Wrestling with Synchronicity

I’ve been plowing through the field Jung set out when trying to get a handle on synchronicity. It’s clearly a whole different way of looking at the world, not just an appendix super-added to explain away some seemingly unexplainable occurrences. Therefore he posits synchronicity as a principle.

Often a common misunderstanding of the idea negates the importance of the meaningful. Any pattern observed is not necessarily an instance of synchronicity. “Meaningful coincidences – which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance groupings, therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation.” (Jung, Synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle, par. 846)

The difficulty for me is to see Jung’s point about acausality.  He reference to the I Ching along with the forward he wrote for the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of that book are most helpful.  The Chinese sages “…basing themselves on a hypothesis of a unity of nature, sought to explain simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with a physical process as an equivalence of meaning.” par.865  It’s not that the one causes the other, but instead “…of a falling together in time.” par.840

As my mind reorientates itself to allow for this different way of viewing the world, I’m struck by Jung’s evocation to Nature herself.

“If we want to know what these workings are, we need a method of inquiry which imposes the fewest possible conditions, or if possible no conditions at all, and then leaves Nature to answer out of her fullness.”  par. 864