Synchronicity’s a word the seminal psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined to refer to a seemingly occult phenomenon he had noticed anecdotally: two apparently disconnected but at minimum thematically related events occurring more or less simultaneously, as if some more complex form of cause and effect was at work. You pick up the phone to call someone you haven’t spoken with in a long time and find them on the other end of the line calling them, that sort of thing. Jung chalked it up to a function of the collective unconscious, and for a long time in the ’70s, ‘synchronicity’ became a catch-phrase for both the self-help shrink crowd and the ‘magic is real’ crowd, and still pops up now and then, though the word’s almost never used as Jung meant it.
Full Story: Comic Book Resources: PERMANENT DAMAGE: Issue #137
(via Cabbages & Kings)
April 29, 2004 at 9:24 am
I almost forgot…
I posted on my web site about a synchronicity that happened to me a long while back regarding the movie Donnie Darko and Grant Morrison.
Here’s the link in case you’re interested:
http://www.madghoul.com/ghoul/InsaneRapture/lunacy/delusions/synchronicity.html
April 29, 2004 at 11:36 pm
Robert Anton Wilson wrote a book called Coincidance: A Head Test which was directly related to me purchasing (although not reading) Finnegan’s Wake – and in googling it I encountered this interview RAW did back in (you guessed it)April 23rd 1988 (4.23.88, to be precis:) http://www.nii.net/~obie/1988_interview.htm