Quest Magazine

Most of us have, at some point or another, experienced certain unusual coincidences so startling they compel us to wonder as to their possible significance or purpose. Do these strange occurrences hold some deeper meaning for our lives? Or are they simply chance events, explicable strictly through statistical processes and probability theory, as most modern scientists would contend?

Among those who wrestled with such questions was the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Having experienced many such events himself, he eventually coined the term synchronicity to describe what he saw as the uncanny phenomenon of meaningful coincidence. While some coincidences were indeed meaningless, he wrote, every now and then we encounter those confluences of circumstance so improbable that they seemed to hint at a deeper purpose or design in their occurrence.

To explain the workings of such phenomena, he theorized the existence of a principle or law in nature quite different from that normally described by conventional physics. Whereas most visible phenomena in our world appear to occur in a linear, cause-and-effect way, like dominos falling upon one another, synchronistic events were "acausal," in that they seemed linked by deeper archetypal patterns rather than by linear forces. For instance, the presence of Baum's coat on the film's set didn't in any way cause the making of the film, nor did the making of the film bring about the coat - they simply were dual expressions of the same unfolding matrix of meaning. In this way, Jung postulated two primary types of acausal relationships: Between two or more outer events in a person's life, or between an outer event and an inner psychological state.

Since first being published in 1952, Jung's concept has become an increasingly familiar one throughout popular culture, having made its way into the plot lines of TV shows, best-selling works of fiction like The Celestine Prophecy, and even the lyrics of rock songs by groups like The Police. In more philosophical quarters, there have been many attempts to shed further light on this important notion, with some even speculating, in the footsteps of Jung himself, that the key to understanding synchronicity might someday lie within the discoveries of quantum physics. As Robert Anton Wilson wrote nearly two decades ago:

Jung was on the right track. He kept insisting that somehow, somewhere in quantum theory, the actual mechanism of synchronicity would be found and defined. In the late 1980s, it begins to look as if we have started to understand it. (50)

Yet for all of this, the mystery of synchronicity remains unsolved. A half-century later, we still find ourselves essentially no closer to unlocking the deeper mechanism underlying Jung's concept than when it was first introduced. Why is this?

One possibility might be that we have been looking in the wrong place for our answers. Could it be, in other words, that we have been approaching this problem from too narrow a perspective, and in so doing missing the forest for the trees? By way of analogy, consider the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant: Five sightless men come across a great elephant, and each one tries to determine its true nature from their own limited perspective. For one, grasping only its trunk, it seems like a large snake, while for another, feeling only its leg, it appears like a tree, and so on. Because of their partial vantage points, none of them can really grasp the true nature of this beast, which can properly be understood only from a larger, more global perspective.

What, then, is this "different cosmology" to which I refer? It is a perspective other writers and I have referred to over the years as the symbolist worldview. This perennial viewpoint has been expressed through the centuries by such diverse figures as Plotinus, Pythagoras, Emerson, Jacob Boehme, and Cornelius Agrippa, to name a few. This way of thinking holds that the universe is a reflection of an underlying spiritual reality, and that all phenomena and forms are symbols of deeper truths and principles. As the Swedish scientist and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg wrote in Heaven and Hell, "There is a correspondence of all things of heaven with all things of man." All things reflect the deeper ideas and principles of which they are a tangible expression or "signature," and can be deciphered for their subtler significance.

For the symbolist, all events and phenomena are to be regarded as elements of a supremely ordered whole; like the intricately arranged threads of a great novel or myth, the elements of daily experience are perceived as intimately interrelated, with no situation or event out of place, no development accidental. Consequently, even a seemingly trivial occurrence may serve as an important key toward unlocking a greater pattern of meaning: The passage of a bird through the sky, the appearance of lightning at a critical moment, or the overhearing of a chance remark—such things are significant to the degree we perceive them as interwoven within a greater tapestry of relationship.

Pervading the warp and weft of creation exists a web of subtle connections known as correspondences. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun" (949). Throughout the ages, magicians and esotericists labored to construct elaborate "tables of correspondences" which attempted to link all the parts of nature in a grand web of harmonies. In this way the Moon is said to be linked with such other symbols as the home, women, the principle of change, and emotions generally, while Mercury is linked with matters of communication, publishing, travel, the mind, and so on. Understanding the essential principles that underlie all phenomena provides the esotericist with a skeleton key that allows him or her to unlock the language of both outer worlds and inner dreams.

The Implications for Jung's Synchronicity

So what does this ancient worldview and its core principles have to offer us in our understanding of synchronicity? For one, consider the question of this phenomenon's true frequency—how often it actually occurs in our lives. While there is evidence that Jung privately entertained a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon, in his formal writings he professed the belief that synchronistic occurrences were "relatively rare" and went to great pains to distinguish meaningful coincidences from conventional ones.

To the symbolist, however, coincidence is merely the tip of a much larger iceberg, the most visible aspect of a more pervasive framework of design that underlies all experiences. The circumstances of an entire life comprise a complex fabric of meaningful connections and linked analogies that extend to all aspects of personal experience—the body, outer events, inner states and dreams, and actions or gestures—and beyond, even to the collective and universal spheres of existence. Indeed, one might well say that everything is a coincidence, insofar as everything co-incides.

Jung regarded the synchronistic event as an important "eruption of meaning" in our lives; yet as divinatory systems like astrology demonstrate (and as I explore more fully in my book The Waking Dream), there are actually many types of meaning in our world besides that found strictly in the occasional coincidence. To borrow a phrase from William Irwin Thompson, we are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, unaware of the complex archetypal drama spread out before us. What the infrequent dramatic coincidence does is simply pull back the curtain on that vast drama ever so slightly to make us aware of but one small detail in that complex tableau of meaning.

For this and other reasons, it may be said that the essential heart of synchronicity lies less in the study of acausality than in a fuller understanding of meaning, to be unlocked not through the tools of science but through those of philosophy and hermeneutic inquiry. As with the studies of astrology and divination, fully comprehending the significance of meaningful coincidence may demand nothing less than a "unified field theory" of meaning, incorporating such diverse subjects as sacred geometry, the theory of correspondences, chakric psychology, number theory, and a multi-leveled cosmology, to name just a few. Only within the broad framework offered by a sacred science such as this can we hope to truly grasp the "whole elephant" of synchronicity, as it were, and not simply one of its isolated appendages, as found within the occasional remarkable coincidence.

And it is against the backdrop of this broader perspective that we stand to uncover an even deeper truth in the workings of synchronicity, one extending far beyond simple matters of either acausality or correspondence. In his book A Sense of the Cosmos, author Jacob Needleman offers the following comment about the curious symmetry found within the ecological web of nature:

Whenever we have looked to a part for the sake of understanding the whole, we have eventually found that the part is a living component of the whole. In a universe without a visible center, biology presents a reality in which "the existence of a center is everywhere implied." (64; emphasis mine)

Needleman's comments here might well be taken as a useful analogy for our understanding of synchronicity, too. In order for the diverse events of our lives to be interwoven in as intricate and artful a way as synchronicity implies (and as systems like astrology empirically demonstrate), there would seem to be a regulating intelligence underlying our world, orchestrating all its elements like notes within some grand symphony of meaning. We needn't think of this as necessitating the involvement of some bearded, anthropomorphic deity on a heavenly throne, of course. As we saw at the opening of this article, the Neoplatonist writer Plotinus referred to it simply as "the One," while the mystic geometers of old sometimes described this unifying principle as a sphere whose center was everywhere and whose circumference was nowhere.

Whatever we choose to call it, it speaks of a coordinating agency of unimaginable scope and subtlety whereby all the coincidences and correspondences of the world coalesce as if threads in a grand design, and within which our lives are holoscopically nested. Seen in this way, the synchronistic event can be thought of as offering us a passing sideways glance, as if through a glass darkly, into the mind of God.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writings, vol. II. New York: William H. Wise, 1929, p. 949.

Jung, Carl. "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol. 8, Collected Works. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press.

Needleman, Jacob. A Sense of the Cosmos: The Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truth. E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975, p. 64.

Wilson, Robert Anton. "Synchronicity, Isomorphism, and the Implicate Order," Gnosis. Winter 1989, p. 50.

By Lance Hardie

Everything you ever wanted to know about psychology—or physics—is contained in those words. True or false?

Man, he lives in jerks—baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerk—gets a farm an' loses his farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that.

That's Ma talking to Pa towards the end of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Things have not been easy for any of them; for Pa, it has finally come to the point of self-pity. Well, it takes less than three lines of text for her to set him straight. Though she may put it in her own language, Ma knows all about life in terms of male-female polarities. And, when all is said and done, it is she who doesn't break.

Of course male-female polarities have been around since—let's go ahead and say it—since the Big Bang. And knowledge of them at least since we shed our primate fur. The particular mode those polarities assume to become behaviors, not to say social structures and political styles—that's a subject much in vogue nowadays.

It is a fact that the male nature tends to be mobile, explosive, and aspiring to enter new territory and scale the heights. This is how the human sperm, among other male vehicles, has been observed to behave. The egg, on the other hand, tends to be settled, protected, and aiming to embrace and dissolve (all right, nurture) an approaching candidate—a female role by definition, generally, or at least by convention.

Moving down the hierarchy through the animal and vegetable realms and past the mineral to the submolecular world, we find an odd correlation. Early in the twentieth century physicists trying to make sense of the structure of the atom bumped up against the particle-wave paradox. Now here is the strange thing. In the world of subatomic physics, particles are seen to display "masculine" behavior while wave phenomena seem to have characteristics more easily associated with "feminine" ways.

The first question that immediately comes to mind is: What about "particles" that sometimes appear to be waves, and "waves" that can also manifest as particles? Even more amazing is that this dual nature of subatomic entities doesn't differ much from what psychologists have discovered in human beings. We all have masculine and feminine aspects to our personalities. Carl Jung called a man's feminine aspect the anima, and the masculine counterpart in a woman the animus. For example, a man's moods originate in his anima, and a woman's bossiness (and some have claimed even her bitchiness) comes from her animus. In Jung's system, individuation or healing takes place within the psyche when the personality is finally integrated.

Is there any question that men like to play ball? Any kind of ball. Whatever culture you live in, there is a popular ball game that men play. Hurling projectiles is one of our basic, primitive drives as men. Dealing with containers is one of the basic, primitive drives of women. It extends, traditionally, to storing, carrying, cooking, and serving. The sexual roles are corollary aspects of these basic tendencies.

However one might feel about "accidents of nature," it seems reasonable to speculate that this similarity can't be the result of such an accident. I'll go out on a limb and propose that the male-female polarity extends to the entire universe, and that it can be found in every layer of reality. It is tempting, therefore, to assert that in the subatomic world particles are "male," waves are "female." Particles are the very stuff of bombardments and collisions, of subparticles flying apart and annihilating each other, the kind of physics favored by—surprise!—male physicists.

In this sense, the notion that the universe began its existence in a Big Bang is a mental projection of what we might call, with complete innocence, "male physics." What's missing is the polar counterpart. The Goddess advocates are right in at least one respect: modern scientific models do not make room for a feminine element in the scheme of things. If the universe is a dance of male and female energy forms, where is the female in our current creation myth? Our Father exploded and sent His seed in all directions. Okay so far. Now then, didn't it have to fall somewhere in order to grow? Who was fertilized by it? See the problem?

In the billiard ball model of the world no reference is made to the balls ever falling into pockets! The balls are there, the pockets are not. How can this be? All the balls can do is collide with each other, endlessly, ad infinitum. You would think that even male physics—especially male physicists—would want to score once in a while. It's a mystery. The metaphor that would brand the scientific brotherhood as a sort of priesthood is closer to the truth than its proponents suspect. By this account, science is not just defeminized; it is positively dehumanized.

Now, just for fun, consider a female-only version of this story. Let's call it the Big Swell.

There is no sudden beginning. Instead there is a slow buildup from an original state, a watery kind of primordial energy matrix pregnant with all possibilities. This state might be similar to what some now call the Zero Point Field, the latent, potential field out of which everything arises into existence. There is organic growth out of this Watery Mother, the infinite container of All That Can Be. And even as new forms arise and grow away from the Original Mother, the Source is always there, continuing to feed the stream that emerges endlessly from it.

Anyone who takes a moment to look at our universe can see the waves that shape the galaxies and drive the orbits of the bodies traveling through space. Astronomers speak of gravitational "resonances" between planets and moons and asteroids and planetary rings. What are these if not wave phenomena? Close your eyes, forget the theories, and let your mind drift for a moment.

Imagine the Great Mother singing to her children as they learn to dance in the infinite space of endless creation. There are collisions here and there, certainly, and it is plain to see that they are necessary steps in the dance if the dancers are to follow the music. If physics had feminine roots and practitioners, there is a good chance that modern physics would conform to some variety of this model. We see what we are. We make what we are. And not because of meanness or prejudice. We do it because it comes naturally to us and we believe it to be the truth.

So then, are men particles and women waves? Well, sure, and they are also both. Part of the wave-particle paradox is that the two aspects cannot be truly separated. Their essence is not entirely in our "reality," so much so that they have been called "wavicles" to emphasize their strange nature. And it is also not news that men have a feminine element within them as women have a masculine counterpart in their makeup, though we both have our dominant modes in thinking, feeling, and behaving.

When we feel a "resonance" with another, it may be less the particle or wave aspect that does it than the movements of the larger ocean and atmosphere in which we live. To grow, to become integrated, means to rise above the smallness of our world, to a larger horizon that includes those parts of ourselves that we have denied or failed to see. To the extent that we achieve that aim, to that extent we achieve peace and true humanity. And to that extent we bring about the Knowledge of our Father and the Wisdom of our Mother—and the Love of both.

Volume 87, number 2

Contents

Looking for the Dutchman's Treasure
By John P. O'Grady

Daily Life as Spiritual Practice
By Ravi Ravindra

Creating a Sanctuary for the Soul
By Dianne Valla and David Rioux

Thinking Aloud: Men Are Particles, Women are Waves
By Lance Hardie

Explorations: Isis and Osiris-Death and Resurrection
By Normandi Ellis

News & Notes