Do you like zodiacs or oddly specific fortune cookies? Synchronicities aren’t either of those things, let’s be real, though, they kind of are. Fun concepts like that are actually pretty important for pretty fascinating reasons.
The psychologist Carl Jung pioneered the ideas of synchronicities and dream analysis. He saw both of these concepts as messaging systems from the unconscious. These “messages” are inherently abstract because the unconscious holds all the data the conscious mind isn’t built to conceptualize.
Synchronicity is a theory that is dependent on the Jungian view of the unconscious. A school of psychology that places the unconscious mind in the driver’s seat of life. The unconscious is understood through emotional logic and intuition; it’s not something that’s understood rationally.
Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences; they are the science of “signs from the universe,” an analytical view of spirituality. A synchronicity is when an external event coincides with an internal psychic state. For example, you are thinking about butterflies. That thought is immediately followed by a butterfly landing on a nearby flower. “Whoa, I was just thinking about butterflies,” you say. Jung would see this as a highly significant experience, one that has a huge impact on the unconscious mind. In a Jungian view, the symbol of a butterfly becomes significant; the unconscious mind highlights the symbol “butterfly.” Butterflies start to represent metamorphosis for the person who keeps taking note of them.
The issue with the theory is obvious; there is no magical connection between the mind and the butterfly. Jung would agree with that; what he was theorizing on was a mysterious connecting force of nature, something like gravity.
To me, Jung’s goal of discovering some previously unknown force of nature failed. The idea still holds weight in the sense that our interior state can project reality and can carry unconscious messages. It’s not that the universe is giving you “signs,” or that you’re manifesting things. No one’s that important. But your subjective universe does have “manifestations” or “signs.” Synchronicities, like dreams, are given meaning based on how they are interpreted and have individual meaning. If you keep noticing butterflies and it means something to you, then that’s all that matters.
An example of interpretations of reality carrying unconscious messages is “grief hallucinations,” which 30-50% of people experience. It’s so common that most consider it a normal part of grieving. What we project tells us a lot about our current psychological needs. Both of those examples are extreme cases of projecting the inner world, but it shows how our brains process reality. We will fabricate reality if there’s an acute need for it. This concept applies to mild psychological needs to a lesser degree. For me, it’s interesting to see how I interpret things as small as someone saying hi. It carries a lot of reflective information on how I think people perceive me.
Humans are innately spiritual animals; the earliest evidence of ritualistic behavior in humans dates back to 70,000 years ago. Chimps have been recorded performing rituals and religion, thus, have molded our collective consciousness for thousands of years. Humans conceptualize the world in a spiritual way. It’s important to play into some spiritual beliefs. We need spirituality the same way a widow needs to see her husband one last time – having a willingness to see things that are not actually there.
Don’t put too much weight on “syncronicites” – that’s called schizophrenia. But maybe those butterflies do mean something if it gets you out of your cocoon.
