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Synchronicity is a term that was used by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experience. Jung believed that some (if not all) coincidences were not mere chance, but instead a literal "co-inciding", or alignment of forces in the universe to create an event or circumstance. The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with these forces is what Jung labelled "individuation." Jung said that an individuated person would actually shape events around them through the communication of their consciousness with the collective unconscious.

Jung spoke of synchronicity as being an acausal connecting principle, in other words a pattern of connection that works outside of or in addition to causality.

Jung's most well-known example of synchronicity involves plum pudding. He tells a tale of a certain Monsieur Deschamps who is treated to some plum pudding by his neighbor Monsieur de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he encounters plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wants to order some, but the waiter tells him the last dish has already been served to another customer, who turns out to be M. de Fortgibu. Many years later, M. Deschamps is at a gathering, and is once again offered plum pudding. He recalls the earlier incident and tells his friends that only M. de Fortgibu is missing to make the setting complete, and in the same instant the now senile M. de Fortgibu enters the room by mistake.

Criticism

The theory of synchronicity is not testable according to any scientific method and is not widely regarded as scientific at all, but rather as pseudoscience. Probability theory can attempt to explain events such as the plum pudding incident in our normal world, without any interference by any universal alignment forces. However, the correct variables required for actually computing the probability cannot be found. This is not to say that synchronicity is not a good model for describing a certain kind of human experience, but a refusal of the idea that synchronicity should be a "hard fact", i.e. an actually existing principle of our universe.

Some may say that synchronicity is a strand of magical thinking.

However, since the scientific method is applicable only to those phenomena that are (1) reproducible, (2) independent of observer, and (3) quantifiable, the argument that synchronicity is not scientifically 'provable' is largely a red herring, as it may point to a property of nature not reducible to the classical scientific method.

Some think that a scientific basis for the phenomena of synchronicity may be related to the principle of correlation, since a more precise scientific term for Jung's expression 'acausal connecting principle' is 'correlation'.

It is a well-known scientific principle that 'correlation does not imply causation'. Yet, correlation may in fact be a physical property shared by events without there being a classical cause-effect relationship. This is most clearly seen in the correlation effects of quantum physics, where widely separated events can be correlated without being linked by a direct physical cause-effect.

Further reading

• Science, Synchronicity and Soul-Making by the physicist Victor Mansfield
• Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Matter and Mind by F. David Peat
• I Ching Bollingen edition by Richard Wilhelm, especially the foreword by

Carl Jung, (the I Ching has been referred to as a 'synchronicity computer')

External links

• http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/naiad2.htm
• http://www.syncharkive.com/

Synchronicity is also a rock and roll album by The Police.