A pretty straight over the plate discussion of what synchronicity is and what it means. Also looks at apophenia, connections, relationships and just what it is to have a “meaningful coincidence.”
For me, this piece wraps together many of the threads I have been exploring lately in a fairly succint manner. Hopefully it will do the same for others as well.
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4 Comments
Synchronicity story via the rigint board:
http://www.actionsquad.org/crawlspace1.html
On a technical note, perhaps, I very much enjoyed how you dove right into the podcast w/o any preface. Great element of storytelling to include, I believe. Would love to see more of that.
As far as the content, great podcast in general and very good exploration of the “seeing connections where none exist” rebuttal. Additionally relevant to my personal experience is the idea of paying attention to the world and the universe (in turn) playing along with you. The most mind-blowing series of synchronicities I ever experienced (over several hours during a single night, described at the bottom of this page) seemed to all occur as a result of me and my good friend fostering our awareness of exactly what we were experiencing. The more we paid attention to what was happening, the more awed and open we became, which in turn lead to more mind-blowing events. Ultimately, it was the experience of it all, as you said, that was the true treasure of the night.
skip, it suggests, quite blatantly, that we are doing it………
I don’t know if this is a synchronicity, but Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising is inspirational to me as well. He expands and contracts the psyche for you…all you need to do is read and reflect. I came upon it at a point when I’d forgotten a lot of what I knew…or at the very least, I wasn’t putting it into practice. He pushed me back into the world when I was far too immersed in the abstract.
Funny how close to the line you tread here. Synchronicity really is nickle and dime magic. The term itself, and its association with Jung, who also calls it “an acausal connecting principle,” reminds us how deep in science the idea is soaked. It is the breakdown of a deterministic, linear and causal universe that allows room for the notion at all. Jung thus relies pretty heavily on J.B. Rhine and the parapsychology paradigm. But, thankfully, he goes further too.
Consider the following avowal by Jung, which contrasts the holism of the east with the reductionism of Western science, juxtaposing causality and chance, in a sense challenging the modernist faith in determinism:
“I do not know Chinese and have never been in China. I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our way of thinking. In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind. It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science. Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in. What Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.
The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this particular mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as the ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage that the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.
The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weights, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.â€
Carl G. Jung, “Foreword†in The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967 [1950]), xxii-xxiii.
When we break it down into little pieces it all kinda falls apart. That’s letting the rational soul get a hold of experience too much. Synchronicity comes when you think as you do, about being empty or not even there at all…totality has a better chance of flowing in when in that state. It’s not a conscious act, of course, because conscious acts are also by definition self-conscious acts. What’s really is going on is a relative annihilation of conscious thought.
The 1,000,000 eyes that are one, the infinite fascets of an instant, etc…Then bang…meaning in the afterthought. Synchronicity is the could be rather than the must be.