Meaningful Coincidences

In 1983, a music group, the Police, put out an album called Synchronicity. In the first song,
composed by Sting, they celebrate the phenomenon of meaningful coincidences, and indeed more deeply,
the oneness and meaningfulness of all life. For that song, Sting drew directly from C C Jung*s work of
1952, Synchronicity, An Acausal Principle, which can be found in the Collected Works, volume 8.
Jung had noticed, for many years, the occurrence of meaningful coincidences which could not be
satisfactorily explained by the principle of causality. He coined the term synchronicity and used it for the
first time in his address at the memorial service of Richard Wilhelm in 1930. Over the years his experiences
of this phenomenon accumulated, his thinking matured and he searched for historical antecedents for this
idea. Eventually, having overcome his hesitations, he found the courage Lu give a consistent account of
everything he had to say on the matter in 1952. He chose the word synchronicity to designate the
meaningful coincidence or falling together of two events in time, because of the quality of simultaneity.
Synchronicity refers to the hypothetical factor which is equal in rank to causality as a principle of
explanation.
Jung, then, describes synchronicity as the simultaneous occurrence of a psychological event (e.g. a
dream, vision, fantasy or idea) with one (or more) external events in life, which appear to be meaningfully
connected. The coincidence of the dream and the event in life cannot be explained as cause or effect of
each other, but do seem to be connected in time (simultaneity) and especially in meaning (i.e. one
recognises a similar meaning in the dream and in the event).
He recognises at least three types of synchronicity:
(1) The relatively simultaneous coincidence of two events or of a psychic state (e.g. a dream image)
and an objective external event, which share a similar meaning content. For example, a woman was telling
him her dream, in which she is given a golden scarab, when suddenly a scarablike beetle (a common
chafer cetonia aurata) flies in the window. Neither event can be said to cause the other, but the
connection between the two events (dream and beetle flying in the window) is the meaning content (the
common content of scarab/beetle). This had a profound effect on the woman, puncturing her very rational
consciousness and allowing her to open up more to the irrational nature of the unconscious and life, and
get on with her own process.
(2) The relatively simultaneous coincidence of two external events or of a psychic state (e.g. a dream)
with a external event, which occurs at a distance. Here examples abound. Jung cites a person in Europe
who was woken up by a disturbing dream about the death of his friend who was in the USA. Next morning
he received a telegram confirming the fact of the friend*s sudden death, and later a letter confirmed the
details as they were depicted in the dream. He had had the dream about one hour after the death of the
friend.
Jung also mentions the famous example of Emmanuel Swedenborg*s vision, while at a dinner party, of
a fire in Stockholm. In fact a fire was raging in Stockholm at the time, as was confirmed a day or two later,
and exact details of the fire which Swedenborg had reported in the vision were also confirmed. People with
him at the time of his vision later attested to the genuineness of the occurrence.
A further example is closer to home: on Tuesday 26th April 1870,. The ship Walter Hood from London
was wrecked on reefs at Wreck Bay near Narrawellen Beach on the south coast of N.S.W., just north of
Milton. The ship hit the reef at 8.00 pm. Between 10.00 11.00 pm that night, a man named George
Robinson, who lived just south-west the Bay near of on the South ship hit the reef near Berringer Lake

awoke from a terrible nightmare. In the dream he stood on Narrawellen Beach, and saw a ship dashed on
the reef, with people clinging to the wreck and with cargo and bodies scattered around on the beach. He sat
up all night, disturbed by the dream and thought not giving much credence to dreams, decided he had
better check it out. So at dawn he sent his stepson by horse to the beach. The latter arrived at 2.00 pm on
the Wednesday and confirmed to his horror all the details of his stepfathers dream. Rescue operations
were set in motion and by Saturday, 23 of the crew of 34 had been saved. (Cf. The Walter Hood by
Eunice Brady, 1985, Sheep Books, Mt Cola, N.S.W.).
In these examples there is an inexplicable knowledge portrayed in the dreams, of outer objective events
which took place at a distance from the dreamer. Causality is of little help, for it would be difficult to
show how the dream of the shipwreck caused the ship to wreck or how the external event of the wreck could
cause the psychological event of the dream. So Jung proposes the hypothesis of synchronicity as a
principle to explain such occurrences on the basis of the interrelatedness of all things, through the
archetypal world of the collective unconscious. He rejects the primitive mentality which would explain such
occurrences as magical causality and transmission of energy, and prefers the way taken by philosophy,
until well into the 18th century, which assumed a secret correspondence or meaningful connection between
natural events.
The funeral of Donne Smith, for many years manager of the Village cinemas in the city, took place on
Thursday. At 2 pm, as Mr Smith was being cremated, all the lights in the cinema complex failed. The
emergency generator was switched on but the fuses blew, and patrons were refunded their money. As the
funeral ended, the power was restored. We reckon it was Donne having a last laugh, said Kevin Taylor,
manager of the cinemas. He always did have a sense of funnbut he never stopped the show before. This
report in Column 8, SUCH. on 27th January 1990 as I was writing article.
(3) The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding future external event i.e. a
foreknowledge in dreams. Jung gives an impressive example of a young friend of his, who, having been
promised a trip to Spain by his father, dreamed that he was in Spain, walking in a street which led to a
square where there was a Gothic cathedral. He turned to the right and was met in another street by an
elegant carriage drawn by two cream-coloured horses. He related the dream to Jung and other friends, and
later went to Spain, and in one of the streets recognised the city of his dream, he found the square, the
cathedral and to his utter amazement saw the cream-coloured horses and carriage exactly as depicted in
his dream.
Jung points out here that the accumulation of details known in advance in the dream excludes the
possibility of mere chance, and he favours the explanation of synchronicity because of the similarity of
content (meaning) in the dream and in the outer life experience.
In the second and third types of synchronicity, space and time lose their absolute validity and are
relativised in the psyche; and in both, unlike the first type, the synchronistic event can only be verified later
(i.e. one cannot know for sure at the time of the dream whether it does or will correspond to an outer event
until one has verified this to be the case).
These are all examples of remarkable coincidences of psychological event (dream) and objective
external event in life, which are connected by common meaning. These coincidences cannot be explained
causally and because of this they are often rejected out of hand as specious or plainly fraudulent. But many
cases are too well-attested to be denied, and Jung claims that it is the ingrained belief in the sovereign
power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events
exist or could ever occur.
Jung felt that there was something lacking in our world-view which cannot embrace these experiences.

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He did not advocate a naive credulity in regard to these phenomena and warned that one must guard
against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as causeless (CW 8:518). But he insisted that
where the experiences are verifiable, they be respected as facts, and he set about trying to understand how
they could be accommodated in our world-view. As M-L von Franz points out, Jung steered a middle way
between destructive skepticism on the one hand, and naive, exaggerated belief on the other.

Forerunners of the Idea of Synchronicity

Casting around for other points of view which could shed some light on these undoubted and often wellattested phenomena, Jung found some helpful paradigms:
He noted that China with its basic notion of Tao never developed in its philosophy the idea of causality,
but always recognised the interrelatedness of all things. The I Ching, which he regarded as the highest
development of Chinese philosophy and which he presented to the West in 1949, is one of the oldest
methods known for grasping a situation as a whole and thus placing the details of one*s life against a
cosmic background, it is based on the principle of synchronicity, the hexagram text which one receives by
the way the coins or yarrow stalks fall, gives the meaning connection between ones psychological state and
outer physical processes and events. It presupposes that the universe is ordered and meaningful, quite
apart from mans interventions, and the best man can do is get in right relationship to the greater forces of
Yin and Yang which are at work, and get into Tao. The goal of being in tune with the will of heaven
parallels the goal in Western religious life of attuning one*s life to the will of God.
In the West we used to have a similar philosophical idea. In classical times there was the notion of the
sympathy of all things. Hippocrates (died 359 B.C.) writes: There is one common flow, one common
breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in
conjunction for the same purpose ....... The universal principle is found even in the smallest particle, which
therefore corresponds to the whole. The human being was seen as a microcosm of the universe, and his
task was to get in right relationship with the whole. (cf. CW 8, p 490).
In the Middle Ages, the natural philosophers put forth the theory of correspondence. Agrippa von
Nettesheim (1486 - 1535) held that all things are interrelated and that there is a world soul or spirit (anima or
spiritus mundi), which is one and fills all things and binds and knits them together ...... that it may make
one frame of the world (page 494). Thus it is the world soul that is the spirit which penetrates all things,
shapes all things and produces correspondences (i.e. meaningful coincidences). Jung relates the idea of
the world soul/spirit to the psychological notion of the unconscious and the archetypes. Agrippa von
Nettesheim also suggested that there was an inborn knowledge or perception in living organisms, which
Jung related to what he called unconscious or absolute knowledge the knowledge of inner perception, by
which one knows things in a way that is not mediated by the senses.
Johannes Kepler, German astronomer (1571 - 1630) held that there is a geometric principle underlying
the physical world, a divine instinct, whose work is shown in the fact, for example, that flowers have a
definite colour, form and number of petals. The human soul has another innate reason which enables it to
apprehend instantaneously without long learning. And for him it is the earth soul (anima telluris) which
brings about marvellous correspondences.
Gottfried W von Leibnitz (1646 - 1716) had the idea of pre-established harmony, which entailed an
absolute synchronism of psychic and physical events. For him the interrelationship of events which are not
in themselves causally connected was based on an antecedant order created by God. He spoke also of an
unconscious perception, and remonstrated with those of a more rational bent who took no account of

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perceptions which are not received through the sense organs.

Jung concludes that the Primitive (magical causality), Classical (sympathy of all things) and Mediaeval
and pre-modern views (theory of correspondence and pre-established harmony) all postulate some
principle alongside of causality. In the 18th century, causality became the exclusive principle of natural
science, and as the physical sciences grew in achievement and prestige in the 19th century, the theory of
correspondence vanished. The principle was lost to the mainstream of western thought and practice, but
enjoyed a kind of underground existence in various mantic and occult procedures (e.g. alchemy,
astrology, tarot etc) . In the latter, Jung claimed that we are not dealing so much with superstition
necessarily, but with a truth which has been hidden for so long.
So Jung sees the principle of synchronicity (a working hypothesis to describe meaningful
coincidences) as a successor to these earlier views which had got lost, as a modern differentiation of the
obsolete concept of correspondence, sympathy and harmony (page 531). It got lost when the principle of
causality became the exclusive principle of the physical sciences . But nowadays physicists in the realm of
sub-atomic physics are taking another look at the older principle in order to explain the acausal events
which they find are taking place.
Underlying the principle of synchronicity is the assumption that there is an interrelated and meaningful
universe, an acausal orderedness, which has nothing to do with cause and effect and the will of man. Jung
cites dreams which suggest that there is a formal factor in nature, a meaning which is prior to human
consciousness, self-subsistent and not dependent on man.
A woman dreamed:
In the garden there was a large sandpit in which layers of rubbish had been deposited. In one
layer she discovered thin slaty plates of green serpentine. One had black squares on it, arranged
concentrically. The black was not painted on, but was ingrained in the stone, like the marking in
agate. Similar marks were found on 2-3 other plates, which Mr A then took away from her.
The dreamer discovers an order in nature which is not created by human ingenuity, but is simply so.
The black squares are arranged in circles and are ingrained. It is a natural orderedness i.e. not painted on
by human agency but ingrained in the soft serpentine rock. It is found in layers of rubbish, among the
matter that has been rejected and thrown out by our Western culture, and also by the dreamer because of
her participation in that culture. As we have seen the mainstream of Western thought had little use for this
sense of given orderedness since the 18th century, and has regarded it as an archaic assumption to be
avoided: thus it is found among the rubbish. But her discovery is taken away from her: the animus figure
here could possibly represent a more rational attitude in her which takes her discovery away, and she is in
danger of relapsing into the more conventional rational attitude of the day.
Jung is quick to point out that such statements in dreams do not provide final proof for his views of
synchronicity and the underlying acausal orderedness in the universe, but the dream certainly seems to
express it so and thus seems to corroborate his views. Where proof cannot be established either way, it is
good to think along the way of nature, i.e. along the way of the dream. The dream seems to support the fact
that there are meaningful patterns in nature, and the dreamer seemed to need to know this and to guard
against the danger of having this realisation stolen from her. These meaningful patterns would correspond to
the archetypes, which are the eternal primordial patterns and powerful factors in the collective unconscious,
which when manifesting in consciousness, have a numinous effect on the person. Jung was at pains during
his life to demonstrate the existence and phenomenology of the archetypes, which he discovered but did not
invent. He suggests that it is the archetypes, which when activated, are the numinously experienced

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meaning factors which are able to produce images from the unconscious which correspond to events in
outer life: that is, synchronistic happenings.
Jung has thus given access to an older way of thinking, and reshaped it for our modern understanding.
He has thus restored something we had lost and need, in order to understand events which are not related
to each other by causality, but by common meaning. In all his writings he comes down definitely on the side
of the ultimate meaningfulness of the universe, and asserts this despite the terrible disharmony, conflict and
seemingly meaningless suffering and pain which is so obvious in the world (see his Answer to Job where
he struggles explicitly with this latter question). The Police in their song Synchronicity I pick up this
paradox in a hopeful way when they sing:

If we share the nightmare

Then we can dream
Spiritus Mundi

Conclusion
Synchronicity then in Jung*s view is a principle equal to causality, as modern subatomic physics is
discovering quite independently. It bears witness to the fact that there is an inexplicable knowledge in us,
expressed in the immediacy of psychic images, a kind of faculty for grasping the wholeness of a situation
a kind of knowledge which embraces the whole. This knowledge is expressed in our dreams. As von Franz
puts it somewhere right at the bottom of one*s own being, one generally does know where one should go
and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call I behaves in such a distracting
fashion that the inner voice cannnot make its presence felt. (Man and His Symbols, p 176).
Part of the task in working with the unconscious is to help find a relationship to the powerful
unconscious factors which are at work in our lives, to find a relationship with those rich cores of meaning,
the archetypes, which were once called the gods, and which could enrich modern life where it has become
empty, sterile and soulless.

Terence McBride
Melbourne, 1990

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