Synchronicity: The Principle of Meaningful Coincidence

In recent decades, it's become common for people who are devoted to various spiritual paths to talk about how "the outer mirrors the inner". What they mean is either that there's a correlation between our inner world of thought and feeling and the outer world of form or else that our thoughts and feelings create the world. Such ideas may have become more prevalent nowadays - witness the success of What the Bleep Do We Know and The Secret, two films that explore the relationship between the two (seemingly separate) worlds. But when Carl Jung first put forth his theory of synchronicity, in an essay entitled "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle", the very notions were challenging for most people to accept.

The psychologist Jung was primarily known for his pioneering study of the workings of the unconscious, and his idea of synchronicity was based upon the assumption that an inner, psychic condition can be linked to a physical event. His first conceived of this theory after working with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. The I Ching is an extremely old (it dates back at least to 1,000 B.C.) book of divination that Confucius and the Taoist sages held in high regard. The system for using it is seemingly random, relying upon yarrow sticks or coins, but many who've used it have been amazed by its accuracy in providing portents for the future. Carl Jung was astounded by the way his early experiences with the Book of Changes proved so accurate and prophetic, and he wondered what rational process could possibly account for this. Eventually he determined that there had to be some kind of direct correlation between the inner world (what he referred to as the unconscious) and the outer.

Because the language of the unconscious can be so uncanny and elusive, resembling more the poetry of dreams than any linear thought process, it can often be hard to recognize these correspondences when they happen. Sometimes they are very obvious, however, like when a conversation in the afternoon echoes thoughts that one had that morning, or when events of the day mirror one's dreams from the night before. Jung postulated that perhaps these occurences might not be as sporadic as we think; indeed, he speculated that man might yet discover that the psyche and matter were actually one and the same phenomenon, one perceived from within and the other from without. People simply don't notice the correlations much of the time, because we've never learned to watch for them - or believe in them, for that matter.

If our psyches are truly connected - intertwined, even - with the outer world of form, then the words of the mystics throughout the ages who've insisted that the only answers lie within suddenly seem more credible. If one accepts the idea of synchronicity, one must acknowledge that any change that occurs within the psyche must have a correlating effect in the outside world. Thus, the way to heal the world is to heal ourselves. The way promote peace in the world is to achieve a state of harmony within ourselves.

With his theory of synchronicity, Carl Jung opened the doors to a new area of study that is still vastly unexplored. What is clear, however, is that a lot of its implications are more widely accepted now. As more and more people become concerned for the future of the human race and the planet, many see inner work as the true path to ishering in constructive and lasting change.