Blog
Transits, Patterns, and the Collective Unconscious
Synchronicity, Properly
Synchronicity is one of the most cited and least understood concepts in popular psychology. It shows up everywhere: TikToks about 11:11, Reddit threads about meaningful coincidences, captions under sunset photos, conversations after the death of someone close. The word does a lot of work. Most of it is approximate.
This post is about what Jung actually meant by synchronicity, what the cognitive science says about why meaningful coincidence feels significant, and what to do with the concept in everyday life. Not to debunk the experience. Not to inflate it. Just to give it a working definition that holds up.
What Jung actually meant
Carl Jung introduced synchronicity formally in 1952, in a long essay titled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. He’d been thinking about it for decades and developed it in conversation with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was at the time one of the architects of quantum mechanics.
Jung’s working definition: a meaningful correspondence between an internal psychological state and an external event, where the connection is not causal. Not “this caused that.” Not “I thought it into being.” Something more like: two events, one inner and one outer, related by meaning rather than by mechanism.
Jung’s classic example was a patient who was telling him a dream about a golden scarab beetle. As she described it, a beetle (a rose chafer, the closest European equivalent to a scarab) tapped against the consulting-room window. Jung opened it, caught the insect, and handed it to her. The image her unconscious had produced and the live insect outside the window corresponded in a way that wasn’t caused by anything. Both events were real. The connection between them was meaningful.
He drew a careful line: not every coincidence is synchronistic. The bar is whether the inner and outer events correspond meaningfully, in a way the perceiver can articulate and the analyst can verify. Most coincidences are just coincidences. Synchronicity, in Jung’s narrow sense, is a specific subset where the meaning relationship is unusually clear.
Marie-Louise von Franz, who worked closely with Jung and continued developing the idea after his death, added a useful frame in her 1980 book On Divination and Synchronicity: synchronistic events tend to cluster around moments when the unconscious is unusually active. Life transitions. Decisions. Periods of grief. Times when the inner work is heightened. That’s where the threshold between inner and outer thins.
What gets called synchronicity but isn’t, exactly
The popular use of the word has stretched it past Jung’s definition in two main directions, and both deserve a kinder look than they usually get.
The first stretch is using “synchronicity” for any meaningful-feeling coincidence. Spotting the same number on three clocks. Running into someone you were just thinking of. A song coming on the radio that matches your mood. These experiences are real and they often feel significant. Whether they meet Jung’s narrow bar (clear meaningful correspondence between a specific psychic state and a specific external event) is a separate question. Most don’t. That doesn’t make them meaningless. It just makes them a different category.
The second stretch is treating synchronistic events as messages from outside, addressed to the perceiver. The universe is sending a sign. The dead grandmother appears as a cardinal. The number sequence is guidance. Jung himself was careful not to make these claims. He wrote about synchronicity as a feature of reality that involved the perceiver’s psyche as much as the external event. The meaning wasn’t broadcast from elsewhere. It emerged in the relationship between an attentive mind and a world that’s full of pattern.
Neither stretch is bad. Both are doing real psychological work: making the world feel meaningful, holding open a category for experiences that rational frameworks don’t fully account for. The corrective isn’t to mock these uses. It’s to know what’s happening underneath them.
What the neuroscience says
A few converging lines of research help explain why meaningful coincidence feels the way it does, without either dismissing the experience or inflating it.
Apophenia. This is the technical term, coined by the German neurologist Klaus Conrad in 1958, for the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated phenomena. Conrad studied it in the early stages of schizophrenia, where pattern-detection runs hot. Subsequent research has shown apophenia is a normal cognitive feature, more pronounced in some people than others, related to dopaminergic activity and openness to experience. High-apophenia minds find patterns faster. They’re also more prone to false positives.
Pareidolia. A subset of apophenia: seeing patterns in sensory noise. Faces in clouds. Voices in white noise. The Madonna in a piece of toast. The visual cortex is built to detect faces and figures because in evolutionary terms, false-positive face detection is much cheaper than false-negative.
Predictive coding. A framework developed by neuroscientist Karl Friston and others over the past two decades. The brain is constantly generating predictions about what’s about to happen and updating those predictions based on incoming sensory data. When a prediction matches reality, dopamine fires. When the match is unexpectedly precise (a thought that materializes, a coincidence that lines up), the dopaminergic response is amplified. This is part of why synchronistic experiences feel meaningful and emotionally charged: the brain’s prediction system is registering a strong match.
The Default Mode Network (DMN). A set of brain regions that activate during self-referential thinking, mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, and narrative construction. The DMN is the part of the brain that builds stories out of disconnected events. It’s especially active when we’re not focused on a task. Synchronistic noticing tends to happen in DMN-dominant states: showering, walking, driving, falling asleep.
None of this debunks Jung’s concept. It explains the cognitive machinery underneath it. The brain is a pattern-detection and meaning-construction organ. Synchronicity, in any framing, requires a perceiving mind that registers correspondence. The neuroscience just describes how that registration works.
Why this doesn’t invalidate the experience
There’s a tendency in skeptical writing to treat the apophenia explanation as a debunking. “It just feels meaningful because your brain is wired to find patterns. There’s nothing actually there.”
This misses what Jung was after. His concept never required that synchronistic events be caused by some outside agent or transmitted from elsewhere. The meaning, in Jung’s framing, was always in the relationship between inner state and outer event, perceived by a psyche capable of recognizing the correspondence.
Saying “your brain constructs meaning from coincidence” doesn’t subtract from the experience. Meaning-construction is one of the things minds do. It’s not a decoration on top of reality. It’s part of how reality becomes navigable to a creature like a human. The dopamine spike that comes with a synchronistic noticing is a real event. The pattern-recognition that produced it is genuine cognition. The experience is doing something for the experiencer.
What changes when you understand the mechanism is the level of certainty you assign to the meaning. The signal is real. The interpretation requires care.
How astrology fits
Astrology, philosophically, is synchronicity-thinking applied to time.
It doesn’t claim that planets cause anything. The chart isn’t a list of instructions Mars is sending you. The framework, when taken seriously, is closer to this: the moment a person was born corresponds to a particular configuration of the sky, and that configuration is meaningfully related to certain psychological and life patterns. The planets aren’t pushing. They’re a clock with meaningful hands.
Jung wrote about astrology in exactly this frame. He was a careful reader of his own clients’ charts and used astrology as a tool for understanding archetypal patterns. He didn’t believe Saturn was causing anyone’s depression. He thought Saturn’s position in a chart corresponded to certain enduring patterns the person would likely encounter, and that the correspondence was synchronistic rather than causal.
This is why the Swiss Ephemeris matters. The astronomical calculation is precise. What the configuration corresponds to in a human life is the interpretive layer, and it’s done with care. The chart describes wiring. Lived experience determines what the wiring meets. The synchronicity isn’t between the planet and the person. It’s between the moment of birth and the patterns that show up later.
This frame asks more of the reader than the popular “Mercury retrograde ruined my week” version. It also holds up better. The thing it asks: notice the pattern, take it as data, then check it against what you actually experience. Most weeks, the correspondence is there. Some weeks it isn’t. Both are useful information.
What to do with synchronistic noticing
A few practical orientations.
Treat synchronicities as data, not as direction. A meaningful coincidence is information about the state of the perceiver’s attention as much as about the world. Notice what you’re noticing. The pattern often tells you what’s on your mind more than it tells you what to do.
Frequency tells you where the unconscious is active. Per von Franz’s frame, synchronistic clustering tends to mark periods of heightened psychological work. If they’re coming thick lately, that’s usually a marker of an inner threshold, not a marker that the universe has special plans for you this week.
Distinguish noticing from interpretation. The noticing is automatic. The interpretation is a separate step that benefits from slowing down. The cardinal at the window is a fact. “It’s grandma” is an interpretation. Both can be held without collapsing into one.
Don’t bet the farm on a single sign. This is the classical caution. Synchronicities are useful as patterns across time, not as singular instructions. If a decision is being made on the basis of one apparent sign, that’s usually a sign about the decision-maker’s relationship to uncertainty.
The astrology can be used the same way. A transit isn’t an order. It’s a clock-reading. What the moment corresponds to in your life is something only you can confirm or disconfirm. The synthesis is most useful when the chart’s description and your lived experience are checked against each other.
The actual point
Synchronicity is a real phenomenon if you define it carefully. The careful definition is Jung’s: meaningful correspondence between an internal state and an external event, where the connection isn’t causal. Most popular use of the word stretches well past this definition, and the stretch isn’t sinister. It’s the human tendency toward meaning-making expressing itself in language.
The neuroscience explains the cognitive machinery without erasing the experience. The brain is built to find patterns. When it finds one that lines up with an internal state, the match feels significant, and that significance is doing real psychological work.
The practical use is to take synchronicities seriously as data and lightly as instructions. The world is meaningful. The meaning is constructed in the relationship between attention and event. That isn’t less than what synchronicity is sometimes claimed to be. It’s a more honest version of it, and a more useful one.
More from the observatory
Stay in the loop
Collective transits, lunations, and the patterns shaping your inner life. No spam, ever.