The Truth About Synchronicity

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“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

When we talk about synchronicity, it is often in a quirky, playful way. Like we’ve just received a sign from the Universe, but we don’t ever give much thought as to how that sign got to us. Where did it come from? What is the force behind it? It turns out synchronicity is a big concept that speaks to the fundamental spiritual truths of self-organization, unity, and our capacity for co-creation.

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What is synchronicity?

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity, calling them meaningful coincidences. An occurrence of related events that don’t appear to have a causal connection. We have all had the experience of hearing an author’s name for the first time, and then out of the blue, we hear it from multiple other sources throughout the week. And those various sources don’t seem to have any direct relationship. Jung contended that somewhere deep in our psyche, we summon events that are needed to further our growth and development.

Jung believed archetypes themselves were the origins of these events. He felt that archetypes were the structure of the collective unconscious, acting as a bridge between the unmanifest and the world of form. They are symbols of shared mythologies or universal patterns of human experience that move from the universal and objective and cross over into the world of matter. As they do this they become increasingly personal and subjective.

Self-organization

We have to take a holistic view of the Universe to really appreciate synchronistic events. Physicist David Bohm explains that the Universe should be seen 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; they co-emerge. This is the nature of synchronicity. We, as the observer, call forth from the Undivided Wholeness what we need for our expansion and growth.

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In Buddhism, there is a similar concept called Co-dependent Origination. And in the Kybalion, they speak of the Hermetic view of cause and effect. While it might seem that these concepts correlate well with our Western view of causality, these two perspectives are much more integrated. In these concepts, the effect is the entanglement of many forces and elements that co-produce or self-organize. It is about unification rather than fragmentation. Things don’t come to be through linear expressions of cause and effect; instead, they emerge from relationships between ourselves, others, and the Divine.

The force of meaning

So if synchronicity is acausal, what is the force behind it? According to Jung,  meaning and affinity is the impetus for these experiences. That is why understanding our unity and harmony is so essential. We can’t develop meaning without relationship – without connection to others and the Divine. So through attractive forces, we are selectively calling forth form to assist our own movement into wholeness as an individual. On some level, we are using meaning as an acausal force to attract experiences into reality.

Our conscious evolution

In The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield talks about synchronicity as a spiritual process that builds energy and furthers our spiritual path. If Jung believes we call forth these events, Redfield suggests that we can do this deliberately. We do this by simply getting clear on what we’d like to know and asking the question. Then we broaden our field of awareness, both within and without, and look for the subtle shifts in our experience. This makes synchronicity an act of co-creation, not just a passive sign by the Universe. And the energy that we build through these events strengthens our co-creative capacities.

Synchronicity speaks to our self-organizing, emergent Universe and our ability to bring into form what serves our highest potential. We are part of the Universal intelligence; we are not separate from it. We no longer need to wait for the Universe to send us a sign letting us know we are on the right path. We have access to the universal patterns of creation. And as we embrace the idea that we are agents of the Whole. Instead of being passive participants, we accept our roles as conscious evolutionaries.