Synchronicity is an explanatory principle; it explains "meaningful coincidences" such as a beetle flying into Jung's room while a patient was describing a dream about a scarab. The scarab is an Egyptian symbol of rebirth, he noted, Therefore, the propitious moment of the flying beetle indicated that the transcendental meaning of both the scarab in the dream and the insect in the room was that the patient needed to be liberated from her excessive rationalism.
His notion of synchronicity is that there is an a causal principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception.
Synchronicity provides access to the archetypes, which are located in the collective unconscious and are characterised by being universal mental predispositions not grounded in experience. Like Plato's Forms (eidos), the archetypes do not originate in the world of the senses, but exist independently of that world and are known directly by the mind. Unlike Plato, however, Jung believed that the archetypes arise spontaneously in the mind, especially in times of crisis, Just as there are meaningful coincidences, such as the beetle and the scarab dream, which open the door to transcendent truths, so too a crisis opens the door of the collective unconscious and lets out an archetype to reveal some deep truth hidden from ordinary consciousness.
Mythology, Jung claimed, bases its stories on the archetypes. Mythology is the reservoir of deep, hidden wondrous truths, Dreams and psychological crises, fevers and derangement, chance encounters resonating with "meaningful coincidences," all are gateways to the collective unconscious, which is ready to restore the individual psyche to health with its insights. Jung maintained that these metaphysical notions are scientifically grounded, but they are not empirically testable in any meaningful way.
All synchronistic phenomena can be grouped under three categories:
1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content, (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable,
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external even taking place outside the observer's field of perception; i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (e.g., the
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.
