“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.”
—C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
Carl Gustave Jung, the revolutionary psychiatrist and psychotherapist, discovered and delved into deeply profound aspects of the psyche that transcend our more limited awareness and knowledge of it. He theorized upon the concept of a "mindlike" conscious universe, the individual human consciousness, and the behavior of synchronicity in relation to both.
Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." According to Jung, synchronicity “consists of two factors: (a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolized or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition. (b) An objective situation coincides with this content. The one is as puzzling as the other.” More specifically, when someone dreams or thinks of an event and the next day it actually occurs somewhere in the world, that is what is referred to as synchronicity. I, for example, recall having a dream quite some time ago of a large bomb exploding over water and saw no civilian casualties only to wake up the next day to read about it in the news. Synchronicity is thus the extraordinary nature of when an individual's inner mental state coincides with an external situation that occurs at a distance. Although Jung had no doubt that synchronicity was an actual phenomenon based on some principle or property, he noted that no one had yet managed to find that causal bridge between the seemingly independent elements that made up these synchronistic coincidences.
Quantum physics has since provided a response in the eyes of many however. It states that the synchronistic property does not necessarily follow the laws of the empirical world—the material things that are actually visible phenomena—but rather those of the non-empirical world of reality—the non-material, hidden, invisible domain of the potentiality of the universe. Here, the non-empirical, cosmic realm of potentiality is real because it has the capacity to materialize and function in the empirical world in two ways: (1) as mental, conscious thoughts and images; and (2) as matter such as structures or real world events. Quantum physics thus allows for circumstances in which a mental thought and a physical external form of that thought occur simultaneously—in other words, synchronistically.
So why is there so much debate on synchronicity? The Newtonian world does not permit such events, whereas the quantum world indicates that they must occur because even if we can only surmise their causes due to the non-empirical nature of the events, their possibility is understood in the context of the "wholeness" of the universe in which all is interconnected—everything is part of the whole, the mindlike conscious universe thinking in us and around us. Synchronicities are events that seem random, but in reality are caused by some unidentified, non-empirical processes that unite the individual to the whole.
Whatever our beliefs, I think we can agree upon the unfathomableness of the conscious universe and its many mindlike operations yet to be fully understood. Let's take for example the early 1900s. A search for the essence of hidden realms brought forth revolutionary theories and art, one after the other, even though these people or events were not physically or mentally connecting with one another: Sigmund Freud unveiled the unconscious through psychoanalysis in 1896; Max Planck investigated the non-empirical and invented quantum theory in 1900; modern art saw the invention in 1912 of abstract painting through the works of Wassily Kandinsky. The connection between these revolutionary events are perceived as synchronistic because there was a shared meaning, and that commonality expressed itself individually in their respective fields in the external world. Rather than being influenced by each others' thinking or works, it could be said that their minds were synchronistically connected to the greater mind of the conscious universe.
“Causality is the way we explain the link between two successive events. Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle.”
—C.G. Jung, The Portable Jung
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