Carl Jung : Synchronicity

Carl Jung used the word synchronicity in his Eranos Lecture in 1951 to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” He described it as a dynamic that encompasses the human experience and it’s history, in terms of social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual events. What did he mean by this?

Jung believed that Synchronicity is experienced when two or more events, which are unlikely to occur together by chance, occur together in a meaningful way. He described the following experience of Synchronicity in a 1952 book of the same title. “A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.”

In another synchronistic event  the comic strip character Dennis the Menace appeared in 12th March, 1951 in several newspapers in the United States. Three days later in the UK the same character, with the same look and characteristics, appeared in the comic The Beano. Both creators denied any causal connection.

Some psychologists believe that synchronicities are places, people, or events that we attract into our lives to help us develop a higher level of awareness. So the more consciously aware you become, the higher your frequency becomes. Each day you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences, or synchronicities, that you have attracted into your lives.

There have been critics of Jung’s theory. In 1952 Fritz Levi described synchronicity as “vague in determinability of synchronistic events, that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of “magic causality”. But Jung believed that synchronicity confirmed what he had always recognised intuitively, “that matter and consciousness, far from operating independently of each other are, in fact, interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.”