Synchronicity is Real (Even if It Isn’t)

Navigating the tension between coincidence and meaning.

A friend you haven’t spoken to in years texts you the moment you’re thinking about them. A book falls off a shelf, and it contains the exact passage you didn’t know you needed. You see the same obscure word three times in a single day. None of these things are objectively significant. And yet—they feel charged.

This is the terrain of synchronicity.

Carl Jung defined synchronicity as “a meaningful coincidence”—two events with no apparent causal connection that nonetheless feel linked in significance. Unlike superstition, synchronicity isn’t about prediction or control. And unlike logic, it doesn’t depend on explanation. It lives in felt resonance, not reason.

To speak about synchronicity is to stand at the fault line between coincidence and meaning, pattern and projection, reality and interpretation. It’s one of those topics that quickly makes people uncomfortable. It resists verification. It courts magical thinking. It opens doors rationalists would prefer stay shut.

And yet, for many, the experience of synchronicity is unmistakable. Not only psychologically real—but psychologically essential.

So what do we do with it?

The Modern Mind Is Uncomfortable With Mystery

In a culture steeped in scientific materialism, everything that happens must be explainable. We prefer cause-and-effect, mechanisms, and falsifiability. This framework has delivered extraordinary technological power—but it’s less equipped to deal with ambiguous experience.

Synchronicity violates modern assumptions:

• It suggests there might be a logic outside linear causality.
• It implies meaning might be relational, not objective.
• It hints that attention might shape reality more than we think.

To admit the possibility of synchronicity is to admit that some things matter before they make sense. That reality may not be random—or rational—in the ways we’ve been trained to expect.

The Function of Synchronicity

Regardless of whether synchronicities are “real” in an empirical sense, they are real in their psychological function.

They interrupt the momentum of default perception. They arrest attention. They create a pause—a threshold moment in which the symbolic dimension of experience opens up.

In Jungian terms, this is the language of the unconscious breaking into consciousness. Not to deliver certainty, but to offer symbolic orientation.

Synchronicities often appear during times of crisis, transition, or transformation. They serve as meaningful mirrors when language fails—when the psyche is seeking integration and doesn’t yet know how to speak.

In this sense, synchronicity is not superstition. It is psychic punctuation.

Pattern or Projection?

Of course, skeptics will argue that humans are natural pattern-recognizers. That we find connections where none exist. That synchronicity is simply a function of statistical inevitability + a desire for coherence.

They’re not wrong.

But this explanation, while true in part, misses the experiential core of synchronicity. The point is not whether the event is “special” by external standards. The point is what it awakens in the person experiencing it.

To say synchronicity is “just coincidence” is like saying a poem is “just words.” It fails to account for the meaning that emerges in the relational field between symbol and self.

The reality is this: meaning is not objective—it is participatory.
And synchronicity reminds us that we are part of the pattern we are trying to read.

Synchronicity and the Re-Enchanted Mind

Modern life has flattened perception. Algorithms predict our desires before we feel them. Data makes meaning seem interchangeable. Reality has been rendered informational, optimized, and aestheticized. Everything is visible—yet very little feels alive.

Synchronicity resists this flattening. It doesn’t scale. It can’t be monetized. It can’t be explained away. It remystifies perception.

And that might be its most subversive function.
It reawakens a mode of mind that is not just analytical, but symbolic, relational, and open to mystery.

To take synchronicity seriously is not to abandon reason. It is to admit that reason is not the only way of knowing.

The Intelligence of Not-Knowing

The value of synchronicity is not in decoding it like a message. It’s in being present with the not-quite-yet.

Synchronicity doesn’t say “this is a sign.”
It says, “you are in a moment of heightened attention.”
Something is shifting. Stay awake.

This is a perceptual ethic—one that cultivates sensitivity, humility, and participation. It doesn't give answers. It invites presence.

The synchronicity becomes a threshold, not a destination.

Conclusion: Real, Even If It Isn’t

So, is synchronicity “real”?

That depends on what we mean by real.

If real means verifiable, repeatable, and explainable—perhaps not.
But if real means meaningful, transformative, and subjectively undeniable, then yes—absolutely.

Synchronicity is real because it reactivates your relationship to meaning.
Because it reveals how much of reality is shaped not just by facts, but by attention.
Because it reminds you that not everything that matters has to be explained.

And in a culture increasingly defined by noise, numbness, and information overload, that reminder is not just magical—it’s necessary.