How Synchronicity Works

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Here’s How Synchronicity Works

While looking for an image for this page, we googled “surreal images.” One of the first  that came up was this this image of  7 keys and a keyhole. 7, as in the title of our book. 7. Not 8, not 2, but 7. There are undoubtedly more than 7 secrets of synchronicity, but for the book, that was the magic number. The bottom line with any synchronicity can be summed up in a simple question: What does it mean for you? Is the experience a confirmation? A warning? A glimpse into a possible  future? We answer that question through stories and synchronicity practices that guide you in making associations and interpreting metaphors and symbols. We help you mine your own unconscious for answers.

Jung’s castle on Lake Zurich

What is Synchronicity?

People recognized synchronicity long before Carl Jung coined the term. It was called names such as ostenta, moira, and destiny. There have been theories about what causes these sudden ‘coincidental’ occurrences for millennia. Heraclitus, a Greek phlosopoher in the fourth century B.C., saw all things being inter-related, or following ‘cosmic reason.’ He believed that events were not isolated happenings but had repercussions across the entire fabric of existence. All things were linked by a web of organization created by the Logos.

Hippocrates, who was born twenty years after Heraclitus died, expressed similar thoughts in a unique way. He said: “There is one common flow, a common breathing. Everything is in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working together for the same purpose. The great principle extends to the most extreme part, and from the extremest part returns again to the great principle.

Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, perpetuated Heraclitus’s concept of the Logos as an intermediary between God and humans. As such, he more or less saw meaningful coincidence as the way the Creator interacts with his creatures. The self-evidence of these acts proved the existence of God, he argued, but conceded these acts of providence didn’t reveal the enigma of his existence or his identity. It’s believed that Philo found his ideas in the mystery schools that existed during and before his time.

Like Heraclitus, he used the term enthusiasmos, which means having God within oneself. The term also dismissed the notion of God as a bearded, autocrat wielding omnipotence and enthroned in the clouds. Instead, God is the unifying spirit of existence that dwells within everyone and everything, the invisible thread tying everything in the universe together.

Frank Joseph in Synchronicity and You in referring to enthusiasmos says: “The term certainly helps define synchronicity, which operates on the principle of meaningful connections established by some unseen force between our inner being and our outer experience.

Two centuries later, the Roman scholar Agrippa referred to a Fifth Essence, something beyond earth, air, fire and water that held existence together. He also referred to it as the World Soul, which penetrates all things and is a thing in itself. Agrippa’s contemporary Plotinus, wrote: “Chance has no place in life, but only harmony and order reign therein.”

In the Middle Ages the idea was known as ‘unus mundum’ – a collective knowledge that exists independently of us, yet available to us. Meaningful coincidence hence existed beyond our conscious awareness and egos, located at the place where our psyche or spirit and the outside world touch.

Carl Jung first devised the term in 1949 when he wrote the introduction to the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching. He brought the term synchronicity into wider use after he presented a paper in 1952 discussing meaningful coincidence. Amongst his findings were the idea that numbers have much deeper significance than simply for counting items. He said that this is why so many divination systems like the I Ching use numbers to synchronously provide the knowledge and answers we need to know.

Jung also saw synchronicity as the reason why independent researchers can come up with the same results or knowledge at the same time. Congealing in the unconscious is the need for answers. So, searching for a solution in their own ways, researchers resolve the problem at the same time. This is known as ‘simultaneous discovery.’

Stories of the Seven Secrets of Synchronicity

Here are some examples of synchronicities that fall within the 7 secrets.

Secret One: The Knowing

Recognizing coincidence as meaningful is the first secret.

While staying at a house in the Florida Keys, two friends came to visit – Robert from Stuart, Florida and Robert from Minneapolis. So for a couple of days, there were three Roberts at the house.  One morning, one of the Robs was searching in the refrigerator for some jelly. He pulled out a jar of mango preserves called, Robert Is Here. “Hey, you aren’t going to believe this,” he called out, laughing. “The jelly is onto us.”

This synchronicity wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if just one Robert had been at the house. But with three Roberts there and then finding the jam with that unusual name, well, it surprised even the skeptical Robert, whom we call Rabbit just to keep everyone straight. It actually awakened Rabbit to the idea of synchronicity and a few days later, he experienced one that involved a particular bike store in Key West and a t-shirt.

While we were staying on the island, Rabbit rode a bike that we had found in a storage room at the house. The bike was in good condition and had a sticker on it that read, Island Bikes, 900 Truman, Key West. He made several references to that bike shop, suggesting that we should go there. So, one evening when we went to Key West for dinner, we happened to cross Truman at the 900 block, but were surprised to see a bike shop with a different name. It was closed and we continued on. That seemed to be the end of it.

After we returned home, Rabbit stayed on in the keys with another friend. During his stay, he was visited by a third friend, Toni, who came bearing a gift: a t-shirt from Island Bikes. On the back of it, below the name of the shop, was the new address farther down Truman. Mystery solved. Of course, Toni had no idea that we’d discussed that bike shop several times in recent days, or that Rabbit had been riding a bike purchased there. To top it off, the t-shirt was bold striped green, red and yellow, the colors of the Rastafarian movement of Jamaica, Rabbit’s usual winter destination.

Two days later, he exploded through the door of our place, wearing his new t-shirt. “Hey, I had a synchronicity,” he announced. “But what’s it mean?”

Now Rabbit was completely aware that coincidence is meaningful.

Secret Two: The Heart

Emotions are intimately intertwined with synchronicity

The loss of a child is undoubtedly one of the most difficult events for a parent to come to grips with emotionally and spiritually.  Because of the emotional intensity and the sheer horror of such a loss, the synchronicities experienced can be enormously comforting. And sometimes they occur months after the child’s death.

Writer Sharlie West lost her adult daughter, Susan, to ALS. Every year, she returned to the funeral home in March, on Susan’s birthday. “One March it was snowing and I was feeling so sad that my beautiful daughter was taken from me. I even yelled at God. Why did you take her? I don’t believe you exist at all. Then on the way home, the license plate of the car in front of me said, God is Watching Over You. After that surprise, a car pulled up next to me with a bumper sticker that read, God is Love. I guess I had my answer.”

Secret Three: The Theory

Synchronicity is the granddaddy of all psychic phenomena.Several years ago, remote viewer Joe McMoneagle  was asked by a Japanese television station to locate a man  who had been missing for 30 years. On May 10, 2003, a camera crew from Tokyo arrived at McMoneagle’s rural home in Virginia. He was handed a sealed envelope containing the name of a missing man. The target was identified with a number on the envelope. With that, he focused  and backed by years of experience, made a series of drawings and typed out a description of where to look for the man.

The first clue he offered was a large Ferris wheel with changing colored lights. He said he felt that it was in Tokyo near water and from the top of the Ferris wheel you could see four ball fields separated by walkways, which formed a cross. One of the walkways ended at a group of sculptures. Near the complex of ball fields, he saw a river and across the river a ‘special train track.’ On the other side of the track was a raised highway that would lead to a multi-story hospital, which he sketched in front of the camera crew.

Then the description took a bizarre turn, reminiscent of a psychic treasure hunt.  He wrote that once they discovered the hospital, they were to give the name of  the missing man to the first nurse they encountered. McMoneagle went on to describe the missing person as a man about seventy-seven years old.

When the crew returned to Japan, they started following the clues. They soon discovered there were 13 Ferris wheels in Tokyo, but only four of them were covered with lights that changed colors. That immediately narrowed the focus to four locations. Surprisingly, you could see ballparks with intersecting walkways from all four. In all, at least sixteen ballparks were visible from the top of the four Ferris wheels.

Next, the crew began looking for sculptures at the end of those walkways, but they couldn’t find any. They were ready to give up when they found a topiary garden – sculptured shrubbery—at the end of a path at the last location. That walkway ended near a river, which McMoneagle had drawn. Across the river they spotted a train track – of a monorail, which was considered special, as McMoneagle had described.

They also found an elevated highway near the track. After following it for twenty-eight miles they came to a hospital. As the crew left their vehicle, they encountered a nurse crossing the parking lot and asked if she knew the man they were seeking. To their astonishment, she told them matter-of-factly that she knew him because he’d been a patient a few wees ago. When they asked how they could find out where he lived, she surprised the crew again by leading them the missing man’s home three blocks away.

An elderly woman answered the door. They asked for the man by name and she said she would go get him. He was indeed the man they were looking for. A short time later, the seventy-eight-year-old man was reunited with his son, who had instigated the search, after a separation of thirty-four years. By the end of 2004, Joe McMoneagle had made ten trips to Tokyo for the television production company and found seven missing persons.

Rob e-mailed his cousin, Russell Walstedt, a nuclear physicist who lived in Japan, and asked him to watch the program. Since Russell was skeptical about about psychic abilities and Rob had known Joe for a few years, he was eager to hear Russell’s assessment.

After watching the psychic detective program, broadcast from Tokyo, Russell wrote back.  “The remote viewing guy is indeed amazing, if actually genuine.” He went on to say that the crew was still looking for two of the three people they asked Joe to locate. However, Russell was baffled by how Joe had located even one of them.

Secret Four: The Creative

Creativity lies at the heart of synchronicity.

The creative muse speaks to us in many different ways and synchronicity clearly  is one of them. Although we hope the muse will whisper in our ears and dictate the great American novel or guide our hands in sculpting a human form that rivals The Pieta, the muse works in a more subtle manner.

On August 14, 1992, Trish mailed off a novel, Storm Surge, to her new editor at Hyperion. It revolved around a category five hurricane named Alphonso that slams into South Florida and flattens entire neighborhoods. On that same day, a tropical wave moved off the coast of Africa, one of many that roll away from that continent during hurricane season. It had completely escaped Trish’s notice. But ten days later, that wave had grown into one of the most powerful hurricanes on record., At one point, its winds were estimated to be in excess of 200 mph. Hurricane Andrew walloped Homestead, Florida, wiped it off the map, and obliterated entire neighborhoods.

The synchronicity is striking in several regards. In fiction and real life, both hurricanes were the first named storms of the season and began with an ‘A.’ They were category fives, and were tightly compacted storms that targeted only a small area. Again, an example where creativity provided a venue for a premonition,  an aspect of synchronicity.

Secret Five: The Clusters

Synchronicity manifests itself in clusters of numbers, names, objects, words, symbols

This was our daughter, Megan,  during her second tandem skydive, on her 20th birthday. It proved to be the culmination of a synchronicity cluster involving 2s.

On August 19, 2009, we moved Megan back to college on the other side of Florida. There’s  a stretch of highway where there’s nothing but sugar cane fields covering land that once was part of the Everglades. Along this stretch, hundreds of swallows sweep across the terrain, nabbing insects on the fly, swooping across the two-lane road. They’re especially thick around dusk and seem oblivious to cars.

So on the way back, around dusk, we entered this stretch. The swallows swooped and
dived (literally ‘sky-dived’), often winging away from our car at the last second. Then two of them, one after another, hit our windshield. At some deep level, we sensed it might be an omen.

On August 30, 11 days after we moved her back to college, we met her halfway across the state for her second skydive, for her 20th birthday. Her appointment  was for 12:30, but they didn’t get airborne until around 2 PM. She was jumping tandem, with an instructor.

Are we seeing a pattern here? 2nd dive, 20th birthday, 2 swallows, a tandem jump
at 2 PM. The tandem jumpers leave the plane last and there were two of them. We were standing outside, watching the jumpers with four of Megan’s friends. And suddenly, something happened to Megan’s parachute. It seemed to just… well, fly away.

An instructor standing next to us said, “Wow, look at that.”

“What just happened?” Trish asked.

“The first chute failed. Don’t worry. They’ll freefall for a few seconds, then the
second chute will open.”

And that’s exactly what happened. They landed safely and afterward Megan said she
didn’t realize anything unusual had happened.

Later, another skydiver said it’s an unusual occurrence. It didn’t happen for
him until his 1,200th dive.

So an event 11 days ago (there’s another 2!) related to Megan’s skydive.  An unnerving synchronicity and a disturbing example of a cluster.

Secret Six: The Trickster

A synchronicity can reveal itself with a twist of humor or wry irony so startling it stops us in our tracks.
One morning, we were seated at an outdoor table at a neighborhood coffee shop, discussing the outline of this book, when an elderly man approached us. He handed us a card that explained he was deaf and selling key chains. We bought one and on the back of the card, found illustrations for sign language.

On the way home, following the cue from the deaf man, we talked about synchronicity as a language of signs. En route, we passed the local high school, where the digital sign at the entrance was advertising a class in sign language. It was a sign about sign language as we were talking about the language of signs, adding layers on the synchronicity.

Clearly, a sign! And a serial trickster synchronicity.

Secret Seven: The Global

When synchronicities manifest themselves through global events, the universe seems to be addressing us as a collective.
We all know the OJ story, what went down, the infamous chase.

On October 3, 1995, it was estimated that half a billion people watched or listened to the live broadcast of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder case. It was the most publicized murder case ever. Reuters reported that the viewing audience for this event surpassed three of the five Super Bowl telecasts between 1991and 1995.

He was acquitted.

Move ahead thirteen years. On October 3, 2008, thirteen years to the day he was  acquitted for double homicide,  Simpson was convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, and ten other charges. He and five men had stormed a room in a hotel casino, where they seized plaques, photos, and game balls. The O.J. story had come full circle.

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If you’re interested in engaging synchronicity, in becoming an active participant in this phenomenon and harnessing its enormous power to enrich your life, then click here.

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