Another excerpt from Synchronicity.
If you’re interested:
Start here. Then go here and here
More to come. But here’s the excerpt:
One of the “classic” examples of synchronicity, told by Carl Jung himself, concerns a crisis that occurred during therapy. Jung’s patient was a woman whose highly rational approach to life made any form of treatment particularly difficult. On one occasion the woman related a dream in which a golden scarab appeared. Jung knew that such a beetle was of great significance to the ancient Egyptians for it was taken as a symbol of rebirth. As the woman was talking, the psychiatrist in his darkened office heard a tapping at the window behind him. He drew the curtain, opened the window, and in flew a gold-greenscarab — called a rosechafer, or Cetonia Aureate. Jung showed the woman “her” scarab and from that moment the patient’s excessive rationality was pierced and their sessions together became more profitable.
Despite our appeal to a “scientific” view of nature, such events do occur, and while it is true that any one of them can be dismissed as “coincidence”, such an explanation makes little sense to the person who has experienced such a synchronicity. Indeed the whole point of such happenings is that they are meaningful and play a significant role in a person’s life. Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we may have ignored some vital clues.
