Synchronicity: Carl Jung’s Most Disturbing Theory About Reality

This video is sponsored by the all-in-one website builder Odoo. Use my link in the description to get started for free. Prominent American writer Mark Twain was born on November 30th, 1835. On that same day, a comet known as Halley's Comet had just recently passed its closest point to the sun on its orbital path, becoming perceptible from Earth to the naked eye for the first time in roughly 75 years. Known as a short-period comet, this occurrence happens once every 75 years or so. And so, 75 years later, the comet made its next visible appearance. On the day after it was at its closest point to the sun, on its departure away from Earth, April 21st, 1910, Mark Twain died of a heart attack. The same day he was born and the same day he died occurred alongside the comet's rare proximity to Earth, almost as if their journeys were aligned, synchronized. Even more eerily, Twain spoke of having a fascination and affinity with the comet throughout his life. The year prior to his death, he even wrote, I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It's coming again next year. And I expect to go out with it. It would be a great disappointment in my life if I don't. The Almighty has said, no doubt. Now here are these two unaccountable freaks. They came in together. They must go out together. Of course, coincidences happen every day, including ones that appear as extreme or bizarre as Twain and Halley's Comet. Most of the time, they're merely modest moments of unlikely odds that we quickly move on from. But other times, they can be so strange and unlikely, so extreme and specific, it can make us question the very nature of reality. It can almost feel as if something else is at play. We might wonder if coincidence is even the right word. Renowned 20th century psychologist Carl Jung wondered the same thing. For him, in certain cases, coincidence was perhaps not the right word. Jung is one of the most influential and esteemed psychologists in history. His insights and theories have provided new models and understandings of the mind and the self, from his theories about the unconscious mind, to dreams, to symbols, to archetypes, and to a shared collective unconscious. Among his many profound insights and ideas, he had a very unusual theory about apparent meaningful coincidences. A theory he coined, synchronicity. Synchronicity is perhaps one of the most controversial and misused terms across psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, often being exploited and contorted to fit various belief systems and schools of thought, far removed from its origins. In properly understood terms, it's still highly questionable, but far more robust than it's often presented. In the book The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, written by Jung and his collaborator, Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who helped pioneer quantum mechanics, Jung provides a comprehensive overview of his theory of synchronicity. With a deep understanding of psychology and vast experience in psychoanalysis, Jung was especially prone to both encounter and be interested in apparent alignments between mind and external reality. With this theory of synchronicity, he sought to make sense of these occurrences. Absurd-seeming, odds-defying, meaningful coincidences. Jung defined synchronicity as the following, the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary, subjective state. In other words, for an instance to be a synchronicity, it can't merely be a coincidence. It must include four central qualities. First, it must be at least two separate events where one is internal, like a dream, thought, or feeling, and the other is external. Second, there must be an acausal connection between the events. That is, they don't directly cause or affect the other. Third, the events must be experienced as meaningfully related. And fourth, the events must occur in close temporal proximity. Being meaningful is essential both in symbol and in time. Meaningful, according to Jung here, is when the internal event has a direct or symbolic parallel with external reality, and the perceived alignment elicits a sense of importance. To help clarify the distinction between coincidence and synchronicity, Jung writes, Today is Friday. We have fish for lunch. Somebody happens to mention the custom of making an April fish of someone. That same morning, I made a note of an inscription which read, The man is completely a fish from the middle downwards. In the afternoon, a former patient of mine, whom I had not seen for months, showed me some extremely impressive pictures of fish which he had painted in the meantime. In the evening, I was shown a piece of embroidery with fish-like sea monsters in it. On the morning of April 2nd, another patient, whom I had not seen for many years, told me a dream in which he stood on the shore of a lake and saw a large fish that swam straight towards her and landed at her feet. I was at this time engaged on a study of the fish symbol in history. Only one of the persons mentioned here knew anything about it. The suspicion that this must be a case of meaningful coincidence, that is, an acausal connection, is very natural. I must own that this run of events made a considerable impression on me. It seemed to me to have a certain numinous quality. In such circumstances, we are inclined to say, that cannot be mere chance, without knowing what exactly we are saying. The strength of an impression, however, proves nothing against the fortuitous coincidence of all these fishes. One must remember that fish on Friday is the usual thing, and on April 1st, one might very easily think of the April fish. Fishes frequently occur as symbols of unconscious contents, so there is no possible justification for seeing in this anything but a chance grouping. Alternatively, an example of synchronicity for Jung includes the following experience he had while treating one of his female patients, who was struggling to overcome hyper-rationalism and over-intellectualization. In his office, during a session, the woman described to him a dream she had the previous night about a piece of jewelry in the form of a golden scarab beetle. As the woman described the dream, Jung began to hear tapping on the window behind him. When he turned around, he found a scarab-like beetle trying to get inside. An unusual behavior for the species in those conditions. Jung opened the window, caught the beetle out of the air, and then handed it to the woman, saying, here's your beetle. Notably, this experience meaningfully altered the woman's perspective, cracking the surface of her hardened intellectualism and allowing in a softer sense of self and the world. Unlike in the prior fish sequence, in this case, the alignment happens in close proximity in time and there is an apparent acausal connection between an internal event, the woman's dreams, thoughts, and statements, and the external event, the sudden appearance and unusual behavior of the beetle. Jung writes, Should proof be forthcoming, however, it would prove at the same time that there are genuinely non-causal combinations of events for whose explanation we should have to postulate a factor incommensurable with causality. We should then have to assume that events in general are related to one another on the one hand as causal chains, and on the other hand by a kind of meaningful cross-connection. For Jung, this kind of coincidence involves such statistical absurdity and symbolic meaning that the more likely explanation is something deeper and metaphysical. For him, they aren't merely signs of something specific to the individual experiencing them, but also signs of an underlying nature of reality. He writes, Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences and heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes. In other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far reaching consequences. Jung takes this rather giant leap based on several other theories and premises he establishes. Crucially, he believed that the mind and reality are fundamentally intertwined. He speculated that matter and psyche flower from the same stem, which he referred to as Unus Mundus, or one world, an underlying unified substrate of the universe. Synchronicity is made possible by this because both the conscious observer and an external event are connected by and stemming from the same source, functioning by the same order, and paralleling in consistent expressions. A synchronicity is a moment in which this connection, or underlying order, is revealed. With this, Jung is effectively departing from a materialist, physicalist view of reality and consciousness. Here, the fundamental nature of the universe becomes a single unified whole. Time becomes an illusion at the foundations of the psyche and reality. The unconscious mind becomes unbounded and eternal. Reality is not matter over mind, or mind over matter, but mind and matter as one. In doing this, Jung effectively arrives at a novel version of a longstanding philosophical and spiritual idea, one that has transcended history and geography. Similar notions of a unified order of reality have echoes spanning back to the voices of Heraclitus and the Stoics, with their idea of the Logos, Taoism's notion of the Tao, Hinduism's Brahman, Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the will, along with many others. Jung himself writes, If this is nothing less than a restoration of the original state of the cosmos and the divine unconsciousness of the world, we can understand the extraordinary fascination emanating from this mystery. It is the Western equivalent of the fundamental principle of Chinese philosophy, namely, the union of yang and yin in Tao, and at the same time, a premonition of that third thing, which, on the basis of psychological experience, I have called synchronicity. Of course, with all these theories, there is much that one is left to wonder about and question. In terms of synchronicity specifically, can things truly be acausally linked? Can two or more events be directly related to Moreover, how can we ever know? Beyond that, what is this one world from which everything stems? Why are there specific archetypes and symbols and orders associated with it? And why only those kinds? Who decides what's symbolic and meaningful? Ultimately, we are so good at creating meaning, we become really bad at discerning truth. We see meaning everywhere, because we create it with each perception, each breath, each step, each thought. And perhaps, with billions of people, trillions of thoughts, trillions of actions, and trillions of moments, the odds that two things that are seemingly the same happen in alignment, in time and space, between the inner and outer domains, is what one would actually come to expect. Perhaps not. A theory like synchronicity, as well as its foundations and counterparts, are unfalsifiable. They cannot be proven false or tested against evidence. They exist less in the realm of science and more in that of the supernatural. Researcher and author Roderick Mayne writes, in the introduction of the book, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, The culmination of Jung's lifelong engagement with the paranormal is his theory of synchronicity. The problem with knowing what is and isn't supernatural is found in the fact that we simply don't fully know what is natural. To define something as supernatural requires having a sufficient understanding of what is, which we do not. We do not and likely will not know how this universe and reality work. No matter how deep we dig, we always hit the bedrock of our ignorance and fallibility. We worship science and materialism as a sort of salvation, a life raft made of information designed to carry us into the heavens of certainty. Though this craft is undeniably impressive, no matter how far we travel in it, we will never escape ourselves. Regardless of any underlying truth to synchronicity, it is an extremely fascinating idea that brings up important questions about the relationship between mind and reality, between ontology and phenomenology, between meaning and coincidence, randomness and order. It compels us to consider radical possibilities for what existence is made of and how we integrate with it. It reminds us that there is something inherently other about everything. Something beyond our comprehension that we participate in without understanding. Like an infinite game of hide and seek, where the hider is also the seeker, but we haven't looked enough places to discover this yet. One of the easiest ways to dismiss an idea is to say, it's just a coincidence. But if everything that happens is merely a coincidence, one is still left to wonder, why our coincidence is happening? Why is anything happening? Regardless of what reality is fundamentally made of, with each of our choices and actions, we clearly affect it. 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