The Cosmos, Synchronicity, & Us

In Richard Tarnas’s wonderful book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimation of a New World View, there’s a chapter called The Archetypal Cosmos, in which he talks about synchronicity and how it led Carl Jung to his interest in astrology.

“Over the years, many researchers have taken a special interest in the problem of coincidences, precisely because such events could be interpreted as evidence that the world possess more underlying unity, order, and meaning than the modern mind has assumed,” Tarnas writes. “…it represented a phenomenon that, simply put, should not have been occurring, at least not in a random, purposeless universe.”

Tarnas goes on to say that the “problem” with coincidences is that even though they are personally significant, they resist objective assessment. In other words, they can’t be tested scientifically, in a laboratory setting. It’s not as if a group of scientists or researchers can run tests on synchronicity that are replicable by other researchers. How do you “test” something that is personally significant but which eludes measurement by objective bystanders? Synchronicity, by its very nature and definition, is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that can’t be explained by cause and effect and is meaningful to the observer – i.e., to you, the person who experiences it.

He notes that the existence of this deeper order and underlying unity could only be substantiated if the phenomenon was in some way “public and pervasive rather than private and exceptional” and only if the “archetypal patternings were more universally discernible and associated more widely with collective experience…” One area that seemed to fit this description was, as Tarnas puts it, “highly controversial” – astrology.

Jung began to seriously study astrology in 1911 and at one point that year, wrote to Freud that his evenings were consumed by it. “I make horoscope calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth.Some remarkable things have turned up…”

Keep in mind that when Jung talks about horoscope calculations, he’s undoubtedly referring to the complicated math involved in creating a horoscope from scratch. In the days before computers and apps, this process used to take me – a math-challenged individual – several days. Then I would sometimes ask my dad, an accountant and math whiz, to check over my calculations. So I can almost envision Jung, hunched over a bunch of papers that are filled with mathematical scribblings.

According to Tarnas, Jung’s interest eventually developed into a major research focus for him and as he grew older, he “devoted himself with considerable passion to astrological research.”

I thought this particular fact was fascinating and quickly pulled out Deirdre Bair’s biography, Jung – nearly 900 pages long – and flipped to the index, looking for the word astrology. The entry is short – 7 mentions and a couple of footnotes. The mentions mostly refer to Jung’s research into marriage charts. But Bair’s book is different from Tarnas’s. She wrote a biography about Jung, the vast spectrum of who he was as a human being. Tarnas wrote about Jung’s ideas – namely synchronicity and astrology.

Tarnas started his journey as a skeptic who basically dismissed astrology as bogus. But he decided to take a deeper look because of some colleagues whose intellectual judgment he trusted and because he was influenced by what Jung had done. “Once I moved past the usual disparagements of the conventional accounts, I noticed that the history of astrology contained certain remarkable features.”

He found that in the historical periods when astrology flourished in the West- like the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age in England, the High Middle Ages and others – also happened to be eras “in which intellectual and cultural creativity was unusually luminous.” He was impressed that individuals like Goethe, Kepler, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Plato and Aristotle – and yes, Jung – supported the idea that astrology illustrated the underlying unity of humanity through the archetypal structures that are depicted.

“The archetypes associated with specific planetary alignments were equally apt to express themselves in the interior life of the psyche as in the external world of concrete events, and often both at once,” he writes.

And archetypes, as synchronicity often tells us, are the stuff that make up who we are as individuals within a collective. Archetypes are our connective tissue, our Indra’s net, our humanity. Pluck one string in Asia and a string in Chile responds. Pluck a string in Austria and a string in Brazil hums in response. I often wonder if Rupert Sheldrake’s theory about Morphic resonance applies to the archetypes depicted in astrology.

Morphic resonance says that a young kid in the 21^st century who hops on a bike and rides off into the sunset without taking a tumble can do so because he draws on the field of information that has accrued about bike riding since the inception of bicycles. With each successive generation, the task or the skill becomes easier because we tap into what has come before us. If Sheldrake is right, does that mean that the experiences, knowledge, and archetypal traits of, say a Virgo, are available to all Virgos? Does it mean the particular traits of that sign become more dominant or readily available to all Virgos?

It’s an interesting thought and takes me back to a conversation Rob and I had with an astrologer and psychic in the late 1980s. He had a pre-birth memory in which he was shown a couple of natal charts, either of which would satisfy whatever he needed to do in his next life. One of the charts was supposedly that of Prince Charles. The other was that of the soul he chose to be.He, like Charles, was a Scorpio, but his life – at least in terms of fame, celebrity, scandal – wasn’t anything like that off Prince Charles Charles.

Who knows what the truth is? It seems we humans are adept at piecing together bits of the truth but that the whole truth, as ephemeral as the secret of oceans and the cosmos, eludes us.