KiwiElf
4th October 2011, 00:14
Coincidences are unpredictable, improbable and illogical. So why do they happen at all, and, even more puzzling, why do they come in seemingly meaningful clusters in life?
A synchronistic event is irrational and illogical, as if the stuff of dreams has suddenly stepped over the boundary of three-dimensional reality and gripped us in full waking consciousness. Synchronicity is a set of those coincidences that are connected, not by logic, but by meaning. (Co-related, meaningful incidents). Such meaningful coincidences happen to us all at some time in life.
An example: There was a case of a woman who dreamed about death on a particular night. Taking little notice of her dream, she spent the next morning shopping and bought a new dress in her favourite colour, blue, arranging for it to be delivered to her home. By mistake, the store delivered a black dress, and shortly after this the woman learned that a near relative had died that day. A series of coincidences such as this can be very disconcerting: a death dream, a black dress and a real death within the space of 24-hours. There is an appearance of design, or meaning. Is this set of events really just a coincidence?
Synchronicity adds new perspectives to old ideas. For example, the idea of control is depicted as allowance rather than force. Cause and effect is expressed as focusing on the desired effect and allowing synchronistic events to create the cause.
Newtonian physics describes the Law of Cause and Effect as, "action and reaction, nothing is lost in the exchange, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Synchronicity allows for the possibility of corresponding events, actions and reactions instead of just "opposite" reactions. This also accounts for "chaos theory," which in itself, is synchronicity.
Dr Carl Jung, who invented the term "synchronicity", claimed that these occurrences were not just clusters of random events but that synchronistic events are really connected in a way that differs from the usual pattern of cause and effect. He felt that certain things - events and situations - "like" to occur with certain other things, and in this he found himself in agreement with classical Chinese philosophy, particularly the I Ching. This attitude of the Chinese enabled them to evolve, among other things, the theories of medicine that are now gaining recognition in the West. Chinese medicine was able to develop in its unique way because it evolved from a philosophy that did not seek causes but rather sought correspondences.
-----
Like the two sides of a single coin, the opposing principles of the cosmos are never far apart. Feast alternates with famine, night follows the day, and birth begins a life story that ends in death.
Traditional Chinese philosophy takes a somewhat abstract but holistic view of the universe envisioning all of its aspects in terms of two distinct forces called Yin and Yang. Sometimes referred to as the receptive and creative principles, or the passive and the active, Yin and Yang embody almost every conceivable duality, including synchronicity. Yin, for example, is linked to the ideas of femininity, darkness, night, valleys, and the directions west and north, while Yang represents the masculinity, light, daytime, mountains, east and south.
Despite the utter opposition between the two principles, however, good fortune (positive synchronicity), follows only when both the Yin and the Yang are present to the same degree, a state of cosmic balance as depicted in the Yin and Yang symbol.-----
The story of how Jung came to invent the term synchronicity is worthy of mention. He was analysing a female patient who had proved particularly resistant to treatment. Jung was the third analyst who had attempted her case, but felt that the chances of improvement were slender because of the patient's uncooperative attitude.
On a certain day in the mid-1920s, during a psychotherapy session, the patient related to Jung a dream she had involving a golden scarab. As she spoke, Jung sat with his back to the closed window until he heard a gentle tapping behind him. Turning, he saw a flying insect knocking against the glass outside. He opened the window and caught the creature as it flew in.
Strangely, it was a scarabaeid beetle, the Cetonia Aurata, the nearest relative of the scarab to be found in the area. Jung was disconcerted, but the impact of this meaningful coincidence upon his patient was even more surprising. The shock of this synchronistic event broke through her previous attitude and she began at last to respond positively to psychotherapy. Incidentally, the scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol, as Jung noted with satisfaction.
Within a wider framework, synchronicity seems to have been at work often in the history of science, for there are numerous examples of simultaneous invention or discovery. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Darwin and his theory of the origin of the species. Darwin had developed his theory in a lengthy essay and in 1884 engaged upon expanding it into a major treatise. During this time he received a manuscript from a young biologist named A. R. Wallace, who was quite unknown to him and who was then in the Molucca Islands of the Malay Archipelago. Wallace's manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin's theory.
Wallace knew of Darwin as a naturalist but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work in which Darwin was engaged. Each scientist, moreover, had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive flash.
Until relatively recently, it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a process of natural selection occurred, causing the well adapted varieties to survive and the rest to disappear. Modern evolutionists, however, point out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would take much longer than the known age of our planet allows.
Moreover, though some mutations can be seen as an adaption to a change in the environment, members of the same species simultaneously mutate in the same way although they are far removed from those who have an environmental cause. This phenomenon is difficult to explain, but is easily described as a synchronistic occurrence.
The difficulty in accepting synchronicity as valid is largely due to the dominantly conditioned left-brain structure of the Western mind. Steeped in ideas derived from Newtonian physics that depend on the framework of cause and effect, the Western mind finds it difficult to give credence to other frames of reference. The concept of synchronicity challenges our ideas and beliefs of causality, (ie, that causes and effects are logically connected), and of linear time (in that the cause always seems to precede the effect). This is not always so.
This difficulty is not insurmountable, as observers of the frontiers of science know. The nature of our civilisation forces us to use the left hemisphere of our brains predominantly, and to neglect the full usage of our right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is involved with analytic, logical thinking. It breaks down the flow of events in our lives into series lists that can then be analysed, studied and manipulated. Thus the left hemisphere organises our reality into sequences, giving us the impressions of cause and effect, logic and linear time. These concepts allow us to lead highly organised lives, but they are not absolute concepts: they are useful but they are not necessarily true ideas of reality.
The right hemisphere of the brain is more likely to condone synchronicity. It is concerned with creativity; relationships and patterns and we use it for our orientation in space, art and crafts, body image and recognition of faces. Rather than perceiving sequences, it has a simultaneous mode of operation and is therefore responsible for intuition.
This hemisphere does not need or use linear time, and since it is the side of the brain that functions during dreams, the dream events are fluid, so that many people find that when they wish to recount a dream they have difficulty deciding in what order the events took place. Since synchronicity is a pattern of events not seemingly subject to logic or time, it is at home in the realm of the right hemisphere, the "creative" side of the brain.
Since the consciousness of time supplied by the left hemisphere is but one possible construction, and since our notion of cause and effect depends upon it for its validity, it is possible that synchronicity does have an external reality, although outside our usual world-view. It belongs in the realm of the paranormal, if we equate "normal" with the picture of "reality" provided by the left hemisphere.
Is it possible to reconcile synchronicity within a scientific framework? Certainly not within the domain of Newtonian physics, which postulates a three-dimensional reality that moves forward through time so that events develop in an ordered linear sequence, having a past, present and future, in that order. From this perspective synchronicity is a random element to be ignored.
Although our civilisation is built largely upon this viewpoint, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says that it is preferable, and more useful, to think with a static, non-moving picture of space and time, which is known as the time-space continuum. Within this framework events do not develop, they just "are."
This is difficult to comprehend, but it simply means that everything that now seems to unfold before us with the passing of time, already exists in "totality." In other words, everything is one thing. It is only because our viewpoint is limited that we are unable to perceive the past, present and future with a glance. In such a four-dimensional world, which is our natural subconscious state (when we dream for example), there is room for synchronicity, for this world view is composed of spatial relationships instead of ordered series. And synchronicity is composed of events that are spatially related and not within a logical sequence.
The experience of synchronicity, however, is often a very personal one, as in the case of the woman who had the black dress delivered to her. Its occurrence seems to suggest a meaningful message of some type. Synchronicity is therefore real and valid for the impact it makes upon the individual having a synchronistic experience and Jung recognised this. Although it was difficult to explain in logical terms, he could not afford to ignore it.
Thus he coined the term synchronicity and allowed it a place in his psychology. Whether synchronicity exists in the objective world or not, it is easily perceived by the human mind when it happens.
Jungian psychology is sympathetic to the right hemisphere mode of perception and attempts to help correct the balance between the two hemispheres that is missing within our society. Jung hypothesised that there exists a collective unconscious to which all individual human minds are connected. The task of each person, according to Jung, is to "individuate" in a process of personal growth integrating all the diverse parts of the individual's nature into a harmonious whole called the "Self."
He saw synchronistic events as the attempts of the unrealised or subconscious self, in its urge to become conscious to offer messages to the individual. The Self is able to tap the resources of the collective unconscious to bring the desired message about. In the case of the woman with the black dress delivery, the message could be interpreted that the time had come for her to come to terms with the issue of death, so that she evolves greater understanding of her own human potential.
To support his theory, Jung pointed out that throughout the world, cultures isolated from each other in space and/or time have all developed mythologies which contain the same basic motifs or themes. This is in itself an example of synchronicity, but Jung thought that the reason was that these cultures all drew their material from the same source: the collective unconscious.
The concept of a collective unconscious is interesting in its implications. The instance of Darwin and Wallace simultaneously intuiting the same hypothesis can be explained by it, in that the idea was already present in the collective unconscious and Darwin and Wallace each tapped it at its "source" (what David Wilcock and others more recently refer to as the "Source Field").
If we extend the concept to the whole of the animal kingdom, it could explain the simultaneous mutations of isolated groups of the same species. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested that our idea of evolution should take into account the idea of interrelation between the unconscious mind and biological processes. If all minds are linked to the collective unconscious, it could be that all the material needed for the unfolding of Earth's evolution is contained therein. Thus creating mutations of species at specific times and dropping ideas into human consciousness to cause the next phase in the development of civilisation. In this light synchronicity may be seen as the tool of a cosmic design - the blueprint for the planet as it steadily reveals itself.
It's a reassuring idea at the planetary level but when applied to the fate of the human individual, it is less pleasing.
The belief that we are free to make our own decisions is undermined by the possibility that the unconscious parts of our minds (to which most of us do not yet have direct access), are being continually influenced by the collective unconscious, which can shape external events to its own scheme for each of us, and which sends us its messages in the shape of synchronicity.
The collective unconscious is no more than a theory at the moment, but only from the one point of view that it is difficult to "prove" by rational, Newtonian logic however, and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. From another perspective, researchers working in the field of the paranormal claim that synchronicity is actually caused by psi processes. It has been suggested that people continuously scan their environment using their psi or ESP faculty, and are able to consciously or unconsciously bring about synchronicities with the information obtained.
Since these events are supposedly outside the limits of the person's conscious control, they can be either "good" or "bad," but nonetheless, say the propounders of this theory, we ourselves cause synchronicity to take place.
This brings to mind an interesting question: could we bring these processes under our conscious control? If so, we could cause synchronicity whenever we wished, presumably for our own benefit. So, like a jigsaw puzzle, the reality is that everything is one thing, each piece infinitely interconnected to the whole; there are no "accidents," and everything does happen for a reason.
Practitioners of occultism claim that this can be done, but, like any new concept, it takes dedicated application - action - to the task, 100% trust, and patience. The first step is to simply accept and be aware of the idea of synchronicity itself. Then apply the rule "know yourself", which involves total understanding of one's own mind and body, including accepting the idea that the "conscious" and "unconscious" mind are one and the same. It sounds a rather impossible task, but it does have much in common with Jung's individuation process. Students in this field claim that synchronicities occur to them with greater frequency when they are attempting to make contact with the unconscious part of their minds.
Synchronicity is at work too if Tarot cards and other systems of divination such as runes, and I Ching, are effective. If the pattern of Tarot cards does coincide with the state of the person consulting them, it is then a meaningful coincidence. This activity belongs, of course, to the right-hemisphere frame of perception, being dependent upon patterns and interrelationships between the cards. Interestingly, Jung saw the Tarot cards as pictorial representations of the forces that live in the collective unconscious.
Despite the views of psychologists, psi researchers and occultists, there is no "scientific" acceptance of synchronicity as a "real" phenomenon. Coincidence belongs in the realm of probability theory that predicts that randomly spaced events are more likely to concentrate in clusters than to occur at evenly spaced intervals. Scientists go on to explain that we pay more attention to events that coincide than those which do not, and those events that concern us personally have a greater subjective impact. They point out that our minds tend to create patterns out of random elements (the influence of the right hemisphere). On these grounds most scientists dismiss synchronicity (of course)!
From a conventional and left-hemisphere point of view, this argument is fair as far as it goes. But it says nothing about why randomly spaced events occur in clusters (which in itself comes into the field of synchronicity), and it also assumes that the mode of perception of the left brain hemisphere is superior to that of the right hemisphere (which it is not - it is just used more through past conditioning starting in early childhood). If both hemispheres were granted equal validity, synchronicity would not be dismissed so easily. As the left brain oriented (three dimensional) Newtonian scientific world view is replaced by the right brain, (four dimensional) Einstein model of the space-time continuum, this may become the accepted frame of reference in our everyday life.
Then synchronicity will have a more accepted place in our lives. The point then will not be why it happens, but rather that since it does happen, what can we do with it and how do we use it?
- based on an article by Cheryl Clayton
A synchronistic event is irrational and illogical, as if the stuff of dreams has suddenly stepped over the boundary of three-dimensional reality and gripped us in full waking consciousness. Synchronicity is a set of those coincidences that are connected, not by logic, but by meaning. (Co-related, meaningful incidents). Such meaningful coincidences happen to us all at some time in life.
An example: There was a case of a woman who dreamed about death on a particular night. Taking little notice of her dream, she spent the next morning shopping and bought a new dress in her favourite colour, blue, arranging for it to be delivered to her home. By mistake, the store delivered a black dress, and shortly after this the woman learned that a near relative had died that day. A series of coincidences such as this can be very disconcerting: a death dream, a black dress and a real death within the space of 24-hours. There is an appearance of design, or meaning. Is this set of events really just a coincidence?
Synchronicity adds new perspectives to old ideas. For example, the idea of control is depicted as allowance rather than force. Cause and effect is expressed as focusing on the desired effect and allowing synchronistic events to create the cause.
Newtonian physics describes the Law of Cause and Effect as, "action and reaction, nothing is lost in the exchange, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Synchronicity allows for the possibility of corresponding events, actions and reactions instead of just "opposite" reactions. This also accounts for "chaos theory," which in itself, is synchronicity.
Dr Carl Jung, who invented the term "synchronicity", claimed that these occurrences were not just clusters of random events but that synchronistic events are really connected in a way that differs from the usual pattern of cause and effect. He felt that certain things - events and situations - "like" to occur with certain other things, and in this he found himself in agreement with classical Chinese philosophy, particularly the I Ching. This attitude of the Chinese enabled them to evolve, among other things, the theories of medicine that are now gaining recognition in the West. Chinese medicine was able to develop in its unique way because it evolved from a philosophy that did not seek causes but rather sought correspondences.
-----
Like the two sides of a single coin, the opposing principles of the cosmos are never far apart. Feast alternates with famine, night follows the day, and birth begins a life story that ends in death.
Traditional Chinese philosophy takes a somewhat abstract but holistic view of the universe envisioning all of its aspects in terms of two distinct forces called Yin and Yang. Sometimes referred to as the receptive and creative principles, or the passive and the active, Yin and Yang embody almost every conceivable duality, including synchronicity. Yin, for example, is linked to the ideas of femininity, darkness, night, valleys, and the directions west and north, while Yang represents the masculinity, light, daytime, mountains, east and south.
Despite the utter opposition between the two principles, however, good fortune (positive synchronicity), follows only when both the Yin and the Yang are present to the same degree, a state of cosmic balance as depicted in the Yin and Yang symbol.-----
The story of how Jung came to invent the term synchronicity is worthy of mention. He was analysing a female patient who had proved particularly resistant to treatment. Jung was the third analyst who had attempted her case, but felt that the chances of improvement were slender because of the patient's uncooperative attitude.
On a certain day in the mid-1920s, during a psychotherapy session, the patient related to Jung a dream she had involving a golden scarab. As she spoke, Jung sat with his back to the closed window until he heard a gentle tapping behind him. Turning, he saw a flying insect knocking against the glass outside. He opened the window and caught the creature as it flew in.
Strangely, it was a scarabaeid beetle, the Cetonia Aurata, the nearest relative of the scarab to be found in the area. Jung was disconcerted, but the impact of this meaningful coincidence upon his patient was even more surprising. The shock of this synchronistic event broke through her previous attitude and she began at last to respond positively to psychotherapy. Incidentally, the scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol, as Jung noted with satisfaction.
Within a wider framework, synchronicity seems to have been at work often in the history of science, for there are numerous examples of simultaneous invention or discovery. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Darwin and his theory of the origin of the species. Darwin had developed his theory in a lengthy essay and in 1884 engaged upon expanding it into a major treatise. During this time he received a manuscript from a young biologist named A. R. Wallace, who was quite unknown to him and who was then in the Molucca Islands of the Malay Archipelago. Wallace's manuscript was a shorter but otherwise parallel exposition of Darwin's theory.
Wallace knew of Darwin as a naturalist but had not the slightest idea of the kind of theoretical work in which Darwin was engaged. Each scientist, moreover, had initially conceived of the hypothesis in an intuitive flash.
Until relatively recently, it was assumed that the mutation of species happened at random and that a process of natural selection occurred, causing the well adapted varieties to survive and the rest to disappear. Modern evolutionists, however, point out that the selections of such mutations by pure chance would take much longer than the known age of our planet allows.
Moreover, though some mutations can be seen as an adaption to a change in the environment, members of the same species simultaneously mutate in the same way although they are far removed from those who have an environmental cause. This phenomenon is difficult to explain, but is easily described as a synchronistic occurrence.
The difficulty in accepting synchronicity as valid is largely due to the dominantly conditioned left-brain structure of the Western mind. Steeped in ideas derived from Newtonian physics that depend on the framework of cause and effect, the Western mind finds it difficult to give credence to other frames of reference. The concept of synchronicity challenges our ideas and beliefs of causality, (ie, that causes and effects are logically connected), and of linear time (in that the cause always seems to precede the effect). This is not always so.
This difficulty is not insurmountable, as observers of the frontiers of science know. The nature of our civilisation forces us to use the left hemisphere of our brains predominantly, and to neglect the full usage of our right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is involved with analytic, logical thinking. It breaks down the flow of events in our lives into series lists that can then be analysed, studied and manipulated. Thus the left hemisphere organises our reality into sequences, giving us the impressions of cause and effect, logic and linear time. These concepts allow us to lead highly organised lives, but they are not absolute concepts: they are useful but they are not necessarily true ideas of reality.
The right hemisphere of the brain is more likely to condone synchronicity. It is concerned with creativity; relationships and patterns and we use it for our orientation in space, art and crafts, body image and recognition of faces. Rather than perceiving sequences, it has a simultaneous mode of operation and is therefore responsible for intuition.
This hemisphere does not need or use linear time, and since it is the side of the brain that functions during dreams, the dream events are fluid, so that many people find that when they wish to recount a dream they have difficulty deciding in what order the events took place. Since synchronicity is a pattern of events not seemingly subject to logic or time, it is at home in the realm of the right hemisphere, the "creative" side of the brain.
Since the consciousness of time supplied by the left hemisphere is but one possible construction, and since our notion of cause and effect depends upon it for its validity, it is possible that synchronicity does have an external reality, although outside our usual world-view. It belongs in the realm of the paranormal, if we equate "normal" with the picture of "reality" provided by the left hemisphere.
Is it possible to reconcile synchronicity within a scientific framework? Certainly not within the domain of Newtonian physics, which postulates a three-dimensional reality that moves forward through time so that events develop in an ordered linear sequence, having a past, present and future, in that order. From this perspective synchronicity is a random element to be ignored.
Although our civilisation is built largely upon this viewpoint, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says that it is preferable, and more useful, to think with a static, non-moving picture of space and time, which is known as the time-space continuum. Within this framework events do not develop, they just "are."
This is difficult to comprehend, but it simply means that everything that now seems to unfold before us with the passing of time, already exists in "totality." In other words, everything is one thing. It is only because our viewpoint is limited that we are unable to perceive the past, present and future with a glance. In such a four-dimensional world, which is our natural subconscious state (when we dream for example), there is room for synchronicity, for this world view is composed of spatial relationships instead of ordered series. And synchronicity is composed of events that are spatially related and not within a logical sequence.
The experience of synchronicity, however, is often a very personal one, as in the case of the woman who had the black dress delivered to her. Its occurrence seems to suggest a meaningful message of some type. Synchronicity is therefore real and valid for the impact it makes upon the individual having a synchronistic experience and Jung recognised this. Although it was difficult to explain in logical terms, he could not afford to ignore it.
Thus he coined the term synchronicity and allowed it a place in his psychology. Whether synchronicity exists in the objective world or not, it is easily perceived by the human mind when it happens.
Jungian psychology is sympathetic to the right hemisphere mode of perception and attempts to help correct the balance between the two hemispheres that is missing within our society. Jung hypothesised that there exists a collective unconscious to which all individual human minds are connected. The task of each person, according to Jung, is to "individuate" in a process of personal growth integrating all the diverse parts of the individual's nature into a harmonious whole called the "Self."
He saw synchronistic events as the attempts of the unrealised or subconscious self, in its urge to become conscious to offer messages to the individual. The Self is able to tap the resources of the collective unconscious to bring the desired message about. In the case of the woman with the black dress delivery, the message could be interpreted that the time had come for her to come to terms with the issue of death, so that she evolves greater understanding of her own human potential.
To support his theory, Jung pointed out that throughout the world, cultures isolated from each other in space and/or time have all developed mythologies which contain the same basic motifs or themes. This is in itself an example of synchronicity, but Jung thought that the reason was that these cultures all drew their material from the same source: the collective unconscious.
The concept of a collective unconscious is interesting in its implications. The instance of Darwin and Wallace simultaneously intuiting the same hypothesis can be explained by it, in that the idea was already present in the collective unconscious and Darwin and Wallace each tapped it at its "source" (what David Wilcock and others more recently refer to as the "Source Field").
If we extend the concept to the whole of the animal kingdom, it could explain the simultaneous mutations of isolated groups of the same species. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested that our idea of evolution should take into account the idea of interrelation between the unconscious mind and biological processes. If all minds are linked to the collective unconscious, it could be that all the material needed for the unfolding of Earth's evolution is contained therein. Thus creating mutations of species at specific times and dropping ideas into human consciousness to cause the next phase in the development of civilisation. In this light synchronicity may be seen as the tool of a cosmic design - the blueprint for the planet as it steadily reveals itself.
It's a reassuring idea at the planetary level but when applied to the fate of the human individual, it is less pleasing.
The belief that we are free to make our own decisions is undermined by the possibility that the unconscious parts of our minds (to which most of us do not yet have direct access), are being continually influenced by the collective unconscious, which can shape external events to its own scheme for each of us, and which sends us its messages in the shape of synchronicity.
The collective unconscious is no more than a theory at the moment, but only from the one point of view that it is difficult to "prove" by rational, Newtonian logic however, and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. From another perspective, researchers working in the field of the paranormal claim that synchronicity is actually caused by psi processes. It has been suggested that people continuously scan their environment using their psi or ESP faculty, and are able to consciously or unconsciously bring about synchronicities with the information obtained.
Since these events are supposedly outside the limits of the person's conscious control, they can be either "good" or "bad," but nonetheless, say the propounders of this theory, we ourselves cause synchronicity to take place.
This brings to mind an interesting question: could we bring these processes under our conscious control? If so, we could cause synchronicity whenever we wished, presumably for our own benefit. So, like a jigsaw puzzle, the reality is that everything is one thing, each piece infinitely interconnected to the whole; there are no "accidents," and everything does happen for a reason.
Practitioners of occultism claim that this can be done, but, like any new concept, it takes dedicated application - action - to the task, 100% trust, and patience. The first step is to simply accept and be aware of the idea of synchronicity itself. Then apply the rule "know yourself", which involves total understanding of one's own mind and body, including accepting the idea that the "conscious" and "unconscious" mind are one and the same. It sounds a rather impossible task, but it does have much in common with Jung's individuation process. Students in this field claim that synchronicities occur to them with greater frequency when they are attempting to make contact with the unconscious part of their minds.
Synchronicity is at work too if Tarot cards and other systems of divination such as runes, and I Ching, are effective. If the pattern of Tarot cards does coincide with the state of the person consulting them, it is then a meaningful coincidence. This activity belongs, of course, to the right-hemisphere frame of perception, being dependent upon patterns and interrelationships between the cards. Interestingly, Jung saw the Tarot cards as pictorial representations of the forces that live in the collective unconscious.
Despite the views of psychologists, psi researchers and occultists, there is no "scientific" acceptance of synchronicity as a "real" phenomenon. Coincidence belongs in the realm of probability theory that predicts that randomly spaced events are more likely to concentrate in clusters than to occur at evenly spaced intervals. Scientists go on to explain that we pay more attention to events that coincide than those which do not, and those events that concern us personally have a greater subjective impact. They point out that our minds tend to create patterns out of random elements (the influence of the right hemisphere). On these grounds most scientists dismiss synchronicity (of course)!
From a conventional and left-hemisphere point of view, this argument is fair as far as it goes. But it says nothing about why randomly spaced events occur in clusters (which in itself comes into the field of synchronicity), and it also assumes that the mode of perception of the left brain hemisphere is superior to that of the right hemisphere (which it is not - it is just used more through past conditioning starting in early childhood). If both hemispheres were granted equal validity, synchronicity would not be dismissed so easily. As the left brain oriented (three dimensional) Newtonian scientific world view is replaced by the right brain, (four dimensional) Einstein model of the space-time continuum, this may become the accepted frame of reference in our everyday life.
Then synchronicity will have a more accepted place in our lives. The point then will not be why it happens, but rather that since it does happen, what can we do with it and how do we use it?
- based on an article by Cheryl Clayton