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What is
synchronicity?  |
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| "Synchronicity"
is a term coined by the Swiss psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, to denote
meaningful coincidences. Jung provided a psychological analysis of these
simultaneous occurrences of two meaningful but not causally connected
events, these coincidences in time of two or more causally unrelated
events which have the same or similar meaning. He even went so far as to
suggest that the principle of acausal connectedness (synchronicity) was
equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation. It is difficult
to describe in a few words what synchronicity is all about, and the reader
is referred to the following books for more complete explanations: Arthur
Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad and The Roots of
Coincidence,
Ira Progoff’s Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny, and Alan Vaughan’s
Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity. Perhaps a few examples will give the reader at least a flavor of the sorts of meaningful coincidences involved. The first example is related by the writer Wilhelm von Scholz in a 1924 book, Coincidence and Fate. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, a lady then living in Strasbourg in Alsace photographed her first baby in the Black Forest. She had the film developed in Strasbourg but forgot to collect it when she moved to Frankfurt soon after. She felt sorrow over the loss of this film. Two years later, she wished to photograph her second baby, and she purchased some film. When the film was developed, she found that it had been double-exposed. The first exposure showed her first baby in the Black Forest. Dr. von Scholz describes the coincidence in terms of "the attractive force of the relevant", in which the woman’s feeling of loss of the first film somehow "attracted" the same. A second example is found on page 22 of Alan Vaughan’s Incredible
Coincidence. Edgar AlIan Poe had written a tale about three shipwreck
survivors in an open boat who killed and ate the fourth, a cabin boy whose
name was Richard Parker. Some fifty years later, three shipwreck survivors
in an open boat actually did kill and eat a fourth, a cabin boy whose name
was Richard Parker. A similar case of life imitating art can be found on
page 112 of Norma Bowles and Fran Hynd’s book, Psi Search. Here, the
authors describe the incredible number of uncanny coincidences between
events associated with the actual sinking of the Titanic and those
described in a fictional work The Wreck of the Titan written fourteen
years earlier (in 1898) by Morgan Robertson. |
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Explore more psi phenomena with the Psi Explorer CD-ROM |
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