What is Synchronicity ?

Synchronicity means the organic unity of the universe, in which all things are connected in some way, beyond our concepts of time and space.

Things that happen simultaneously (and do not fit into our usual concept of causality in time and space) have in certain cases a meaningful connection, though they appear to us as purely accidental, or what we call 'chance'.

C. G. Jung, the German psychiatrist and author, made the first tentative use of the term 'synchronicity', after he observed the simultaneous happenings of psychic phenomena and apparently unconnected other events which could not be explained by the law of cause and effect.

Not causality.

These events therefore seemed to be exceptions of the law of causality. If certain things repeat themselves again and again under the same conditions, we call them a law of nature, whether we can explain them or not.

If we can explain them, because these phenomena take place in time and space, our reason is satisfied.

But there are also things which happen outside the spacetime continuum and which do not fit into our two dimensional logic or into our threedimensional concept of the universe.

Since it is not our business to explain the world but rather to observe whatever phenomena come to our notice, we have to admit that what  Jung calls 'synchronicity' is an established fact of scientifically verified observation and not a mere theory.

Yung's explanation…

"My occupation with psychology of unconscious processes has forced me since many years to search after another explanation, because the principle of causality appeared to me insufficient to explain certain curious phenomena of the unconscious psychology.

 I found, for instance, first that there are psychological parallel phenomena which cannot be related to each other, but must stand in a different connection with each other.

This connection appeared to me mainly to consist in the fact of a relative simultaneousness, therefore the expression 'synchronicity'.

It seems, indeed, as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities or fundamentals which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, like in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions."

I Ching, "a science".

According to Jung, the I Ching was a typical example of science that rested solely on synchronicity.

The very fact that he called it a 'science' shows that he found an element of order and clear thinking in it which was not based on subconscious or un conscious processes alone, but on a certain logic or consistency of thought that was able to satisfy our reason by transforming intuition into a clear system of thought, out of which a truly universal world view emerges, as we have seen in the previous chapters.

Thus, the I Ching is based on the principles of synchronicity and causality, which proves that they need not be mutually exclusive, but that the one can contain the other, while going beyond it.

We, therefore, need not choose between the systems of Fu Hi and King Wen, but can accept both, depending on whether we want to see the world in its universal or its temporal aspect.

The Hexagram

We have seen that if we project all combinations and movements of the Book of Transformations, represented in sixtyfour hexagrams and described in sixtyfour chapters of this ancient book of wisdom, the result is a manyfaceted diamond.

From each point of the circumference seven lines emerge, as there are seven movements and one static combination, static in the sense that there is no outer, visible movement, but only an inner tension, due to the reduplication or intensification of one property.

We may call it an inner movement. These sixtyfour relationships correspond to the sixtyfour main characters or situations of human life. In other words, we are dealing with a most significant characterology, based on intuition and verified by experience. Intuition and experience are the two faculties which have to do with synchronicity and causality, feeling and knowledge (logic).

There is a similar situation in astrology, but the difference is that astrology works with symbols which have been taken over from a distant past without correcting them to our present stand of knowledge and experience.