Regarding certain meaningful coincidences in time.
The grand synchronicity of life is at all times mysterious. This morning, I slept in, as I usually do on my birthday, and I woke up around the time of my birth, which in this zone, comes out to be 6:10 AM. I’ve done this as far back as I can remember. Why does it happen? There’s a secret here that I prefer not to dismiss in terms of subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition because it’s more satisfying to think like a poet than like a reductive psychologistic materialist. It’s my birthday and I can engage in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and irrational, intuitive, a priori assumptions if I want to.
I subscribe to the Poetic Outlaws newsletter. So, of course, the poem today was “Growing Old” by Matthew Arnold, in which the author describes the subjectivity of aging in melancholy terms: “It is to spend long days/ And not once feel that we were ever young.” To this, I must respectfully answer, “That is complete bucket of tosh, Mr. Arnold.” Still, the synchronicity of receiving such a poem today is palpable and I should at least celebrate Matthew Arnold for wishing me a ghostly happy birthday.
But what is synchronicity? I’m using it colloquially to indicate ostensibly disconnected or only slightly connected events that seem to correlate in a surprising way. Deciding to sleep in and waking up at the approximate time of my birth on my birthday is curious. Perhaps it is simultaneously more and less curious that it seems to happen this way every year.
Receiving a poem by email the same day, entitled “Growing Old,” is even more curious. The strange feeling that accompanies synchronicity would have been even more powerful if I’d received the email at 6:10 AM. Unfortunately or fortunately, it arrived at 2:04 AM—no doubt, automatically scheduled by Erik Rittenberry, who runs Poetic Outlaws, and with whom I’ve never spoken. (Buy the man a coffee. He does good work.)
In Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle (taken from volume eight of his collected works, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung describes it as “the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time.” He adds that it can take three forms:
a) the coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.
b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a “synchronistic,” objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.
c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.
Whereas in the first case an objective event coincides with a subjective content, the synchronicity in the other two cases can only be verified subsequently, though the synchronistic event as such is formed by the coincidence of a neutral psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision).
Phantasms, dreams, and visions. This is why I love Jung. For me, the most significant language comes from the first item on his list, the quality of perception in the person having the synchronistic experience. This is because, in order to write this blog post and have it be meaningful to you, it first has to be meaningful to me. I have to look inward and, much like Guy de Maupassant’s character standing before the grave of his loved one, say, it’s curious what I felt. Back to Arnold’s subjectivity, if not his melancholy. Back to the self, suggesting that synchronicity may depend, to a large extent, on whether or how much we’re paying attention.
Jung died in Küshnacht 12 years before I was born 5,973 miles away in San Diego. I find the fact that he can speak to me across time and space also profoundly mysterious—more so than current A.I. reconstructions of dead intellectuals from history. I try to read their works, where the real intelligence rests. Nothing more artificial than a book is necessary. But no matter how much I read and how many synchronistic experiences I have, I wonder whether there is some first cause, some transcendent unity in which all synchronicities could be reconciled.
In his critique of Schopenhauer, Jung dismissed this idea, noting that the former “thought and wrote at a time when causality held sovereign sway as a category a priori and had therefore to be dragged in to explain meaningful coincidences. But, as we have seen, it can do this with some degree of probability only if we have recourse to the other, equally arbitrary assumption of the unity of the first cause.” In other words, grand unities are baseless suppositions. So let’s not start talking about god unless we’re reading Lord Byron.
But what about DNA? If we go back only a few generations, say 300 years, we have thousands of ancestors. We all know this, but looking at online charts that approximate the average size of a 10th ancestral generation is sobering. Given the range of genetic diversity it implies, doesn’t it seem at least somewhat likely that perceptual states (and, by extension, the depth and breath of synchronicity in one’s life) might emanate not from god but from heredity? Another baseless supposition, maybe, but one that might be a little more persuasive and more than a little unsettling.
This is especially true when I think of my Welsh, Italian, and Armenian ancestors. I suspect they didn’t survive to reproduce and pass on their genes because they were noble and loving children of the cosmos. I think it’s far more likely that they survived because they were tough, many of them ruthless, hard-edged killers (especially on the Welsh side), able to persist, generation after generation, through war, famine, plague, persecution, imprisonment, transportation, exile, and genocide. This gives me pause and makes me wonder who I am, in a genetic sense, and whether, if I were to meet one of my 10th-generation grandfathers, I’d live through the experience.
DNA cannot replace god; god cannot replace uncertainty; and uncertainty seems to be at the root of synchronicity. This morning, before I sat down to write, I looked at the news and saw an image of Pope Francis paying his respects to the remains of Padre Pio at Santa Maria delle Grazie.
You will not find a more quintessential Catholic image. But without an a priori grand unity, it’s just a preserved corpse, just another Lenin. Maybe so. And without either a metaphysical, genetic, or somehow transcendent cause, maybe birthday synchronicity is nothing more than subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition, nothing mysterious about it at all.
Thank goodness I’m a fiction writer and not a scientist. I get to rely on the spontaneous overflow of inner feelings (instead of inner plumbing), speak with angels and the ghosts of poets, even the ghosts of scientists, and make the mysterious great again. So happy birthday synchronicity to me and to all those who survived so that I could say, it’s curious what I felt.