Theos-Talk Archives (January 1995 Message tl00252)

Murray: "I don't see synchronicity necessarily as acausality."

Synchronicity is necessarily acausal because that is Jung's own
definition.  Jung and Pauli worked out a very simplified model
which has a vertical line crossing a horizontal line to form a
cross.  At the top is pure energy (what I would call spirit).  At
the bottom, as its counterpart, is our spacetime continuum
(matter or physical manifestation).  On the left is causality
(which I would interpret as Karma when defined as the Law of
Cause and Effect).  And on the right is Synchronicity, which Jung
defines as the acausal connecting principle or a meaningful
coincidence.  In other words, Jung defines synchronicity as the
polar opposite or complement (Jung uses the Greek/Gnostic term
syzygy) of causality.  It refers to things that happen without a
physical cause, as when you catch a glimpse of some future event
and then later that event really does happen.  The difference
between a synchronicity and pure coincidence is that it must be
*meaningful* to the psyche experiencing it.  Until this century,
physicists thought that the world was ruled only by causality and
thus saw it a mechanistic; a vast machine that was totally
deterministic if one simply knew the right equations.  Einstein,
Bohr, and many others have shown this to be untrue.  There is an
indeterministic element in our universe.  Physicists call this
element chance or randomness and describe it in terms of
statistical probabilities.  I call it the Chaos Factor, but it is
all the same thing.

On the other side, many religious and occult-oriented people who
believe in Karma, also see the world as deterministic.  They
believe that every event is destined to occur as the result of
past karma.  When our cat barfs on the rug, they would have us
believe that once upon a time we were a cat and barfed on
someone's rug.  Tit for tat.  Such folks believe that all events
can be foreknown if we but have the Knowledge of past karma.
Adepts or Masters, for example, can look at a person, see their
past karma in the akashic records, and tell them exactly what
kind of coffee they will order for breakfast next weekend.  I am
sorry for these people, but science has burst their bubble during
this century, and such a worldview is no longer acceptable.  I
realize here, that by saying this I am treading on a lot of toes.
Buddhist Sutras, for example, abound in the wonders of knowing
countless ages of past karma.  However, it just isn't so.  Not
totally anyway.  Rather, lets just say that all of this is
exoteric, and the esoteric truth is that our world has an
underlying probabilistic nature.  Anyone today who thinks that
our world is deterministic is in serious conflict with modern
science.  This probabilistic underpining makes us shift our
worldview.  Before, a Master could see future events.  Now, a
Master sees highly probable events.  The future is shown to be a
realm of possibilities, each with a probability attached to it.
Because of this, we can never really KNOW what is going to happen
in the future with certainty - this is but one result of
translating the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle from the scale
of the quantum to our everyday world.  Thus every now and again
during the course of our normal lives a surprise will jump out at
us.  This affords us the freedom to grow and change, but also
cannot be accounted for in the deterministic world of Karma.
Only by positing a counterpart to Karma, such as synchronicity,
can we account for these surprises.  Jung believed that the
indeterinistic element of our universe was responsible for such
things as ESP and Psychism.  I believe that as we bring psychic
phenomena into our conscious control, we translate synchronistic
events into karmically determined ones.  In other words, just as
matter and energy are convertible, so are causality (Karma) and
acausality (synchronicity) - thus the cross in Jung's model.

Again, there are several definitions of karma, and the only one
that I am looking at here is as the Law of cause and Effect, or
the principle of causality.  But I think that the idea of
determinism by knowing past karma (which many theosophists
subscribe to) is just as flawed as the idea of determinism by
knowing mathematical equations (which physicists have recently
and very reluctantly agreed is untrue).  As above so below - if
our physical world is probablistic, then the other cosmic planes
probably are too.

Post no Flames.  Please, before you flame this idea, think about
it.  I will be happy to address questions or further refinements.
But I am also afraid that some of you whose worldview depends on
karmic determinism will be very upset by this posting and your
emotions will immediately lead you to a flaming response.  The
ideas expressed in this posting are a result of my own attempts
to integrate science, Jungian psychology, theosophy, and
occultism.  For those of you who don't like Jung or who don't
understand or care about modern physics, please ignore this
posting and continue on.

          Jerry S.