Synchronicity - What Exactly is It? - By: Robert Paterson

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

(from Wikipedia)

The word synchronicity was first coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. He had studied for many years under the great pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, until he eventually broke with him over the fundamental question of Freud's sexual theory. Freud believed that every desire or motivation or ambition was rooted in sexual desire, and his theories became fashionable all over the world, and particularly in the USA, during the mid-twentieth century.

Jung believed that people's motivations were not exclusively based on sex, and he went on to formulate, among other things, his theory of archetypes to explain behavior. His work was building on that of Freud who had conducted extensive investigations into the meaning of dreams. Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, became one of the best selling psychology books of all time. Jung's investigation into people's dreams led to the idea that certain types and characters appeared in dreams and that these characters were common to all people and cultures. He called them Archetypes.

His discovery of archetypes led him to explore different cultures, including those of the ancient world. It was while he was studying the culture of ancient China that he came across the book which we know as the I Ching. This is a book of divination, or fortune telling, if you will, in which the reader thinks of a question they want answered, while performing an apparently random process with stalks made of yarrow, which leads one to a particular page in the book. This page then supplies the answer to the question.

Jung found that the book gave a surprising number of correspondences and right answers. In other words, it worked. It was this event which led Jung to the idea of synchronicity to explain the correspondence between the random choice of page, and events in the real world.

About the Author

Robert Paterson writes for "Blog Synchronicity" dedicated to helping people discover how to use the power of synchronicity in their own lives. Find us at http://phe-synchronicity.blogspot.com/

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