Life Abounding In Synchronicities

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Synchronicities are often dismissed as mere coincidences that only seem to happen to us; but I find it impossible to ignore synchronicities that occur between events that are years apart, as I have had in my life. In the current worldview of mechanical materialism, what I am calling synchronicities are excluded from that characterization. Normally, a synchronicity is simply events that occur simultaneously, or rather seem to occur simultaneously, given that the synchronicity of measurements of clock time at different locations is fraught with practical difficulties, paradoxes, and considerations imposed by Einstein’s Relativity theory. 

For me, that events in the past seem strongly related to later events, though at the time there may have been little to make the initial event stand out, is a synchronicity in my view. They are not causal, but rather are resonant in a strong way. And by ‘strong way’ I mean that the earlier event either created the possibility that the later event could happen, or created  the possibility of some occurrence that led to the possibility of the later event. I am saying that ‘synchronicity’ is, not a causal chain, but rather, a chain of created possibilities, and even the necessity, for some later event to happen.

Further to that point, I want to bring in the paradigm of Responsive Naturing, which would be the operative source of these possibilities and necessities, and assert that these synchronicities are atemporal, as well as acausal. This means that synchronicities are a form of entanglement of events that lead to some outcome that could not otherwise happen. This is a rebuttal of the idea of random events leading to order of any sort. It is synchronicities that give rise to order. This idea of synchronicities being a form of entanglement is not my own. It was developed by Thomas Filk in his essay titled, “Quantum Entanglement, Hidden Variables, and Acausal Correlations:”

The consequences of entanglement – a particular type of acausal quantum correlations – belong to the most surprising and counterintuitive effects of physics and our physical understanding of the world. Furthermore, entanglement endows quantum theory with a holism and a peculiar kind of nonlocality which is in complete contrast to the reductive nature of classical physics. In a certain sense one can consider entanglement as the most distinguished characteristic of quantum behavior. Many features of quantum theory can be related to classical local models, but in order to explain the quantum correlations arising from entanglement in a classical setting, nonlocal influences seem to be unavoidable. This is a consequence of the work of Bell on hidden variable approaches to quantum theory.

 Entanglement may be that physical phenomenon which is closest to what C.G. Jung might have had in mind with respect to his concept of “synchronicity.” Jung considered synchronistic phenomena as based on acausal, nonlocal, meaningful correlations. And for Pauli entanglement may have been a model for the relationship between mind and matter in the framework of the dual-aspect monism he proposed together with Jung.