What Is Syncronicity and Why Does it Happen? And the answer is not a Police song by Sting...

I have always felt it--in childhood you learn it is called Deja Vu and it seems you have been somewhere before... Your surroundings feel knowable in an eerie way. As I have gotten older, I have dreams that sometimes come true--some good, and then, not all the time is it happy news but a life change. There is a name for this--synchronicity, as noted by Carl Jung and M. Scott Peck in "The Road Less Traveled." One of my favorite books of all time which means more to you each time you pick it up. In perfect syncronicity, each time I open it to a page it is exactly what I need to read...

The universe that is depicted by mechanistic science is entirely predictable. Everything is accounted for by laws of causation. Yet, how can science account for what we don't understand. A force that works on its own.

A story is told of a certain M. Deschamps who, as a boy in Orleans, France, was presented with a piece of plum pudding by a guest of the family, M. de Fortgibu. Years later Deschamps, now a young man, ordered plum pudding in a Paris restaurant, only to find that the last piece had just been taken. The waiter discreetly indicated the direction of the guilty patron who, it turned out, was none other than de Fortgibu. Many years later, at a dinner party where Deschamps was again offered plum pudding, he took the opportunity to recount the above events concerning de Fortgibu. Finishing his tale, and still eating his plum pudding, he remarked that all that was missing was de Fortgibu. Soon the door burst open and in came de Fortgibu himself, now a disoriented old man who had gotten the wrong address, and so had entered by mistake!

How many times have you been thinking of someone and they call or email out of the blue?

The most common meaningful coincidences are those seemingly random but apparently purposeful events which speak to us directly in terms of personal meaning. For instance, psychiatrist C.G. Jung reported a beetle arriving at the window of his office as a client was describing a dream involving just such an insect. Her dream centered on the golden Egyptian scarab beetle:

"While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned around and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes."

Jung notes that up to this point in the therapy the patient had been extremely difficult to treat, clinging to a rigid notion of rationality. When the actual insect of her dream came flying through the window, her perception of reality began to soften and change.

Jung used the term "synchronicity" for such meaningful coincidences. They are considered "acausal," meaning they cannot be reduced to a cause-and-effect explanation.

I suspect these kinds of events are much more common than popular scientistic views would have us believe, and I daresay they happen more often to individuals who are open to intuitive perceptions. Coaching opens these meridians as does any practice that takes you from a narrow way of thinking and relating to one that opens up a larger sky of ideas and perceptions.

So on my best birthday ever--I toast to syncronicity and wonder who will respond to this post?

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