Synchronicity seems like a far-out idea to the rational mind. A concept easily negated as psychological confirmation bias, but there’s something profound to unpack here.
What’s a Synchronicity?
The concept of Synchronicity was coined by Carl Jung. Jung describes synchronicities as requiring no belief system or hypothesis, they simply deeply resonate as meaningful. So, in contrast to coincidences, synchronicities are immediately felt to be meaningful, prior to any thinking about correlation.
Jung later admitted that after dining with Albert Einstein ‘It was Einstein who first started me thinking about a relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality…years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.’
Quantum Physicist Wolfgang Pauli in seeking a unified theory of reality later collaborated with Jung on a joint volume outlining the synchronicity principle. Stating that:
A truly unified view must include the feeling function, since without feeling there is no meaning or value in life, and no proper acknowledgement of the phenomenon of synchronicity
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7042.pdf
and in their quest to for clearly define synchronicity in relationship to mathematic equations they wrote that:
It presumes that indestructible energy has a dual relationship to the spacetime continuum: on the one hand, there is the constant connection through
effect—that is, causality; and on the other, there is an inconstant connection through contigence, equivalence, or meaning that is itself synchronicity. For a physicist, equations are not objectively accurate reflections of material reality but structurally accurate relationship – connections. For Jung, synchronicities are meaningful only when an individual experiences them.
Examples of Synchronicities
1 — You have a thought about something. Immediately you get a text from a friend expressing the exact same idea.
2 — Thinking about a particular problem in your life. You go into a book store, open a random book and the answer lies in the first paragraph you find.
Another definition is a parallelism of events that cannot be explained causally.
Scientific Materialism vs Quantum Theory
For the most part, scientific materialism sees consciousness and matter as separate, a dualism. In that framework, any meaningful correlation between mind/matter is forbidden, so it’s no wonder these metaphysical ideas are dismissed.
On the contrary, we’re seeing the rise and recognition of quantum theory, panpsychism, David Bohm’s implicate order and other new scientific information that doesn’t compute with materialism, exposing our short-sightedness to an energetic foundation of reality.
These fields obey quantum-mechanical laws, implying the properties of discontinuity and non-locality. The totality of the movement of enfoldment and unfoldment may go immensely beyond what has revealed itself to our observations. We call this totality by the name holomovement.
David Bohm
Ancient Wisdom and Non-Local Consciousness
This new understanding (I say new, it was also mapped by Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism and Zen up to five thousand years ago but we’re slowly catching up) sees consciousness as the fundamental feature of physical matter. Whereby every single particle in existence has an incredibly simple form of consciousness.
A brief summary is that our brains and bodies emerge within consciousness. That the individual is more like a whirlpool of water in an ocean; seemingly a separate entity, a separate whirlpool, but ultimately all part of the ocean of shared being. With the brain, like a radio, receiving consciousness.
With this understanding, if two people have the same thought or idea and say the same exact words with each other simultaneously – that’s no more unusual than me passing you an apple.
It’s two minds, springing forth and thus informed by, the same source.
Physicist David Peat said that synchronicity is
…the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending through society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.
A brief glimpse into the implicate order and wholeness of reality manifesting explicitly.
Three Ways to Invite Synchronicity
In my direct experience, the first and most important way to invite synchronicity is to recognise that the frequency of synchronicities is correlated to the degree of conscious apperception. Or more simply; the degree of presence.
This allows you to act on two more:
2 — Follow your intuition. Inner — tuition is the connection to the source of wisdom. Einstein nailed it when he said “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.” Practice tuning into this.
3 — Trust yourself. The mind attempts to label everything to more smoothly navigate this ever complexifying World. Try going with your gut instinct and trusting the wisdom that arises.
Summary
My advice is to believe nothing. Not even this article. Instead experiment with the concept agnostically, practice presence and see what synergy reveals itself to you.
This is all baffling and absurd through the lens of conditioning that the subjective and objective world are very much separate. Simple, I feel if we are humble enough to drop our beliefs and explore this empirically, directly.
We live in a “participatory universe,” John Wheeler proposed. So it might well be a valid precursor that experience of Synchronicity is predicated on your ability to forego materialistic beliefs and look humbly at the World without a lens to participate.
Humble curiosity will only open doors to a deeper understanding. That’s the truly scientific approach — go test it.
Thanks for reading.
