Talk:Synchronicity

Carl G. Jung got the message...

The realization that a number of his fantasies and dreams did not pertain to his personal psychology, but were connected with collective events that were about to take place in the world, led Jung to write the first manuscript of Liber Novus. He attempted to ascertain to what extent the material in the rest of his fantasies was also bound up with what was to happen in the world, and what this interdependence of the individual and the collective meant. Likewise, Jung’s work on Liber Novus ended with the fateful arrival of the text of The Secret of the Golden Flower from Richard Wilhelm. For Jung, the pressing question was, how are such meaningful events—not linked by any apparent causal chains—possible? (Jung, 2010).

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.5 Jung was seeking to explain the modus operandi of the I Ching, which he had first come across in the early 1920’s in an English translation by James Legge (1882) but, as he said, came to understand only when he read Wilhelm’s version. He referred to synchronicity again in his “Tavistock Lectures” in London, 1935: “… a peculiar principle active in the world so that things happen together somehow and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not.”6 Again in the Lectures he equated it with the Chinese concept of Tao.

In his own words

If I have now conquered my hesitation and at last come to grips with my theme, it is chiefly because my experiences of the phenomenon of synchronicity have multiplied themselves over decades, while on the other hand my researches into the history of symbols, and of the fish symbol in particular, brought the problem ever closer to me, and finally because I have been alluding to the existence of this phenomenon on and off in my writings for twenty years without discussing it any further.