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.

We should then have to assume that events in general are related to one another on the one hand as causal chains, and on the other hand by a kind of meaningful cross-connection.

The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other facto

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

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

Goethe thinks of synchronistic events in the same “magical” way. Thus he says, in his conversations with Eckermann: “We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike.”53

The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other facto

When for instance I am faced with the fact that my tram ticket bears the same number as the theatre ticket which I buy immediately afterwards, and I receive that same evening a telephone call during which the same number is mentioned again as a telephone number, then a causal connection between these events seems to me improbable in the extreme, al