In one twenty-four hour period three difference people—my psychotherapist, the stranger standing next to me as I took off my shoes at a meditation retreat, and a woman I met for the first time at a networking event—each recommended the same book to me. I believed the coincidence was meaningful; for some reason I was supposed to read this book! I promptly purchased and read A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2000), initiating my on-going fascination with neurobiology.
This was not the first time something like this had happened to me. Before a trip to London many years earlier, a friend suggested I take Zen and the Art of Archery (Herrigel, 1953) with me for the journey. Unfortunately, I did not have time to purchase the book before my trip. A few days later, as I sat under a tree in Queen Anne’s Rose Garden in the middle of London, a man who was jogging by stopped and asked me if I had read the book Zen in the Art of Archery. Creepy! Soon after, I was walking the streets of Oxford looking for Balliol College (where I was about to start a course of study) when I stumbled upon Blackwell’s Bookstore. It was there where I purchased my copy of Zen in the Art of Archery, and another interesting title that caught my eye—The I Ching Workbook (Wing, 1979) or The Book of Change—a 5000-year-old oracle divination method that would become an important topic of study for me for the next twenty-five years.
An Introduction to Synchronicity
Carl Jung was also curious about synchronicity, a term he coined in a 1930’s lecture about the unusual psychological insights he gained from using the I Ching (Jung, 2010). Jung describes synchronicity as being about meaningful coincidences. In an infamous example of synchronicity offered in his essay On Synchronicity (2010) Jung discusses one of his clients—an educated young woman whose rationalistic approach to life seemed to imprison her. Jung hoped that something unexpected would happen to “burst her intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself” (Jung, 2010, p.109). Then one day the woman relayed her dream about a scarab when suddenly a large flying insect knocked against the windowpane from outside of Jung’s office; it was a scarabeid beetle. This event had the effect Jung hoped for—it broke through his client’s resistance and treatment was able to begin (Jung, 2010).
Jung believed there was more to the universe than cause and effect; synchronicity was about more than meaningful coincidence. Jung understood and wrote extensively about the phenomena of synchronicity as an explanatory principle that describes an underlying connection between events in time and space. He believed an acausal principle exists that explains an inherent connection between mind and matter or psyche and the phenomenal world. This underlying connectedness, according to Jung (2010), forms a field where synchronicities are born and thrive.
The Categories of Synchronicity
My personal experience with synchronicity is not limited to book recommendations from strangers. Other events that range from dreams foretelling actual experiences in my life, dreams about experiences happening to people close to me, and what I sometimes refer to as somatic empathy—where I seem to experience the disowned moods, somatizations and thought patterns of people close to me. The latter is most pronounced in the way I tend to experience the presenting issue of a new and sometimes existing client the day before I see them.
The first time I recall my dreams tapping into another person’s private experience was in college. A young man I knew was spending a year studying abroad. I dreamed about a specific scene of him sitting by the water and writing in a journal as he struggled with an issue in his life. I wrote a letter to him about my dream with details about what seemed to be his struggle and other insights. None of this information I could have known prior to having dreamed it. Also, to the best of my knowledge, he was living away from the ocean and I was unaware of him keeping a journal.
A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from him, coincidentally on Valentine’s Day, the day he received my letter. He called to tell me the new foreign language word he learned that day which meant, connection. “We have that”, he told me. We talked further and I soon learned all the events in my dream about him had been exactly true.
Years later, after no contact with this man for an extended time, I decided to move across the country. The night before my move I had coffee with a friend at a café she recommended and somewhere I had never been. During our conversation she asked me if I believed I would meet my soul mate in my new city. I laughed and told her, “I hope so, because if he’s here he had better stand up and make himself known right now!” We laughed and I turned my head to see THE SAME MAN I HAD DREAMED ABOUT YEARS EARLIER standing behind me!
What I believe about this experience: I had been wondering to myself at the time what destiny I would be walking away from by moving and what destiny would come into view. Perhaps somehow my internal psychic experience paired with thoughts he had about his life path and this resonance contributed to us finding ourselves in the same place at the same time. In fact, not long after my move to the west coast I heard through a mutual friend he had moved to the east coast.
In his essay On Synchronicity, Jung shares numerous stories like mine that have been observed by many and recorded in large collections (2010). In studying this material Jung discovered the phenomena of synchronicity seemed to group together into three categories:
1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content, where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e. at a distance, and only verifiable afterward.
3.The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward. (p.110)
Synchronicity and Science
Jung enjoyed conversations with Albert Einstein about the physics that may be related to synchronicity (Jung, 2010). Since that time, science has learned much more about the flowing web that seems to underlay the structure of the universe. For example, we now know that when two photons are separated by any distance, a change in one results in a change in the other. This supports what Jung believed–there seems to be a field of connectedness that binds mind and matter.
In an innovative experiment, researchers Jeanne Achterberg,Karin Cooke, Todd Richards, Leanna Standish, Leila Kozak, and James Lake (2005) studied the mind-matter-space phenomena in Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis published in the American Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. In this study, participants were sent distant intentionality, also known as prayer or Reiki. In each trial the brain of the receiving participant lit up when studied under a functional magnetic resonance imaging protocol—proof that something was activated between one person’s psyche and another person’s body.
“A Wink from the Cosmos” is how writer Meg Lundstrom describes synchronicity in her May, 1996 magazine article in Intuition Magazine. Whatever it is—a wink, proof of the existence of G-d or a coincidence—I am aware that I feel good when synchronicity happens and I am aware of it’s inherent beauty in a way that makes me smile.
