Are Synchronicities Clues To The Bigger Picture?

1. Are Synchronicities Clues To The Bigger
Picture?
February 27, 2015 by Tam Hunt.
We’ve all had them – those moments when something
happens that makes you ponder the role of design in
the universe, and your own place within it. When falling
in love, engaging in artistic endeavours, or struggling
with tragedy, these moments can occur frequently. Are
things indeed “mean to be” at some deeper level? Or is
the universe just an unfolding series of random events,
occurring one after another, while our limited human
minds desperately try to find the thread that links them
together?
Synchronicity is the technical name given to the events
I’m referring to. Carl Jung, the Austrian psychologist,
coined the term in his 1951 essay on this topic. A
synchronicity is, essentially, a meaningful coincidence.
Something happens in the world around us that seems
to defy probability and “normal” explanations.
The classic example is Jung’s own vignette in treating a
particularly stubborn patient. He describes his talking
sessions with her that delved into themes of her
excessive rationality and rejection of any deeper
meanings in the universe. As his patient was describing
her feelings and a recent dream in which she was given
a golden scarab, Jung heard a light tapping on the
window behind him. The tapping persisted and Jung
opened the window to find a large scarab beetle flying
against the window. He caught it and handed it to her,
saying, “here is your scarab.”

2. The scarab beetle is, according to Jung, a classic symbol
of rebirth. So the dream scarab and the real world
scarab beetle coincided to create a moment of
transformation for the patient, who was able to
overcome her problems.
tambookI’ve been keeping a list of synchronicities from
my own life for a few years now. Many are fairly trivial
events that may best be explained as mere coincidence.
One example: I bought a game on Amazon as a gift for
my nephew. The game had 354 reviews. Right after this
I bought Nelly’s song, “Just a Dream” (a great song), on
iTunes. It also had 354 reviews. Is there any deeper
meaning in these events? I doubt it! But one could
stretch to find something if you wanted to.
A second example is a bit harder to dismiss as
coincidence. I studied biology in college and have
continued to read widely in evolutionary theory since
finishing college in 1998. I’ve also published a few
papers in this field since that time. I was reading a book
on evolutionary theory and the strange but fascinating
topic of bedbug sex came up. Female bedbugs don’t
have vaginas — I know, it’s weird! Male bedbugs
instead stab their penis into the female’s body, break
through the carapace, and deposit sperm directly into
the body cavity. I shook my head in wonder and went
home shortly thereafter. When I got home from the
coffee shop where I had been reading, I turned on a
recording of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart and, lo
and behold, the topic of bedbug sex came up! He
showed a very funny and exquisitely weird skit by
Isabella Rosellini demonstrating bedbug sex. I had
never before heard about bedbug sex and here it came
up twice in one day, in entirely unrelated contexts.

3. So what do these two episodes of bedbug sex offer in
terms of deeper meaning? To be honest, I have no idea,
but I can certainly speculate. I have been thinking and
writing about sexual selection and other mechanisms of
evolution for many years, and have developed a
published theory that expands Darwin’s ideas on sexual
selection. So perhaps I was somehow being encouraged
to keep going on this path by my possibly synchronistic
experience. It’s kind of a stretch, I know, but not
entirely unreasonable.
Ok, one last example from my life, as an example of a
strong synchronicity: I’ve been to Hawaii a number of
times since late 2013, with my primary motivation to
buy property there (I’m writing this essay in Hilo,
Hawaii). I almost never talk to people next to me on the
plane because I really enjoy the quiet time to read or
work on writing projects, and because I’m afraid of
being held captive in a boring conversation for many
hours. The first trip to Hawaii, however, was with a
woman I was dating at the time, so there was less risk
of having to talk to the person next to us for the whole
flight. I struck up conversation on a whim with a woman
seated by herself beside us, and it turned out that she
lived on the Big Island and we learned a lot about it in
our conversation. We all became friends after she
invited us to her birthday party that week, and to this
day we’re still friends and see each other often.
The second trip to Hawaii was a month later and I was
traveling by myself this time. Another woman traveling
solo was in the seat next to me, I again chose to strike
up a conversation, and she was also quite interesting
and friendly. She was visiting a good friend of hers who

4. lived in Hilo. The same day we arrived in Hilo I was
having dinner with the woman I met on my first trip and
we ran into the second woman, who I’d just met on the
plane that day, at the same restaurant, which is one of
many in Hilo! I ended up hanging out with the second
woman a couple of days later and we’re also still
friends.
My third trip was a month later. I was again traveling
alone and was going for three months this time. I was
hoping to finally buy some property after scouting a lot
on the first two trips, and also to research a novel I’m
working on that is set on the Big Island. This time I was
seated next to a guy traveling by himself who seemed
to be in his late twenties or early thirties. Again, I struck
up conversation; again, this was strange because I
almost never speak to people on the plane. Again, we
had great conversation and it turned out that he was a
traveling nurse going to Hawaii for a three-month
contract. We became great friends and had many
adventures during my stay.
Anyway, to wrap up: three of three trips to Hawaii
yielded good new friends and opportunities to learn a
ton about the Big Island. Coincidence may still be a
good explanation, but despite my hard-nosed scientific
outlook on most things, I can’t help but wonder if mere
coincidence may not be the best explanation here.
If we’re looking, instead, at these events from the point
of view of synchronicity, the deeper meaning is fairly
obvious to me: in some manner the universe seemed to
be helping me to make a home in Hawaii. This was the
correlation between external events and my mental
states that is the hallmark of synchronicity.

5. We could also look at these events as simply resulting
from my excitement about going to Hawaii and a place
that I was thinking about making a serious part of my
life (I still live in Santa Barbara, but I split my time
between Santa Barbara and my place near Hilo;
paradise to paradise…). My excitement made me more
talkative and more interested in people around me.
Possibly. But it’s also quite unusual that people traveling
solo, youngish, and interesting, would be seated next to
me three times in a row.
I took a fourth trip to Hawaii in mid-2014 and I did not
meet anyone interesting on the plane and didn’t even
talk to the person next to me. But three out of four
instances is still enough to make me scratch my head.
Explaining Synchronicity
So what’s going on with synchronistic experiences?
First, let’s define our term carefully. Jung defined a
synchronicity as meaningful and causally related
correlations between outer (physical) and inner
(mental) events. A good shorthand is meaningful
coincidence. The coincidence is between external events
and inner meaning that matches those events in some
way or was inspired by them.
Jung attempted to explain synchronicity through an
appeal to the “collective unconscious.” This collective
unconscious is described by Jung as either the sum of
our unconscious minds held in common by all people or,
more intriguingly, as a deeper level of reality that
undergirds our physical world. Synchronicities bubble up
from the collective unconscious, and are a goad to
“individuation,” a key part of Jung’s teachings.

6. Jung suggested that the correlations between external
and internal events had a similar root cause. So while
the correlations were not causal— they are “acausal”—
there is a deeper causal explanation for each half of the
synchronistic event. Jung seemed to believe that the
universe itself was attempting to teach some lesson or
insight by offering up these meaningful coincidences.
Another intriguing possibility is that synchronistic
experiences are suggestive of the idea that we — you,
I, and everything around us — are part of a much larger
mind. Just as in our own dreams events can happen
that skirt the laws of physics or logic, if we are indeed
part of a much larger mind, a much larger dream, then
synchronistic experiences are the clues. This idea was
sketched by the German writer Wilhelm von Scholz and
mentioned by Jung in Synchronicity.
So What Does It All Mean?
Looking at the bigger picture, and not only my own
candidates for synchronistic experiences, synchronicity
is perhaps the most compelling reason for me
personally to remain agnostic about a higher-level
intelligence in our universe. I’m not a religious person.
I’m not a Christian and I was a militant atheist for many
years. I’ve shifted, however, in the last ten years to a
softer stance on the big questions about God,
spirituality and meaning.
I’ve written previously on the “anatomy of God,”
describing how I find the evidence and rationale for a
“God as Source” quite convincing. God as Source is the
ground of being, apeiron, Akasha, the One, etc., that is
the soil from which all things grow. The Source is not

7. conscious. It is beyond the dichotomy of
conscious/unconscious. It is pure Spirit.
God as Summit, a conscious being that may or may not
take an interest in our lives or even our planet, is a
different matter. The metaphysical system that I find
most reasonable — a system known as process
philosophy, with Alfred North Whitehead as its primary
modern expositor — certainly has room for God as
Summit. Whether God as Summit really exists,
however, is a separate debate. If I had to bet on it, I’d
bet that there is no God as Summit at this point. But I
remain agnostic.
The synchronicities that have happened in my life are
numerous and strange. They don’t add up necessarily to
any compelling evidence for God as Summit, but they
certainly do make me wonder.
Turning back to Jung’s famous scarab beetle example of
synchronicity we must, to be fair and scientific,
acknowledge that the beetle he caught wasn’t
technically a scarab beetle; it was, instead, a scarabaeid
beetle (common rose-chafer) whose “gold-green colour
most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab” beetle,
in Jung’s own words. It seems, then, that Jung was
exerting some poetic license at the moment he gave
the beetle to his patient and in his later description of
the episode.
Does it matter that it wasn’t technically a scarab beetle?
Clearly it didn’t matter to the patient, of whom Jung
claims “this experience punctured the desired hole in
her rationalism…” Would this have happened without
Jung’s poetic license? We have no way of knowing.

8. These details demonstrate that there is a large gray
area with respect to synchronicities that each of us
must navigate when assigning meaning to particular
events.
This criticism aside, we all have surely had numerous
synchronicities happen to us that demonstrate my
broader points above: there are deep mysteries
inherent in reality and we cannot, if we are to be
scientific, ignore these mysteries and the dimly-
perceived world of deeper meanings that synchronicities
sometimes highlight in each of our lives.
——