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What are the odds… I like the idea of Synchronicity.
“Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” – “ “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related” – Carl Jung –
In the Hermetic riddle: as above so below, so below as above… which I’ve taken to mean that, as above so below, we are influenced as much (most) of our lives are determined by outside factors. But, as below so above, we also influence as in co-creators. (this idea of co-creation appears in most wisdom traditions in some for or another. The idea of synchronicity is about how it is that we might influence co-create reality.
In his book Synchronicity Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results