There are no accidents or coincidences in life – everything is synchronicity – because everything has a frequency. It’s simply the physics of life and the Universe in action. ~Rhonda Byrne

Synchronicity is explored in spiritual circles in a light and playful way. Some are claiming it as the Universe’s way of telling us we are on the right track. Others believing that the Universe is leaving us breadcrumbs on our path to awakening. In truth, the well of synchronicity goes much deeper than initially explored. It speaks to some of the fundamental truths at the core of spirituality – unity, self-organization, and our capacity to create our reality. 

What is Synchronicity?

When Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity, he called them meaningful coincidences. A significant occurrence of related events that have no apparent causal connection. For example, last week, I was listening to a podcast, and the guest recommends the book War of Art by Steven Pressfield. An author who I’ve read before and really enjoyed. Then the next day, my husband tells me he wants to buy the same book – out of the blue. He heard of it from a completely different source – that to me is synchronicity. Events falling together in time but don’t appear to follow a causal path. 

For decades, Jung and a Nobel-winning scientist, Wolfgang Pauli, explored this idea in a series of correspondences. These letters were later published as Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958. Jung was convinced that somewhere deep in our psyche, we call forth events needed for our growth and development. Jung believed that archetypes were the origins of these synchronous events. 

Archetypes are universal patterns that are the structure of the collective unconscious that bridge the unmanifest and the world of form. Johannes Kepler described them as preexisting ideas from the mind of God that left imprints on our souls and as humans, we had an innate ability to perceive them. Another way to understand archetypes is that they are symbols of shared mythologies or templates of human experience. Moving from the universal and objective and crossing over into the world of matter, becoming more personal and subjective as the individual experiences them.

If you know your archetypes – and not just yours, if you know how to perceive the world in archetypes, through archetypes – everything changes. Everything. Because you have two things: you can see through one eye which is impersonal, and through the other, which is personal. That’s the way the game is written down here. ~Caroline Myss

Embracing the Whole

To fully appreciate synchronistic events, we must see the world through the eyes of unity rather than separation. Physicist David Bohm had a similar view of the universe. Explaining that the universe should not be fragmented and looked at as the mere sum of its parts. Instead, we should see it as an Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This living awareness consists of potentialities or what he called the implicate order. It wasn’t until an observer came along that the implicate order would collapse into form (explicate). The implicate, explicate, and awareness are not separate; instead, they co-emerge.

This holistic view of the universe is also mirrored in Buddhism as explored through co-dependent origination. Or the Kybalion, through the Hermetic view of cause and effect. While it might seem that this correlates well with our Western view of causality, it is much more integrated. In these perspectives, the effect is a matter of the entanglement of many forces and elements that co-produce and self organize. It is about unification rather than fragmentation. This self-organization of the universe is the coming together of diverse individual parts in unified relationships.

“After a careful and critical appraisal of the many experiences and arguments, I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.” ~Wolfgang Pauli

Meaning as Order

So if it isn’t the law of cause and effect, what brings these events into our experience? Jung believed that there is another acausal force that orchestrates these events that is non-local. In this view, meaning is seen as an ordering factor. There isn’t a point A that moves to B in a defined space. Rather it is beyond time and space and brings about events based on meaning and affinity. This affinity or attractive forces are selectively calling forth form and function to assist our movement into an integrated whole. Or as Maria Popova put it, “The ultimate dependency between the observer and the observed.” On some level, we are using meaning as an acausal force to attract experiences into reality that serves our evolution.

Why Is This Important?

Synchronicity speaks to both ideas of a self-organizing emergent Universe and our ability to bring into form what serves our highest potential. Once we begin to recognize these sync events, our capacity for co-creation becomes tangible. We are creating a union of the masculine principle as an ordering agent+time and the feminine principle of energy and creation. This is the very nature of all manifestation. And the movement of the cosmos from unmanifested consciousness into manifested. But the idea that these events operate outside of time/space and is a product of meaning and affinity is also the very nature of magic itself. 

Don’t dismiss the synchronicity of what is happening right now finding its way to your life at just this moment. There are no coincidences in the Universe, only convergences of Will, Intent, and Experience. ~Neale Donald Walsch

Becoming Aware of Synchronicity

James Redfield, in his book The Celestine Prophecy, talks about synchronicity as a way of building energy and as a means to further our spiritual path. Describing them as a spiritual process that we can consciously engage with. If Jung believes we call them forth on some level from the collective unconscious, Redfield contends that we can do this deliberately. He suggests we do this by clarifying what we’d like to know and asking the question. Then we pay attention to our inner and outer environment and look for the signs. This makes synchronicity an act of co-creation, not just a passive sign by the Universe.

The more we become aware of these signs that our higher self calls forth for our growth and evolution, the more that occurs. We no longer need to wait for the Universe to send breadcrumbs to let us know we are on the ‘right’ path. Once we understand synchronicity, we know we create the path. The Universe is a self-organizing, emergent intelligence, and we are part of the intelligence. We have access to the mind of God. When we understand these events’ true nature, we take a step toward our full human potential. As we become agents of the whole, we embrace our roles as revolutionaries rather than passive participants.