Synchronicity: Carl Jung, Meaningful Coincidence, and How the Universe Communicates
You think of a friend you haven't contacted in years, and your phone rings — it's them. You are wrestling with a major life decision, and you open a book at random to the exact passage that answers your question. You dream of a symbol, and the next morning you see it on the street, on a billboard, on the shirt of a stranger sitting next to you on the bus. You are going through a period of inner transformation, and a bird flies into your window, or a coin appears on the ground at your feet, or a song comes on the radio whose lyrics describe precisely what you are feeling. Are these coincidences? Almost certainly, in the strict statistical sense — any sufficiently complex system produces apparent patterns that our pattern-recognition minds will naturally notice and interpret as meaningful. But Carl Jung proposed something more radical: that some of these apparently acausal connections are not random noise processed by a meaning-hungry mind, but genuine expressions of a deeper o...