Synchronicity

Lao-tzu gives the following description of Tao in his celebrated Tao Teh Ching:3 There is something formless yet complete That existed before heaven and earth. How still! how empty! Dependent on nothing, unchanging, All pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven. I do not know its name, But I call it “Meaning

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

Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he attempted to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise The Secret of the Golden Flower, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelis

The archetypes too, as a priori forms of representation, are as much found as invented: they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know of their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous representational structures. Accordingly it would seem that natural numbers have an archetypal charact

All the events in a man’s life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams.…

Jung first used the term “synchronicity” only in 1930, in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm,4 the translator of the I Ching, or Book of Changes.

Every answer of nature is therefore more or less influenced by the kind of questions asked, and the result is always a hybrid product. The so-called “scientific view of the world” based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped sta

Chance, we say, must obviously be susceptible of some causal explanation and is only called “chance” or “coincidence” because its causality has not yet been discovered.

Whoever would learn the secret of doing and undoing these things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if he falls into a great excess … and he must do it at that hour when the excess befalls him, and operate with the things which the soul prescribes.