Jung, Pauli and synchronicity
A psychiatrist and a quantum physicist spent twenty years puzzling over a question neither could resolve alone: whether the world contains coincidences that are not really coincidental. An excerpt from Part I of the book.
What synchronicity is
Jung kept noticing something that happened to him regularly in session: a patient would describe a dream or a thought, and at that exact moment something would happen in reality that mirrored it precisely. The most famous example from his own practice: a patient describes a dream about a golden scarab beetle, and during the session an actual beetle strikes the consulting-room window — one closely resembling a scarab, a species rarely seen in that part of the world.
Coincidence? Jung decided it was something more. He called the phenomenon synchronicity — a meaningful coincidence with no cause-and-effect relationship (one event doesn't cause the other), and yet both sides are connected through meaning.
That's an important distinction. Jung wasn't claiming that the patient's thought had "summoned" the beetle. He was claiming something subtler: that the psyche and the external world sometimes fall into the same pattern at the same moment, with no chain of causes to explain it.
Why the physicist believed it
You might expect a quantum physicist, used to rigorous equations, to dismiss an idea like this as pure mysticism. The opposite happened.
Pauli worked in a world where classical causality had long since stopped being a given. Quantum mechanics showed phenomena — like particle entanglement — in which two objects behave in a correlated way toward each other, even though no signal can be identified that "carries" that correlation. For Pauli, Jung's synchronicity wasn't an abandonment of scientific rigour — it was a question about whether, beyond classical causality, some other kind of order exists in nature.
What this has to do with the I Ching
Jung had known the I Ching for years — he first encountered it in James Legge's 1882 English translation, but really came to understand it only through the German translation and his friendship with the sinologist Richard Wilhelm. It was in his foreword to the English edition of Wilhelm's translation, written in 1949, that Jung laid out an extensive account of the principle of synchronicity, in order to explain how an oracle could work at all.
The I Ching doesn't assume that tossing coins causes some state of affairs in the questioner's life. It assumes, rather, that the state of the moment — including exactly how the coins happen to fall — is part of the same coherent "now" as the question itself.
A question that stays open
It's worth being honest here: neither Jung nor Pauli ever proved the existence of synchronicity in any scientific sense. It remains a philosophical and psychological concept, not a physical law.
But for anyone who turns to the I Ching, the story of Jung and Pauli offers something valuable: a language. It lets you talk about the experience of tossing coins without having to choose between "this works scientifically" and "this is superstition." Synchronicity offers a third way — a coincidence that is meaningful, even if it isn't causal.