Synchronicity

Rating:
Summary: Reality Behind Chance Events
Review: .
What an awesome book! Our whole civilization is based on Newton's cause and effect and great technological and scientific achievements have been produced from such knowledge. However, it is Max Plank's and Einstein's discovery of quantum physics, that of the atom, where such Newtonian law of cause and effect does not apply. There is a relativity or undetermined, non-causuality of the movement of the electron. It does not operate according to such law and this is a strange thing indeed. It appears to operate in an acausal effect, one that is determined my chance, and by the person who is examining such movements appears to have an effect on such just by his observation! There is an amazing chaotic element of the operation here.

And this takes us to the idea of synchronicity, that of events occurring outside of Newtonian's law of cause and effect. In this book, Jung does a detailed analysis of planetary alignment and married couples. Anotherwards this acausal effect takes in astrology and chance. Now come to play the games of chance such as Tarot and I-Ching, both ancient oracles in predicting events of chance.

While Jung cannot prove anything measurable in line with science's cause and effect analysis, he does portray a much higher probability in such measurements he records, much more than average chance occurs, relating his argument in the existence of acausal happenings outside of our Newtonian frame of minds. It is an amazing task.

What is so interesting is that the motivation and faith of the person partaking in the experiment appears to have a direct effect on the outcome. I've read this before how faith - an inner determined belief - has a creative effect on our destination and karmic outcome. And what is of equal interest is Jung's few accounts, his story of a fish, his story of a beetle - as in the Scarab beetle dream of a patient that synchronized with an event of a beetle and so forth.

While astrology and I-Ching and other clairvoyant and telepathic events may be blown off by the Newtonian minds of science and trashed by the religious fundamentalists who superstitiously equate acausal events to demons, the idea of acausal events, synchronicity is a reality to be observed, as in the electron, and yet not proven scientifically.

Rating:
Summary: Reality Behind Chance Events
Review: .
What an awesome book! Our whole civilization is based on Newton's cause and effect and great technological and scientific achievements have been produced from such knowledge. However, it is Einstein's theory of relativity, that of the atom, where such Newtonian law of cause and effect does not apply. There is a relativity of the movement of the electron. It does not operate according to such law and this is a strange thing indeed. It appears to operate in an acausal effect, one that is determined my chance, and by the person who is examining such movements appears to have an effect on such just by his observation! There is an amazing chaotic element of the operation here.

And this takes us to the idea of synchronicity, that of events occurring outside of Newtonian's law of cause and effect. In this book, Jung does a detailed analysis of planetary alignment and married couples. Anotherwards this acausal effect takes in astrology and chance. Now come to play the games of chance such as Tarot and I-Ching, both ancient oracles in predicting events of chance.

While Jung cannot prove anything measurable in line with science's cause and effect analysis, he does portray a much higher probability in such measurements he records, much more than average chance occurs, relating his argument in the existence of acausal happenings outside of our Newtonian frame of minds. It is an amazing task.

What is so interesting is that the motivation and faith of the person partaking in the experiment appears to have a direct effect on the outcome. I've read this before how faith - an inner determined belief - has a creative effect on our destination and karmic outcome. And what is of equal interest is Jung's few accounts, his story of a fish, his story of a beetle - as in the Scarab beetle dream of a patient that synchronized with an event of a beetle and so forth.

While astrology and I-Ching and other clairvoyant and telepathic events may be blown off by the Newtonian minds of science and trashed by the religious fundamentalists who superstitiously equate acausal events to demons, the idea of acausal events, synchronicity is a reality to be observed, as in the electron, and yet not proven scientifically.

Rating:
Summary: The mysterious link between psyche and matter
Review: Although Jung is of course best known for his exploration of the unconscious mind, this - a small volume by Jung's standards - seeks to map out the mysterious link between the human psyche and the physical universe, mainly studying the so-called 'meaningful coincidence'. The idea is not difficult to grasp. But the implications are, frankly, profound, or even frightening. This book is highly recommended for all readers interested in discovering something new about themselves and the universe we live in.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most profoundly meaningful paper of modern times
Review: Frankly, I usually avoid reading scholarly monographs like the plague, let alone reviewing them. The only reason that I am making an exception in this case is that I suspect that this is one of the most profoundly meaningful papers written in the modern era. Jung must have thought so also, for he knew that he was most likely sacrificing his professional standing among "serious" scientists if he published.
To cut to the chase, this paper in proposing an "acausal connecting principle" actually: 1) shows that there is a legitimate alternative to the materialistic, mechanistic world view of modern science, and 2) shows that there is MEANING inherent in the universe. Think about it, in one paper he set in motion the dethrowning of the godless, meaningless, clockwork universe of modern science. He never rejects basic scientific principles, he just shows that there is demonstrably MORE to it. This is a paper that moves to correct a profound imbalance in the collective consciousness of modern man. This paper reconnects us with the mindset of Pythagoras and Plato- men perfectly capable of applying reason, experimental method, and mathematics, yet also knowing that there is meaning in omens, in dreams, in the direct mystical experience.

Rating:
Summary: Synchronicity
Review: I read this book as a free-reading experience and although you may ask why it is becaue books like this are interesting to me at 16 years old. Although I thought it was a bit difficult and there were a lot of terms I didn't know, I still understood most of what C.G. Jung was trying to say. If you decide to read this book I suggest keeping a dictionary nearby or at least have some prior knowledge to many different pyschological terms. Not a lot of the things he said can be proven currently with our current technology but that doesn't mean this book won't provide interesting insight into the world of psychology. But that doesn't meant that you still can't enjoy it and use it to develop a deeper interest in this field. I must warn you though; read it in a place where you definetely won't fall asleep or else you will.

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Summary: Trying to find Synchronicity experienced Synchronicity
Review: I was introduced to a book by Joseph Jawroski, 'Synchronicity : The Inner Path of Leadership' while I was reading 'Fifth Dicipline' and 'Dance of Change' written by Peter Senge. And, my interest grew to read this book. One day I decided to search this book in a leading book store in Bangalore, India though I anticipated not to find this book, which was then newly released. However I wanted to give a try. The efforts proved futile. While I was walking out of the store ...On on some spurr I turned back and went went looking for books in random until I laid my hands on a book dealing with the biography of CG Jung. In this book I learnt that the one who coined the word 'Synchronicity' was CG Jung. And, there was a chapter written by CG Jung on 'Synchronicity' plus reference to the book 'Synchronicity'. On coming to US, on the first opportunity available I acquired this book. I read both the books by Joseph and by Jung. I was searching for the real Synchronicity and I was led to the source. It is amazing to learn that there lived a very rational person who tried very hard to bring in science to explain 'acausal occurance'.

Rating:
Summary: "If you dig deep enough, you find truth"
Review: Jung included the comment that the 'natural numbers' appear to be a tangible connection between the spheres of matter and psyche...In other words - number is pre-existent to consciousness, and forms the basis for everything in the universe...As he indicates; "Since the remotest times people have used number to establish meaningful coincidences, that is, coincidences that can be interpreted"...In that respect, the following verification may be of some interest.

Rating:
Summary: A Unified Theory of Mind and Matter.
Review: Jung's "Synchronicity" is an essay about those moments when everything just seems to come together. Jung defined synchronicity as "the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning". Synchronicity is a cluster of meaningful patterns that normal cause and effect has not caused. Synchronicity is acausal. Beyond cause as we know it. A bridge between the known and the unknown, between the conscious and the unconscious. Though there have been others from the West that have expanded upon Jung's thoughts concerning synchronicity this is still a very good place to start. For further reading I would suggest looking to Jean Shinoda Bolen and F. David Peat, among others. For an Oriental perspective regarding acausality, synchronicity, may I suggest the "I Ching" and "Tao Te Ching". Lao Tzu, the author of "Tao Te Ching", is the father of Taoism. As Barbara Marx Hubbard has said, "The spiral of our evolutionary progress is turning back in time to reconnect with the great sage Lao Tzu". Taoism is a way of life that attempts to live in harmony with the unity of the universe by following the natural grain of things, of going with the flow. Wisdom is timeless and knows no bounds.

In "Synchronicity" Jung was trying to describe to the Western mind, his own included, the phenomenon of the alignment of universal forces with one's own life experiences. Much like Quantum Physics, Jungian Pyschology was beginning to leave behind the mechanistic universe of the 18th and 19th Centuries and starting to view reality as an organic whole. Our leading thinkers were becoming more than mere observers, they were becoming participants. Objectivity and subjectivity were merging. There are no lines of demarcation in nature, rather there are merely areas of confluence. Everything is interconnected. With Jung chance met design.

Synchronicity though subjective by nature, is scientific. Cynical skeptics will point out that the theory is not "Scientifically" verifiable because synchronicity is not quantifiable. That synchronicity is nothing more than magic, fantasy. The fact that the "Scientific Method" these same skeptics cherish was channeled via a series of dreams, including a dream within a dream, to Rene Descartes strikes me as ironic to say the least. Subjectivity created their objection to subjectivity. Can't we all just get along? To quote Einstein, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality". All attempts to describe anything exactly fall short. Our best theorys are models of reality, not reality itself. Most, if not all, of our greatest scientists have also been mystics, or at least had a mystical experience. The "Promethean Impulse" or "Divine Inspiration" that has been granted to our greatest minds is not make believe. The answers to many of our scientific questions have come in the form of dreams, or other non-rational states of consciousness. It took a dreamer to realize that the Earth is round. There is always something new to learn. Jung was no charlatan. He was an optimist. He believed in our ability to grow and change. He spoke from personal experience tempered by thoughtful meditation. He claimed that the Universe is no coincidence and neither are we. I agree. Read Jung.





Rating:
Summary: theoretically vital but badly written
Review: Jung's work on the acausal operations of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) took his work far afield and opened up implications even in physics. Essential but hard to get through.

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Summary: Beyond Chance, or: Mapping the Etherverse
Review: Just as Oppenheimer's Shiva-jigging atom-stomp codified the nuclear sciences as a force to be reckoned with and redefined the method and madness of the battlefield for the 20th century, so in turn were set in motion a series of sub-atomic particle explorations that would ultimately serve just as destructive to long-held paradigms about the nature of the universe. The contradictory tenants of Quantum Physics desecrated the Newtonian Determinism that had dominated modern thought for some two hundred years: the electron 'cloud of possibility' and the photon wave/particle paradox shattered the comfortable, mechanistic notion of causality (cause and effect), relegating it to historical curiosity. In effect: these rigid clockwork rules, when viewed at the smallest sphere, suddenly turn elastic, "reality" dictated by the will of the observer and/or the constraint of the causal experiment: clockwork causality began to stretch like salt-water taffy before the conscious participant, giving Dali's soft-clock surrealism an eerily prescient scope. For empiricists and hardwired logicians, Quantum-theory was as dangerous and reality-threatening as anything Darwin pulled on the Secular Fundamentalists, and resistance to its baffling, frustratingly unfussy relativity continues to this day - some would rather reject it out of hand, rather than deal with the consequences.

Others, on the other hand, probed the quandary, and found therein substantive material for the more questionable aspects of this existence. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung latched onto the discoveries of his friends Einstein, Planck, Bohr (etc.), saw the correlation with Eastern philosophy and his own studies into the paranormal, and in 1952 published *Sychronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,* an attempt to condense and conceptualize some very difficult peculiarities/inconsistencies that statistical science neglected to take into account - specifically 'meaningful coincidences', the inexplicable that occurred far too often to be products of chance. Or, as Jung put it: "Sychronicity... means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary objective state...(pg. 25)." In other words, the chaotic, malleable elements of the extreme microverse have a representative affect on our causal-ruled macroverse - although the manifestation of it cannot be adequately measured, due to its unpredictable nature - and to Jung's views, this was as a serious venture to be studied rather than outright dismissed.

Essential to this argument is the concept of a 'soul,' or soul-network: 'something' beyond the physical perception, and beyond the spatial limitations of energy, working in accordance to its own plan. Jung envisioned, beyond the mechanistic aspect of the 'normal' world, a broader framework of existence, in which all things are connected via an indefinable ether-verse, encompassing such derided/quizzical concepts as "meaningful coincidences," foreknowledge/precognition/intuition, ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, and so forth. As a human came to channel the Quantum theory, "...we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents (pg 102)."

Heady stuff! It's interesting to note Jung tip-toe around the `G' word (the thesis would have been outright rejected then and there by self-respecting scientists), instead incorporating the Tao, Schopenhauer's Will & various other cultural representations of an all-pervading force that, as the Chinese sages knew three thousand years before, could not be comprehended consciously, but through meditative "non-being" ... or the ~unconscious state~, Jung is quick to clarify. Integral to this discussion are archetypes, the common models upon which cultural icons/identities are patterned. Jung does not go into specifics here (for he mined archetypes throughout his career) but does pose several interesting notes - the theory of whether numbers actually existed, as archetypes, before human conception (and human existence?) was certainly something to ponder upon.

*Sychronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle* is divided into four sections, being 1) the establishment of the theory, 2) an experiment of statistical randomness to 'prove' Sychronicity by way of astrology, 3) a list of examples of similar concepts throughout the ages (the Tao etc. mentioned above), and 4) a lecture in 1951 wherein the genesis of this book was formulated. As a student of Eastern philosophy, nothing Jung stated here was exactly new or revelatory to my mindset; but when the dominant Western attitude of that period is taken into perspective, it is easy to see why this work would be deemed controversial and, a favored expression of shallow dismissal, "junk science."

Still, some reservations should be made here. For one, Synchronicity shouldn't be considered science, rather a metaphysical theory; and Jung falls into the all-to-common trap of claiming his hypothesis as irrefutable, using the higher-than-probable results of his tests and a number of "meaningful" coincidental stories to make his case. I suggest that anyone seriously investigating these theories make the effort to view both sides of the coin - those who support and those who refute the concept of Synchronicity and the innumerable derivations of Quantum possibility, for the following reason:

This thesis can be seen as an origin point for the current market of the New Age: hokum and free-wheelin' misinterpretation take voluminous cues from that established by Einstein et al. Although there are practical alternatives - self-help agencies such as PSI and similar motivational speakers a la Tony Robbins utilize these concept as the base platform of success: "To Think is to Create" - despite this, the more intricate (and exciting) aspects of Quantum Physics are often diluted by some into mass-consciousness vehicles for easy enlightenment - think of Redfield's bestselling poppycock-omnibus *The Celestine Prophecy,* or any number of Quantum-cannibalizing frauds designed exclusively for the bohemian soccer-mom set - and the increasingly nebulous 'pseudo' aspect of it subsequently strengthens resistance from traditionalists and skeptics.

This book is an excellent attempt to map the unknown, the indefinable *Something* so intrinsic with the ongoing process of life. A brave, massively influential analysis of all that 'beyond chance' - five stars.