Synchronicity

According to Wikipedia:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

It really is a great word/concept! One of my favorites. There have been a few synchronistic events in my life, which I guess is the norm for most of us - often attributed to that infamous lucky star.

Anyway, the origin of the word, according to lore, which I hope is correct because it is a good story, the word was coined by Carl Jung after working with a patient who was telling him about a repetitive dream she had had about a golden scarab. Just then Jung heard some tapping on the window behind him and when he opened the window to see what it was a bug flew in and he caught it in his hand. To his dismay, it was a rose-colored scarab!

Jung apparently also described the term, in the 1920s, in the following terms at different times: an "acausal connecting principle", a "meaningful coincidence" and as an "acausal parallelism." I personally like the meaningful coincidence best of the lot...

What is interesting is that this concept apparently baffled Jung to the point that about 30 years separated his coining of the term and his actual publishing of a complete treatise on it. Another quote by Jung, written apparently around 1950 shows the evolution of his thinking on the subject and the importance he accorded it:

Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.

I love this notion of "creative acts" which sounds like creative acts of the universe, and his reference to "a pattern that exists from all eternity" sounds a lot like a reference to God or a God-like intentionality of the universe. Hmm...

Otherwise, the same notion has sometimes been explained (even by Jung) as some form of collective consciousness (like two people making the same invention at the same time on two sides of the world), while others place it in the realm of divine intervention, of destiny or some form of determinism, predetermination, or that heavily-charged and hard to accept notion (for me at least) called fate.

Synchronicity has also been popularized recently by books like The Secret, in which magical thinking is assimilated to the law of attraction, which says your thoughts create your reality. I believe that is true to a certain extent, but more in the sense that you are free to interpret what happens to you any way you like. I don't know how much control we have over what actually happens, even though I would like to think we have some influence, but we can all control how we live and experience everything that happens to and around us. There is the classic example of seeing potential obstacles as stepping blocks, and of there are others, like simply feeling gratitude for whatever happens... For many, the good and the less good are both good, i.e. it's all good.

I read a fun story today in a French novel on art in which a couple is in a museum and the woman is in ecstasy in front of the painting. The husband can't take it any more as his wife is always positive, always sees things in a positive light. He tells her something like "I can't stand your positiveness any more - when the alarm rings in the morning you are thankful, when it's time to go to work you are thankful for having a job, you see art and it makes you joyful, I can't take it." What does she say? "I am so happy that you feel comfortable enough with me and all of these strangers to express such deep sentiments in public." Personally I understand and feel sorry for him, but somehow I am jealous of her...

So when does being positive look naive, ingenu or silly? Like Voltaire's Candida, who in the face of every possible disaster repeats what his tutor, Professor Pangloss taught him, that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." And when is it spiritual and enlightened? And how did I get so far adrift of the subject of today's post? I don't know...

To get back to the subject and to close this post, let me just say that several books have referred to synchronicity or made it part of their plots. Those I seem to recall that made direct or indirect references to it were Lewis Carroll , Douglas Adams, Philip Dick and one Russian author I discovered thanks to a Russian friend (imagine the coincidence : )) Alexander Green (aka Alexandre Grine in French). He wrote one particularly beautiful book called the Scarlet Sails, which was given to me the aforementioned friend several years ago. According to Amazon it is only available used. Beautiful story. If you can find it. Maybe with a little help from synchronicity...