At a Zoom office hours a month or so ago (we’ll do another one soon!), someone asked about discernment: In short, she had been feeling undervalued at her job, and as though summoned, an opportunity dropped directly into her inbox. It offered more money and more prestige—and the siren song of synchronicity—and so she took it, and has been regretting it ever since. Her question: “How do you tell when a sign is a sign?” She no longer felt like she could trust herself.
Fortunately, my friend
was also hanging on the Zoom—she’s a the author of Quarterlife and a Jungian psychotherapist, so she thinks a lot about synchronicity.* This, after all, is one of Jung’s (many) key explorations that he mainstreamed: That synchronicity is a nod from the unconscious, God, the universe, the other side, nature, however you want to imagine or think of a force that’s greater than yourself. As Satya explains, “Jung coined the term to make sense of a meaningful coincidence where Western science was/is inclined to simply dismiss something as meaningless. Jung wanted to emphasize the element of meaning to say that beyond cause and effect, the gold standard for science, there is another thing to witness: that things may be mutually arising within time and space.” The word pairs the Greek syn (“together”) and khronos (a more mystical version of “time”). Synchronicity is a powerful form of communication; it’s often the language of signs.(*In a weird fit of synchrony, when I went to pull the link for Satya’s book on Bookshop, Quarterlife was featured on their homepage.)
Jung wrote the introduction to the Wilhelm translation of the I Ching (“Book of Changes”), which introduced this ancient Eastern tradition of divination to the West, a call and response where you can actively engage with synchronicity by throwing pennies and building hexagrams in response to questions. (Satya and I hosted a New Year’s I Ching workshop where she walked us through how to phrase questions and translate throws—you can watch the replay video here to get the hang of it. I have a similar workshop coming up for paid subscribers about Kabbalah and Tarot with Mark Horn on Sunday, April 14 at 10am, mark your calendars! And if you want more I Ching, Satya is doing a retreat in June on the magical San Juan islands.) Once you learn how to consult the I Ching, synchronicity abounds. I threw pennies this morning and got the eerily accurate answer I needed, but maybe didn’t want. I’ve come to trust this, or at least to think deeply about the hexagrams I receive using them as an opportunity to interrogate myself.
Before we dive more deeply into synchronicity, sometimes a sign is just a sign—my beloved late brother-in-law Peter is masterful at sending me these, which usually come as pick-me-ups, hugs, or high-fives. (I wrote about a massive sign here.) I’ll see the number sequence I’ve asked him for on license plates, the clock, or a receipt at moments when I need it most. Or, on my birthday, he managed this wild trick below—I don’t even know how to use Siri. (He’s since done the same thing for my brother twice, both on significant days.)
Starting a virtual check-in with Peter is not the same as being able to pick up the phone and call him, but it feels like something, a warm embrace, a recontextualizing of the idea that maybe there’s benevolence everywhere guiding us, watching us, helping or intervening when appropriate. (Laura Lynne Jackson’s book Signs is the place to start if want to connect with loved ones on the other side, or as she calls it, “your team of light”—you can hear our podcast convo here.)
As Satya puts it, “Synchronistic experiences help us feel less isolated, less alone, and more connected to something divine or archetypal. They tend to transcend time and space in some way and connect the inner world with the outer world.”
Yesterday, while writing this newsletter, I took a break to pick up my college best friend at the airport and take her to lunch. This weekend, I had been casually DM-ing with two former co-workers who I hadn’t chatted with in months, if not years. As synchronicity would have it, the restaurant host steered us to a table next to one of these friends…who was waiting for the other. Meaningful coincidence, indeed.
Or, as Satya told me as we were emailing about this newsletter, “this week I had a dream that I had suddenly arrived in India and was surprised to find myself there. I thought to myself that I need to make sure to find R—, a friend who lives in India who I haven’t been in touch with for a long time. The afternoon of that day, she sent me an email. I sent her a delighted note back and told her that I’d just dreamed of her.”
I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been feeling increasingly psychic in the past few years, which might be in part because I’ve trained myself over the years to pay attention to “chance encounters.” These days, I know I can frequently conjure a phone call or email if I think of someone—we are definitely sending each other energy, all of the time. And I also know to reach out if someone is continually popping up in my mind, in case they’re sending me a mental S.O.S.
Satya feels the same, remarking, “In my life, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon anymore. I don’t make it mean anything except that there is a less firm divide between our individual inner worlds and those of others, or as firm a divide between the inner and outer worlds as we’re generally taught to believe. I don’t always think that meaning needs to be made of it. Sometimes, I’ll reach out to someone I’ve dreamt of because I have a sense that something is happening with them and they need to be checked on. But I don’t look for the deeper meaning too often because I also think it can become confusing. Too little openness to patterns and meaningful coincidences leads to a sense of emptiness; too much openness leads to disorientation and feelings of being flooded. There’s a balance, as with all things: openness and discernment are both needed.”
Synchronicity is a process, or this is the advice that Satya offered to our friend on Zoom that day, the one who felt compelled to take the new job because it had dropped into her lap. A synchronicity or sign is not necessarily a green light, it’s more of a blinking yellow: Pay attention to this. There’s potentially important information here. This woman felt suckered by falling for more money and prestige as she maintained that she hadn’t really wanted to leave her existing job. But where we landed is that she had wanted more. It was up to her to investigate what that more might mean rather than walking through the first door that opened.
I think this is really important, because it’s so easy to fall through the “fate” trapdoor: What are the chances I would sit next to an investor in my space at dinner? What are the chances that I would find myself sitting next to a cute stranger on an airplane from my hometown half way around the world? What are the chances I would meet someone at a lunch who had the same business vision as me and also wanted to quit their day job? I know a lot of people who have persevered in bad relationships or tried to power through a poor business match because it felt too fated not to be right. The universe wanted it to happen, dammit! (I also, of course, know some situations like this that did work out—and such is the unpredictability of life.) I’ve always found that the best question to ask in these types of situations is, What am I supposed to learn here? Or slightly rephrased, What is this situation trying to teach me? This feels especially critical if you sense you’re locked in a pattern, as sometimes synchronous events can be a test: Am I going to choose the same thing again? Or, am I ready for something different.
Speaking of patterns, Satya concludes with this: “I find that when people are having hugely synchronistic experiences back-to-back, it can indicate that something powerful is happening in their life and that they’re connecting to a stronger experience of the archetypal universe, of the interconnection of all things, and of love. But these are also times to be cautious because while they might indicate a significant life change, it can also involve a lowering of certain rational defenses. People can draw huge conclusions that aren’t indicated, and even be prone to manipulation from others where it may seem magical and synchronistic but is not.”
As always, there’s work on our side that’s required—yes, you can get in the river of life and “go with the flow,” but you’ve still got to swim.
Satya is brilliant and for those who are interested in working with her, she’s running a seminar on Jung’s book Memories, Dreams, Reflection that begins this Saturday—and then the I Ching retreat in June I mentioned above!
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Elise -- I want to thank you for this post. Ironically (never), it's a different take on a piece I just posted today on spiritual abundance and following the signs of my own destiny. This line made me think about your piece:
It’s not enough to follow the signs of fate or blindly follow what others are doing without inner discernment from my soul; this can be akin to chasing a butterfly off a cliff. (I’ve jumped off many a cliff, by the way, mostly by chasing other people’s butterflies.)
Thank you for your work and wisdom.
This post is itself synchronicity for me because a few days ago I texted a college friend who I hadn’t texted in at least a year for an update on her life, kids, etc. An hour later she texted back a picture of her that same morning smiling with my college son on his VT campus. She’s never met him, has only seen IG posts and Christmas card pics. She stopped him coming out of a dining hall and asked “are you Jen Parker’s son?” The timing did not feel random.