Synchronicities: Those Inner Archetypal Events that Matter

Synchronicities. When some inner perception, dream, intuitive hint, or an unexplanable urge corresponds simultaneously with an outer event, we tend to call it a miracle or pure chance. It’s a place where the conscious and unconscious seem to touch each other, or overlap for a moment in time. These are synchronicities. It’s as though the threshold of the conscious mind lowers and the unconscious spontaneously pours in. And because these events are not causal by nature, they require a different principle of explanation. Synchronicities are acausal events that happen in space-time. They function like “acts of creation” in time. Dr. Carl Gustav Jung called these “rips in the fabric of time.”

Science looks at space, time, and causality as the classical triad in physics. To this, Carl Jung has added a tetrad: synchronicity. There seems to exist in the unconscious an a priori knowledge or an immediacy of events that lack causality in our ordinary world. By its numinous effect, a synchronicity evokes emotion and something will take on a higher order of meaning and broader significance for its host. Jung believed these events are archetypes coming forth with their intrapsychic orderedness, a way to marry mind and body, or spirit and matter. These archetypal inner events give a profound intuition of the eternal continuity of humanity. The Self, then, can be viewed as an inclusive living organism containing the totality of deposits from all past lives, as well as a point of departure, or fertile soil, from which all future life will spring forth. The idea of immortality legitimately follows from these premises. So let’s look more deeply at what an archetypal event truly is.

The Archetype. ‘Arche’ signifies origin, cause, principle, or dominant leader. ‘Type’ means an imprint, model, prototype, or norm. So its definition is a formative pattern or principle underlying anything that can take form. There can be no important idea or view that is not grounded in a primordial archetypal form. Archetypes, then, are imprints in the psyche that continually create recurring typical tendencies and experiences in nature. Archetypes are dynamic, living organisms endowed with generative force. An archetype supplies the images or figures that enable us to make cognition possible, the images of life itself.

The unconscious mind is the totality of the archetypes, the depository of all human experience, going all the way back to our beginnings. The unconscious contents make up a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine a person’s life in invisible ways — all the more effective because they are invisible. Archetypes function like the instincts of our perceptual life. Plato’s Ideas are a philosophical expression of the psychological archetypes. Archetypes can arise spontaneously at any time or place, and without any outside influence, which means they are unconscious forms present in every psyche but nonetheless active, that continually influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions. They are the psychic aspect of our brain structure.

No one knows where archetypes come from, or whether or not they are acquired. They seem to have entered the picture when human life began. Whether they ever originated at all becomes a metaphysical question that still has no answer. All the myths, and fairy tale motifs concentrate universal human modes of behavior into images, or perceptible patterns that depict archetypal people and events. And this seems to be true since the beginning of time.

Archetypal Events. Not just static forms, but certain dynamic processes, occurrences, and situations, are also archetypal patterns… events we all experience like Birth, Death, Betrayal, Vocation (or Life’s Purpose) and Transformation. Throughout history these patterns take on differing forms in the dreams, visions and fantasies of everyone, from the remotest aboriginal to the most sophisticated modern intellectual. Yet in every age, with no communication amongst people of the many cultures or nations, these patterns or essences remain constant.

Archetypes are not just our historical psychic heritage, they also represent our universal human latent possibilities. Individuation — the natural unfolding into our whole self — is an archetypal process we all experience to some degree. Like a seed, the psyche bears within it the predisposition of this archetypal process, containing its own different components of Ego, the Unconscious, the Persona, and the Shadow — all are archetypal phenomena. And as we unfold, there comes a time when we’ll feel driven to find our Vocation or Life’s Purpose, another archetypal event. Often, synchronicities will usher in the magical phenomena that will guide us. The archetype corresponding to our inner or outer life can be actualized, and in taking form will appear before the camera of the conscious mind as a synchronicity. An example of this happened recently in my involvement with someone seeking her vocation:

I received an email from a woman who was told to contact me, but knew nothing about me. She wanted my opinion about a certain university she was considering entering. I wrote back to tell her I’d served on that faculty for four years and knew a great deal about it. She was shocked to realize she had actually contacted a past faculty member of the very college she wanted to attend. Then, that same day she Googled a search for learning experiential group process and was given our organization’s website. These synchronistic events are obviously guiding her to her life’s work, and fit perfectly with her passion to be educated in new paradigm psychology. She felt it was the Universe saying “Yes!”

Symbolic Understanding. Symbols are the modes of manifestation by which archetypes can be known. A symbol is “an essence and image of psychic meaning and energy.” Symbols describe how the psyche experiences life. Symbols are metaphors for the eternal brought to us in the recognized forms that exist in our ordinary world. Two dimensions are thrown together in a unity of meaning. Ultimately, everything in creation can become a symbol for our essential traits, qualities, difficulties, and characteristics. In other words, a symbol is capable of transfiguring earthly images into the divine. A sunrise can be an Awakening, the night a symbol for Depression, the bull can represent stubborn Blindness, a dead leaf can represent Transformation. And this symbolic, imaginative view of the world is just as organic for us as what comes from our physical senses. The imagination represents a natural and spontaneous striving that adds enrichment to life. It makes a parallel psychic bond with life that goes along with the biological. We say something this numinous becomes ‘spiritual.’ But it is really always ‘psycho-spiritual’ because we have to attribute spiritual meaning to it by the apprehension and perception we make of it in our psyches. According to Jung,

“The phenomenon we call spirit depends on the existence of an autonomous primordial image which is universally present in the preconscious make-up of the human psyche.” (CW 9, para 396)

Even if something we perceive as spiritual is a hallucination, it is still a real psychic occurrence that affects us, not subject to our will. It is, in fact, this symbolic imaginative dimension of consciousness that makes us who we are. It’s the root of all creative activity, fed by the archetypes working from our depths and creating the spiritual, or metaphysical realm of life.

Changes that happen to us are really quite limited in number, always stemming from some universal archetypal form or process. Whenever a stressful situation or intense preoccupying need happens in your life, a particular archetype has been constellated. This means it possesses an energy-charged nucleus of meaning that will attract to you the ideas that will render it capable of conscious realization. It will be felt as a revelation, an illumination, or a “saving idea” that come into the mind as an image or a divine Thought. Only then can it be translated into a workable formula in one’s life. This is very liberating and often can bring about a life-changing transformation.

Archetypes and their meaningful symbolic synchronicities are the voice of our human species, the great ordering factor of our consciousness, and as such, disregard or violation of them brings confusion and destruction. They are the unfailing causes of neurosis and psychosis, as well as the guides to all that we can become. They even seem to have foreknowledge of our goal to become centered, individuated human beings. Thus they are the protectors and bringers of our salvation, and can help us overcome any blockage or bridge any split within our psyches.

Making the unconscious mind conscious is our psyche’s most passionate desire. The vast unconscious mind collaborates with our individual psyches to answer the secrets of the day and solve the riddles of the future in our dreams and the symbolic realities we experience when reflecting on our life’s challenges. It is this capacity for consciousness that, alone, makes us human. These sacred synchronicities occur more often in your life than you realize. Make a vow to recognize them when they appear as Messages from the Beyond.

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