You think of someone you have not heard from in years and, a few hours later, you receive a message from them. You read an unusual word in a book and that same evening you hear it spoken on television. Episodes like these happen to everyone, and many dismiss them with a shrug. Others sense something more. To describe these experiences, in the twentieth century the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung proposed a term that would become hugely popular: synchronicity.
What Jung meant
Jung used the word synchronicity to indicate the coincidence in time of two or more events not linked by cause and effect, but united by a meaning for the person who experiences them. The central point is not the coincidence itself, which may be purely random, but the sense it takes on for that person.
Jung developed this idea over many years and set it out in an essay published in the early 1950s, in a volume shared with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The theme interested him because it touched the border between the inner world and external events.
The scarab episode
The best-known example is told by Jung himself. A patient was describing a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. At that moment Jung heard a light tapping at the window: it was an insect resembling a scarab, which he caught and handed to the woman.
Jung reported that the episode had an important effect on the patient's journey, precisely because the coincidence was charged with symbolic meaning: in ancient Egypt the scarab was a symbol of rebirth.
Synchronicity, chance and superstition
It is useful to distinguish synchronicity from neighbouring ideas with which it is often confused:
| Concept | What it claims | Attitude |
|---|---|---|
| Chance | Events coincide with no connection at all | Indifference |
| Superstition | One event magically causes another | Fear, rituals of avoidance |
| Synchronicity | Events coincide and take on meaning for the person | Reflection, listening |
Synchronicity, understood this way, does not claim to explain why coincidences happen. Rather, it invites us to ask what they mean to us.
The risk of seeing signs everywhere
Anyone who starts paying attention to coincidences soon discovers there are a great many. Our perception tends to notice what confirms the thoughts of the moment: if you are thinking of buying a red car, you will start seeing them everywhere.
This does not diminish the experience, but it does suggest caution. A few questions help keep your balance:
- Did the coincidence strike me spontaneously, or was I looking for it?
- Does the meaning I give it arise from me, or am I forcing it?
- Does it help me see something more clearly, or push me towards hasty decisions?
How to observe synchronicities
If you want to explore this theme in an orderly way, you can keep a simple log:
- Describe the event with date and circumstances, objectively.
- Note what you were thinking or living through at that time.
- Write the meaning that seemed to emerge, without any claim to truth.
- Reread after a while: some coincidences lose their force, others connect with each other.
This log can sit alongside your dream journal: waking coincidences often echo images that appeared at night.
An everyday example
Imagine you are going through a period of uncertainty about moving to another city. On the same day a friend tells you about a trip to that city, you find an old ticket bearing its name and you happen to hear a song that mentions it. None of these events "decides" for you. Together, though, they can act as a mirror: they show how present the theme is in your thoughts and invite you to look at it openly.
Synchronicity in symbolic tradition
Long before Jung, many traditions read the world as a fabric of correspondences: "as above, so below", runs a Hermetic formula. In this view, inner and outer reflect each other. Studio Esoterico Cornelio looks at synchronicity in this light: not as proof of a fate already written, but as an invitation to grasp the links between what is lived inside and what happens outside.
In short
- Jung called synchronicity the coincidence of events with no causal link but united by meaning for the person involved.
- The scarab episode is the most famous example Jung recounted.
- Synchronicity differs from chance and superstition through the reflective attitude it calls for.
- It is important not to see signs everywhere and to check whether a meaning arises spontaneously or is forced.
- A log of coincidences, alongside a dream journal, helps you observe them with order and a critical eye.