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synchronicity is a beautiful word for a beautiful thing originally coined by Carol yung in 1930 it gives us a word for something mysterious that has the power if true to turn our cultural model of the world on its head it's a shame then that it is one of the most misunderstood and misused terms in popular culture and not just by the Skeptics but even more so by its devout sign drunk Believers in this episode then I want to give a clear account of synchronicity that is true to yung's original conceptualization that's coherent but that's also

rigorous enough to satisfy even if it won't convince the Skeptics [Music] after coining the term in 1930 Yung spent the next two decades developing the concept with his collaborator Wolf Gang poy one of the Giants of quantum physics who won the Nobel Prize in 1945 and was described by Einstein as his spiritual Heir together Yung and poy published their work in 195 to the interpretation of Nature and the psyche in his half of the book Yung gives us the most neat and concise definition you could ask for he defines synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence but

it's not the only definition he gives us he also describes it as a causal parallelism or as in the title of his contribution to the 1952 book as an a call connecting principle or in a more comprehensive definition he describes it as the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state so as you can see like all good terms it's got depth and depth as we know always requires a little bit of nuance and this is where things are going to

get really interesting and a little bit unexpected for those of you who are already familiar with synchronicity so what we're going to do here is firstly we're going to unpack the three components at play in every true synchronicity then we're going to look at the difference between synchronicity with a small s and synchronicity with a capital s that is the solid concrete experiences of synchronicity on the one hand and then the underlying abstract principle on the other then we're going to try and tidy up some of the sloppier use of the term after young and

all of that is going to give us a steel manned synchronicity with that in mind let's get started with the basics so according to Yung for something to be a synchronicity it has to have three separate components first off we have at least two events One internal and One external secondly the connection between these events is a causal which means their connection doesn't come from one causing the other but something more mysterious and thirdly these events happen at the same time we're going to look at all these using examples but this third one is the

controversial one it's the one that everyone after young seems to have forgotten or ignored which makes it the perfect place to start another good reason to start with this piece of the p is because it's intimately connected with the term itself synchronicity comes from the marriage of two Greek words first off the prefix sin meaning together as in our words synthesis or synonym and secondly Kronos meaning time which we find in words like chronological or Chronicle so synchronicity means together in time or as Yung rather more poetically puts it a falling together in time it's

a key element and one often overlooked in popular usage of the term synchronicity isn't simply a meaningful coincidence Yung tells us but a meaningful coincidence with this alignment in time you can see this in any of the examples that Yung gives of synchronicity but here's a fun one from a letter that he wrote in 194 45 for instance I walk with a woman patient in a wood she tells me about the first Dream in her life that had made an everlasting impression on her she had seen a spectral Fox coming down the stairs in her

Parental Home at this moment a real fox comes out of the trees not 40 yards away and walks quietly on the path ahead of us for several minutes the animal behaves as if it were a partner in the human situation one fact is no fact but when you have seen many you begin to sit up in this example the fox comes along at the same time as they were talking about this impactful dream of the spectral Fox if the fox had come the next day or later in the walk then it would have been much

less significant but what makes this a synchronicity is that just when they are talking about this dream of the spectral Fox this real one appears this element of synchronizing in time as we'll see is overlooked not just by New Age writers who pick up on yung's work from the 1960s onwards but also by Future yans but Yung is explicit about this point here I would like to call attention to a possible misunderstanding which may be occasioned by the term synchronicity I chose this term because the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events

seemed to me an essential criteria I'm therefore using the general concept of synchronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events the second key component of every synchronicity experience according to Yung is that as well as the external coincidence so in the above example you can think of the fox walking ahead of them in the real world as they're talking about the dream there's also an internal element at play and this can be a lot of different things it can be a thought a feeling a dream or

even a vision this is another very important difference between the yungin and the popular usage of synchronicity that both its Skeptics and its die hards get wrong let's use another example to illustrate this the following is is a story of French poet em Des at the start of the 20th century here's yung's version of the story a certain Miss de when a boy in oron was once given a piece of Plum Pudding by miss the for Shibu 10 years later he discovered another plum pudding in a Paris restaurant and asked if he could have a

piece it turned out however that the plum pudding was already ordered by Miss the fort Shibu many years later miss Des was invited to partake of a plum pudding as a special Rarity while he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was Miss the for chibu at that moment the door opened and an old old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in Miss the foru who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the Party by mistake that is a a beautiful example of synchronicity so we have

three events one in childhood in oron we've got another in a Parisian Restaurant a decade later and then we've got a third which seems to be many decades later in an unspecified location and this third occasion has all the Hallmarks of a synchronicity so we've got the internal component of it where uh de shamp is thinking about Miss de for Shabu and he comments on his absence and then we get the external component which is this old old man arriving Uninvited and unexpected at the party it's a perfect illustration of what we've been talking about

but the story also provides us with a helpful counter example given the way that the term is thrown around today you'd be forgiven for thinking that the second incident the one in the Parisian Restaurant was a synchronicity but it's not at least not as far as you is concerned it's a hell of a coincidence in a different city a city with hundreds if not thousands of other restaurants and here we are with the same dish Plum Pudding ordered by the same man but notice there is no internal mental event there's no thought or feeling which

foreshadows the external event that's to come and so any skeptic is going to point out that given enough time and enough people such events are bound to happen they make great stories but to see them as anything more than that is to make a huge leap Yung is explicit about this in the book he writes synchronicity means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective State the third instance does meet this criteria it is a true uniion synchronicity and thus much

harder to dismiss and while it might not convince a skeptic Yung points out that there's something rather more compelling about it it has the Hallmarks of a good synchronicity with its temporal alignment and its internal and external components that brings us to the third component of asynchronicity and the truly quirky part of yung's formulation of it and that is the acausal element in the equation this is a central part of yung's thinking it's right there in the tit of the 1952 piece he wrote with poy uh his contribution was synchronicity and acausal connecting principle in

the book he describes acausal events as successions of chance events that are not subject to the operation of a common cause so to say that a synchronicity is a causal is to say that neither of the events that make it up the internal nor the external could have caused the other in any plausible kind of way and so if we don't have a causal explanation then that's where we get yung's a causal connection let's illustrate this with another example the following is a famous story from the life of Swedish polymath Emmanuel swedenberg and here's the

Wikipedia summary of the event on Thursday 19th of July 1759 a great and well documented fire broke out in Stockholm Sweden in the high and incre freeing wind it spread very fast consuming about 300 houses and making 2,000 people homeless when the fire broke out swedenberg was at a party with friends in gothamberg about 400 km from Stockholm he became agitated and told the party at 6:00 that there was a fire in Stockholm that had consumed his neighbor's home and was threatening his own 2 hours later he exclaimed with relief that the fire had stopped

three doors from his home in the excitement following his report word even reached the ears of the provincial governor who summoned swedenberg that same evening and asked for a detailed recounting at that time it took 2 to 3 days for news from Stockholm to reach gattenberg by Courier so that is the shortest duration in which news of the fire could reach gothamberg the first messenger from Stockholm with news of the fire was from the Board of Trade who arrived Monday evening the second messenger was a royal Courier who arrived on Tuesday both of these reports

confirmed every statement the precise hour that swedenberg first expressed the information yian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolan gives similar examples in her book The Da of psychology where she talks about her grandfather living in New York's uncanny knowledge of someone's death in Japan the person would appear to him in a dream or in awaking Vision carrying a suitcase and this way he would know that they were leaving and moving on my mother remembers his remarking on several occasions that so and so died my grandfather had seen him on his way with a suitcase then often Weeks

Later news would come verifying what grandfather already knew clairvoyantly in these examples we can see a sort of Knowledge from a distance it would be weird to think of swedenberg Visions as causing the fire in Stockholm or of bolan's vision of people with suitcases causing their deaths in Far Away Japan but it would also be strange to think of a fire in Stockholm causing a vision in Gothenburg or of someone's death in Japan causing a vision in New York naturally this will lead us to ask the question of what the connection is and this is

another place where we get a common misunderstanding of Yung later thinkers will describe an event as a causal and then they'll go on to attempt to account for it using exactly what Yung was arguing against they'll invoke what he calls magical causality you see this a lot in writers who talk about intention manifestation they might use spiritual language or they might talk about it in terms of the subconscious but the result is ultimately the same they're invoking some sort of magical causation that we can harness to make our dreams come true and have synchronicities untapped

but Yung doesn't think this way he doesn't think of synchronicity in this causal way that we can harness and manipulate instead he thinks something else is going on this is where we get his distinction between the concrete and Abstract synchronicities so far we've been talking about the components of asynchronicity that is to say we've been talking about the necessary elements in a single synchronistic experience think of this as synchronicity with a small s it's a Concrete example of the phenomenon but there's another layer to yung's treatment he's also talking about the underlying principle he's talking

about this new mysterious natural law or principle that these examples are pointed to think of gravity every time something Falls we can think of that as a concrete example of gravity but these concrete examples all point to an underlying natural laow that we have to wait for Newton and Einstein to get a full grasp on Yung working with the quantum physicist Wolf Gang poy is trying to build a theory of this Newtonian einsteinian level of synchronicity synchronicity with a capital S this is what he is referring to in the title of his section of the

book synchronicity and a causal connecting phenomenon notice he doesn't call it synchronicity meaningful coincidence because he's been very ambitious and is trying to get to the underlying principle where he gets to in his investigation is that synchronicity with a capital S is a separate law to causation there is something mysterious going on that we don't fully understand but somehow there is a connection between psyche and the material world that forego restrictions of space and time you can see the footprint of his Quant physics collaborator here they formulate a view of the world in which the

archetypal level of the psyche has roots which sink into the mysterious depths of material reality Yung and po are attempting nothing less than the transformation of our entire materialist worldview they believe that synchronicity points to a new understanding of the world transcends decart's Mind Body Duality ultimately I think yung's hope whole project fails I think he relies on too many Dody studies and premises and his whole Endeavor Falls with them that's something I'd like to look at more in a future episode but for now I just want to highlight that for young synchronicity isn't something

we can manipulate it's not some magical causality that we can harness but something without cause this mysterious a causal something is the third element in every every one of yung's meaningful coincidences setting aside all the high-minded philosophical Theory what this acausal piece means practically is that there is no sense of a cause between the internal events and the external ones Yung and the dreamer talking about the spectral fox in Her Dream didn't cause the real fox to appear in the forest nor vice versa the same goes for the plum pudding Emily de's comment on the

absence of Miss the for Shibu didn't magically caused the old man to appear there's something deeper and more mysterious at work yung's acausal parallelism so to recap synchronicity for Yung is a combination of three things a coming together in time of an internal and external event in a way in which neither caused the other but both by some mysterious mechanism cooccurred we could leave it there but there's one more implication from what we've been talking about that I want to draw out with that in mind let's play a game I like to call synchronicity or

no synchronicity consider the following example listen to the following passage from yung's book and see if it sounds like a synchronicity to you I noted The Following on April 1st 1949 today is Friday we have fish for lunch lunch somebody happens to mention the custom of making an April of fish of someone that same morning I made a note of an inscription which read esto totus medius piscus AB IMO in the afternoon a former patient of mine whom I had not seen for months showed me some extremely impressive pictures of fish which he had painted

in the meantime in the evening I was shown a piece of embroidery with fishlike sea monsters in it on the morning of April 2nd another patient whom I had not seen for many years told me a dream in which she stood on the shore of a lake and saw a large fish that swam straight towards her and landed at her feet I was at this time engaged on a study of the fish symbol in history only one of the persons mentioned here knew anything about it synchronicity or no synchronicity there's definitely a sense of some

meaningful coincidences going on there as Yung notes in the following paragraph the susp that this must be a case of meaningful coincidence I.E an a causal connection is very natural I must own that this run of events made a considerable impression on me it seemed to me to have a certain numinous quality it's the kind of thing that se drunk die hards would call a wink from the universe it Bears a family resemblance to the phenomenon of soall angel numbers that often pass for synchronicity in New Age circles that is to say the idea that

numbers like 1111 or other significant numbers are following you around or that the traffic lights turning green has some kind of meaning or something else of this sort or for a strong example we might think of desams in the Parisian Restaurant part of the trouble is that the phrase meaningful coincidence leaves a lot of wiggle room for interpretation some writers say that it's in the eye of the beholder whether the coincidence is Meaningful or not another part of the trouble is that Yung kind of monopolizes the whole territory of meaningful coincidence with the term synchronicity

perhaps we just need another term for these weaker coincidences that don't measure up to the bar Yung sets at any rate Yung ultimately dismisses the idea that such coincidences even when there is a notable series of them as in his fish example meet the requirements for synchronicity continuing from the fish example above and the numerous Impressions it can make on us he writes that the strength of an impression however proves nothing against the fortuitous Coincidence of all of these fishes it is admittedly exceedingly odd that the fish theme recurs no less than six times within

24 hours but one must remember that fish on Friday is the usual thing and on April 1st one might very easily think of the April fish I had at that time been working on the fish symbol for several months fishes frequently occur as symbols of unconscious contents so there's no possible justification for seeing in this anything but a chance groupy runs are series which are composed of quite ordinary occurrences must for the present be regarded as fortuitous however wide their range may be they must be ruled out as acausal connections it is therefore generally assume

that all coincidences are lucky hits and do not require an acausal interpretation this assumption can and indeed must be regarded as true so long as proof is lacking that their incidence exceeds the limits of probability so you can probably sense yung's hesitance in dismissing these occurrences he's clearly impressed with them but if he wants to build a theory of synchronicity a rigorous theory of synchronicity then he wants to use solid building materials hence his strong conditions for synchronicity that we've looked at in this episode he distinguishes between two types of chance event there's the ordinary

workings of a random chance and then there's synchronicity where does that leave angel numbers and other so-called wings from the universe the answer is clear as far as Yung is concerned they're not synchronicities maybe they point to another weaker category of meaningful coincidence but as far as he's concerned they're not the real thing and if that means that 90% of so- called synchronicities are illegitimate his successors May disagree but as far as Yung is concerned so be it part of what we're seeing with synchronicity is Yung entering the domain of philosophy and leaning into the

broader implications of his work if you'd like to learn more about yung's troubled relationship with philosophy then you can check out this video or if you want to learn more about synchronicity then you can check out this video for now though that's everything for this episode of the living philosophy I'd like to thank David pilibosian Sasha Canton Thomas and all the other patrons for their support of the channel I shall see you next time thank you for watching