By Dr. Joseph Lancaster
“What a coincidence!” Haven’t you heard these words before? Haven’t you had such an odd experience where two events—independently—happen around the same time? I’m sure you have. The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, called this coincidence, Synchronicity, in his treatise called, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. This writing is about those strange, though positive, coincidences that can heal your life by increasing your divine knowledge.
Dr. Stephan Hoeller, my mentor and renowned Gnostic-Jungian scholar, would encourage us to start by dividing the word “synchronicity” to make its definition clearer. Synch means to connect two things together. Chronicity relates to the Greek god, Chronos, meaning the god of time. This means synchronicity is where our soul, such as thoughts and feelings, discover a breathtaking connection between an intuition, and simultaneously, an outward manifestation of the same intuition. For example, there was a unanimous person that dreamt of receiving a phone call from a lost friend they have not spoken to in 20 years. Suddenly, they wake up to a phone call from that exact person. “What a coincidence!” Or a person goes into a bookstore hoping to find a rare book in mind, and immediately, the exact book needed falls right in front of the person. “What a coincidence!” Lastly, while alone, I, myself, had an intuition that my deceased and beloved grandmother was in my presence. Suddenly, I looked in the mirror and saw my deceased grandmother right beside me. According to Jung in his book, Man and His Symbols, these mysterious and acausal events are healing to our souls because they are truly “meaningful coincidences.”
These prior examples of the phone call, the book, and the deceased loved one, all have the theme of catching our attention for the sake of shifting our unawareness to psycho-spiritual awareness. We become conscious that something beyond us is at work. Something is trying to get our attention—to help us! Thus, to understand the outside evidence of what we intuit, we need to ask ourselves “why now?”
However, before we get into possibly answering this question, let’s extend our understanding of synchronicity to an even higher level of divine experience. Jung attributed synchronicity to truly come from an archetype, or universal truth, outside and within the unconscious. The archetype can be a divine figure that the soul needs to keenly be aware of after intuiting its presence. The archetype, such as an angel, may externally present itself—through a vision—to a person. The angel may say his or her name while showing itself.
To understand the outside evidence of what we intuit, again, we need to ask ourselves “why now?” Maybe a person—who has been suffering by worldly distractions and internal challenges—concludes that the angel desires to attract their soul’s attention to wisely seek out a higher realm of consciousness. Thus, instead of doing what doesn’t work, the angel wants the person to truly know themselves on a higher level of being, such as the angel itself. Therefore, one may ask, “How are we a reflection of one another? And what is our unified purpose?” Like you, his or her meaningful conclusion will lead to “knowing” about one’s true self. So, like an angel, “what a coincidence” your true self may be to discover.
