Synchronicity

David Peat has been reflecting on and teaching about synchronicity for many years, and this is the second book on the subject about events that break through into everyday life with a great sense of significance and numinosity, strongly linking the inner and outer. David discusses the nature of mind and consciousness more generally before moving on to the work of Freud and especially of Jung, who coined the term. Jung had a close relationship with the the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who helped him develop some of his ideas but was going through a considerable upheaval in his personal life. Jung helped him work through some powerful dreams and unconscious material. Pauli frequently exerted a powerful effect on objects and equipment. The next chapter explores scientific connections through forces and fields, including the work of Rupert Sheldrake and David Bohm. A chapter on alchemy leads back to a further discussion of synchronicity in relation to causality. A good deal of work on the subject has been carried out in the last 50 years, elaborating the notion of the collective unconscious both in terms of brain and culture as they feed back on each other. Then there is divination – Jung was very interested in the I Ching. David concludes that synchronicity, with its sensitivity to harmony and the indivisibility of consciousness, has a role to play in addressing our cultural crisis as a point of access to a creative source of infinite potential, with mind and matter arising from a deeper order of reality with which we can relate.