Revisioning Jung’s Idea of Synchronicity

 Synchronicity is considered to be one of the most important ideas emerging out of the twentieth century. Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe a category of experience that defied and had an altogether different logic than the widely accepted and virtually unquestioned logic of linear sequential causality (in which a cause precedes an effect in linear time), which was generally thought to be the only kind of causality operating in the universe at the time. 

Bringing forth the notion of synchronicity was a bold and heretical act by Jung that was a radical departure from and challenged one of the most inviolable, sacrosanct, and seemingly unassailable foundations of the modern scientific materialistic worldview. In his idea of synchronicity Jung was proposing a completely different kind of organizing principle at play in the universe that was quite alien to the widely accepted western worldview of how the universe worked.

In order to break free from and distinguish synchronicity from the limiting logic of linear causality, Jung chose the word “acausal” (calling synchronicities an “acausal connecting principle”) in order to characterize how synchronicities didn’t have to do with causality as it had been generally understood. 

There was an unforeseen problem, however, that had to do with Jung’s choice of the word “acausal”—and what he meant by this—that has caused a rift and created conflict among a number of theorists, researchers, scientists and psychologists in their accepting Jung’s idea of synchronicity. Some people have even dismissed Jung’s work on synchronicity, thinking his conception of synchronicity is incoherent or flawed....<<<Read More>>>....