Synchronicity Psychic Possibilities

Synchronicity-'the meaningful co-incidence of two or more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.
Carl Jung

From Morgana's Observatory

In 1944, when he was 68 years old, Carl Jung slipped on an icy road and broke his ankle; this led to a severe heart attack. While hovering between life and death, Jung experienced curious visions, in one of which he was hovering above the earth, out in space, then saw a kind of Hindu temple inside a meteor. "Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss." He was convinced that if he recovered his doctor would have to die -- and in fact the doctor died as Jung started to recover. The result of these strange experiences was that Jung ceased to be concerned about whether his contemporaries regarded him as a mystic rather than a scientist, and he ceased to make a secret of his lifelong interest in the occult. In 1949 he wrote about the "acausal connecting principle" called synchronicity. In the following year he wrote his paper On Synchronicity, later expanded into a book. Unfortunately, Jung’s fundamental premise in both these works is basically nonsensical. Western science, he says, is based on the principle of causality. But modern physics is shaking this principle to its foundations; we now know that natural laws are merely statistical truths and that therefore we must allow for exceptions. To explain "synchronistic" events, Jung was inclined to refer to a phrase of the French psychologist Pierre Janet, abaissement du niveau mental, "lowering of the mental threshold," by which Janet meant a certain lowering of the vital forces -- such as we experience when we are tired or discouraged and which is the precondition for neurosis. Jung believed that when the mental threshold is lowered "the tone of the unconscious is heightened, thereby creating a gradient for the unconscious to flow towards the conscious." the conscious then comes under the influence of what Jung calls the "archetypes" or "primordial images." These images belong to the "collective unconscious" and might be, for example, of a great mother, a hero-god, a devil-figure, or an image of incarnate wisdom. Jung thought that when the archetype is activated odd coincidences are likely to happen. The medieval "magician" Albertus Magnus wrote: A certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love of hate or the like. When therefore the [human soul] falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that the [excess] binds things together [magically] and alters them in the way it wants. Whoever would learn the secret of doing and undoing these things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if [s/he] falls into a great excess. That is to say, a psychological state can somehow affect the physical world. But Albertus’s "great excess" is clearly the opposite of Jung’s "lowering of the mental threshold." One is lowering of vitality, the other is an intensification of it. Synchronicity is an explanatory principle; it explains "meaningful coincidences" such as a beetle flying into Jung’s room while a patient was describing a dream about a scarab. The scarab is an Egyptian symbol of rebirth, he noted. Therefore, the propitious moment of the flying beetle indicated that the transcendental meaning of both the scarab in the dream and the insect in the room was that the patient needed to be liberated from her excessive rationalism. His notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception. Synchronicity provides access to the archetypes, which are located in the collective unconscious and are characterized by being universal mental predispositions not grounded in experience. Like Plato's Forms (eidos), the archetypes do not originate in the world of the senses, but exist independently of that world and are known directly by the mind. Unlike Plato, however, Jung believed that the archetypes arise spontaneously in the mind, especially in times of crisis. Just as there are meaningful coincidences, such as the beetle and the scarab dream, which open the door to transcendent truths, so too a crisis opens the door of the collective unconscious and lets out an archetype to reveal some deep truth hidden from ordinary consciousness. Mythology, Jung claimed, bases its stories on the archetypes. Mythology is the reservoir of deep, hidden wondrous truths. Dreams and psychological crises, fevers and derangement, chance encounters resonating with "meaningful coincidences," all are gateways to the collective unconscious, which is ready to restore the individual psyche to health with its insights. Jung maintained that these metaphysical notions are scientifically grounded, but they are not empirically testable in any meaningful way. All synchronistic phenomena can be grouped under three categories: 1.The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content, (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable. 2.The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external even taking place outside the observer's field of perception; i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (e.g., the Stockholm fire). 3.The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.
Sources:
C.G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity by Robert Aziz
Unsolved Mysteries by Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson


From Joseph Campbell's 'The Portable Jung' Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurance of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneious, casually unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content preceived by an observer can, at the smae time, be represented by an outside event, without any casual connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time.

Although the psychological interpretation of horoscopes is still a very uncertain matter, there is nevertheless some prospect today of a casual explaination in conformity with natural law. Consequently, we are no longer justified in describing astrology as a mantic (prophetic) method. Astrology is in the process of becoming a science. But as there are still large areas of uncertainty, I (Jung) decided some time ago to make a test and find out how far an accepted astrological tradition would stand up to statistical investigation. For this purpose it was necessary to select a definite and indisputable fact. My choice fell on marriage. Together with my co-worker, Mrs. Liliane Frey-Rohn, I first proceeded to collect 180 marriages, that is to say, 360 horoscopes, and compared the 50 most important aspects that might possibly be characteristic of marriage, namely the conjunctions and oppositions of Mars and Venus. Upon examination of the results of comparative tests (refer to 'The Portable Jung' for a descriptive analysis of data used) one is immediately struck by the fact that the cojunctions are all moon conjunctions, which is in accord with astrological expectations.
Although I was obligated to express doubt, earlier, about the mantic character of astrology, I am now forced as a result of my astrological experiment to recognize it again. The chance arrangement of marriage horoscopes, which were simply piled on top of one another as they came in from the diverse sources, and the equally fortuitous way they were divided into three equal batches, suited the sanguine expectations of the research workers and produced an over-all picture that could scarely have been improved upon from the standpoint of the astrological hypothesis. The success of the experiment is entirely in accord with Rhine's ESP results, which were also favourably affected by expectation, hope, and faith.

An Example
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficultly lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality (Descartes). After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab (a beetle- in this case carved into jewellery)-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently taping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large insect that was knocking against the window-pain from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now continue with satisfactory results.
From Jung's Collected Works. 'The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche'

Email: j-gifford@home.com