By Guest Contributor
The universe is a dance of possibilities. You dance with it when you fall into a flow, a rhythm, where more of the possibilities that you desire start to show up.
Carl Jung called this state of “meaningful coincidences” synchronicity.
The classical true story of the golden scarab beetle best illustrates it.
In an article called, “Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Carl G. Jung shares a true story that has now become a classic example:
“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.” [Coll. Works, vol. 8, 843]
Jung explains “The meaningful connection is obvious enough … in view of the approximate identity of the chief objects (the scarab and the beetle).” [CW, vol. 8, 845]
The scarab beetle showed up because the patient was stuck in a thoroughly rationalistic point-of-view, which prevented her from experiencing insight into her problems.
The timely appearance of the scarab beetle, something that stood outside the realm of rationality, caused her to experience the paradigm shift that she needed to experience psychic healing.
This transformation in her psyche was a symbol of rebirth.
As Jung wrote: “The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol. The ancient Egyptian Book of What Is in the Netherworld describes how the dead sun-god changes himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and then, at the twelfth station, mounts the barge which carries the rejuvenated sun-god into the morning sky.” [CW, vol. 8, 845]
Here is another example, told by Jung.
A man named Monsieur Deschamps had a neighbor, Monsieur de Fontgibu, who gave him his first plum pudding when he was a young boy. In Paris ten years later, Deschamps orders plum pudding in a restaurant but discovers that the last serving was sold to de Fontgibu, who is unexpectedly in town and at that same restaurant. Years later, Deschamps is once again offered plum pudding at a social gathering. As Deschamps tells the gathering about the earlier coincidences, he is shocked to see de Fontgibu, now a senile old man, barge in through the door, having mistaken the room for another place that he had been seeking.
Rationalists like to oppose the idea of synchronicity as apophenia, a tendency of the mind to seek and perceive connections between unrelated phenomena.
However, apart from the obvious fact that synchronicity appears to have a strong meaning to those who experience it, sometimes transforming them in a way that they could not have imagined, like Jung’s ultra-rational patient who needed a nudge by the universe to have her psychological breakthrough, an even stronger argument to support the Jungian “discovery” of synchronicity, I believe can be found in viewing the situation from the perspective of quantum physics and the idea of an intelligent universe.
Everything is energy and this energy is organized by intelligence. This intelligence is not individual but cosmic; it is an impersonal, non-linear, infinite organizing awareness.
Thus, we live in three domains.
There is the domain of the “world of appearance.” This is the every day world where an oak tree is a solid mass of wood that can hurt your foot if you kick it.
There is the domain of “the quantum world.” This is where the oak tree is not at all solid but a constellation of atoms, which at the subatomic level is not a collection of solid things, but only patterns of probability that dance in and out of existence.
Then there is the domain of “pure intelligence.” This is the infinite organizing intelligence that organizes the life-form of the tree so that it grows from an acorn into an oak tree.
Since at the quantum level, every particle appears to be in instant communication with every other particle, at the level of the world of appearance, a thought is an attractive force that brings more of what you think about into your experience. Thus, through the agency of pure intelligence acting on the quantum field, thoughts, which are wavelengths, affect other wavelengths to bring you the subject of your thoughts.
In order to tap into the flow of synchronicity, a connection with pure consciousness and with the quantum world is necessary. This connection is established through a specific pattern of thought, which we call an intention.
Carlos Castaneda’s definition of intention best explains how it is the connecting force between the three domains. He says, “In the universe, there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.”
The dance of the universe is the flow of synchronicity, and this synchronicity is something that you can invite into your life by holding the intention of consciously creating your reality.
