Deschamps' Plum Pudding

A meaningful insight into a mysterious deeper connection or hocus pocus, mystical nonsense? Many of us certainly tend to lean to the later whenever hearing tales about highly unusual incidents of incredible coincidence. But could there actually be more to certain instances of sheer coincidence or pure chance than skeptical, reasoning minds are willing to accept?

Usually referred to as synchronicity, this phenomenon describes the coincidence of events that clearly have no causal relationship to one another but yet seem meaningfully related to one another all the same. It was an idea conceived of by famed Swiss psychiatrist and analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung as an attempt to explain that these events can indeed have a hidden relationship. Furthermore, Jung believed that this relationship could be placed on the same order as causality itself. In other words, he believed that there is a connection between certain ideas and events that is structured in its own logical way, albeit directly indiscernible by us. This invisible logical relationship manifests itself as the simultaneous occurrences that reveal this connection, however improbable the connection might seem to us to be.

Examples of synchronicity are everywhere, and many of us have experienced them personally in one form or another, but few examples are stranger than the encounters noted in the memoirs of French writer Émile Deschamps. In 1805, he wrote, he made the acquaintance of a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu who treated him to some plum pudding in a restaurant. Ten years later, Deschamps ordered some plum pudding at another restaurant only to be told by the waiter that the last dish and just been served to another customer, this customer turning out to be none other than Monsieur de Fontgibu himself. Then, much later in 1832, Deschamps ordered plum pudding in a third restaurant and told his dinner acquaintances of the earlier encounters, ending his story by saying that only Monsieur de Fontgibu was missing to make the evening complete. At that moment, de Fontgibu entered the room.

Another famous example of synchronicity is the novel Futility written by Morgan Robertson in 1898. Although written a full fourteen years before the sinking of the Titanic, the plot's main event is the sinking of the "unsinkable" transatlantic liner Titan after it collides with an iceberg. Many of the circumstances described in the novel match the actual disaster to an eerie degree, these including the name and the size of the ship, the speed it was traveling when it collided with the iceberg, the number of the passengers on board and even the exact site of the incident.

As Jung would later write about such inexplicable phenomena when formulating the idea of synchronicity: "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them-for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes." And this very improbability is what gives the event an almost magical touch.

Improbable coincidences happen to many of us on a regular basis, although perhaps not nearly as dramatic and bizarre as described in the two preceding examples. Have you ever started thinking of someone you know for no particular reason and then suddenly received a phone call from that same person? Or perhaps you were once at a time in your life when it was very important for you to decide what kind of career you should pursue only to suddenly begin meeting a large number of people who all worked in one particular field. Or maybe you had a strange dream one night about someone important in your life but with whom you hadn't had contact with for quite a time. Later on you find out that that same someone, or someone very near to him or her, has died, and that this happened at virtually at the same time you had the dream in question. These are all not only examples of synchronicity, they are examples of events that have actually taken place. And no, there is no clear causal connection involved here, but there is a meaningful coincidence here all the same, at least for the individuals who have experienced these things.

And that's what the fascination with synchronicity gets down to in the end; the meaning such an occurrence has to you personally. Perhaps the important question about synchronicity is not whether or not these improbable coincidences follow some logic of their own or not or can ever be studied as causal phenomena do, but whether or not they are personally meaningful to us as individuals. Is everything truly connected here some way? And if so, is it connected in a way in which these peculiar manifestations can give our lives more meaning, depth, even guidance?

And here we are back to square one again. Science can't prove or disprove any of this one way or the other. At least not yet, anyway. Those who "believe" in synchronicity can't do so either. And what a bizarre coincidence that is.