Synchronicity

All the phenomena I have mentioned can be grouped under three categories: 1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and wh

first give you a brief description of the facts which the concept of synchronicity is intended to cover. As its etymology shows, this term has something to do with time or, to be more accurate, with a kind of simultaneity. Instead of simultaneity we could also use the concept of a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something other

Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements. As I

incline in fact to the view that synchronicity in the narrow sense is only a particular instance of general acausal orderedness—that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes where the observer is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize the tertium comparationis. But as soon as he perceives the archetypal background

that in principle new points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name.

Space, time, and causality, the triad of classical physics, would then be supplemented by the synchronicity factor and become a tetrad,

synchronicity is a phenomenon that seems to be primarily connected with psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.

Synchronicity postulates a meaning which is a priori in relation to human consciousness and apparently exists outside man.71 Such an assumption is found above all in the philosophy of Plato, which takes for granted the existence of transcendental images or models of empirical things, the εἴδη (forms, species), whose reflections (εἴδωλα) we see in t

This Taoistic view is typical of Chinese thinking. It is, whenever possible, a thinking in terms of the whole, a point also brought out by Marcel Granet,12 the eminent authority on Chinese psychology.