The Science of Synchronicity: A New Way to See and Experience the World

Constructing and Deconstructing Reality Constructs

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

Albert Einstein

The “official definition” of synchronicity is vague and filled with concepts even more nebulous – concepts that lie at the foundation of the Western world’s core reality construct. A core reality construct (CRC) is comprised of concepts describing how we think the phenomenal world operates.

It is how we explain the how, when and why of what happens, has happened or will happen to entities or between entities.

Welcome to the tenuous world of causality or cause-effect. Synchronicity speaks about events that do not follow the linear cause-effect reality model upon which the classical Western worldview is built.

Synchronicity defined as an acausal (not having a direct observable cause) occurrence begins to wreak havoc on the linear model of Western cause-effect thinking.

Carl G. Jung was dismissed as a mystic and his synchronicity model was considered insufficient for the rigors of scientific testing. But that does not dismiss the phenomena of coinciding events which seem meaningful in some way to the observer.

Jung’s definition does not explain synchronicity. His explanation is only a definition of what characterizes a synchronistic event. Certain other psychological frameworks attempt to explain the phenomena according to the human propensity for certain cognitive biases. [2] 

In either case, neither the scientific dismissal nor the psychological treatment explain away every instance of synchronicity. There are some instances that simply fly in the face of a “rational” explanation. The argument of last resort for the “classical rationalist” is chance coincidence according to the “law of large numbers” which states that almost anything is possible given a large enough field of play and enough time. [3]

Synchronicity: What is it?

Most of us have a sense of what synchronicity means and have had experiences referred to as being synchronistic. It is common for people to say that “things happen for a reason” when referring to coincidences – though we may not know what the “reasons” are, or we may attribute a “reason” when an outcome manifests or when a meaningful connection is made in the classical sense of synchronicity.

The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia and it includes some comments by the famous psychologist Carl G. Jung, the man who coined and defined the term synchronicity.

“Synchronicity is defined as the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causality. Instead, it maintains that just as events may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related — the cause and the effect occur together.

Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

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