Synchronicity: a true story

By Jolanta Lapiak, circa 1997, 2009.

Definition: Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related, conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as causality.
-- thefreedictionary.com

Below is the English translation for the video in ASL above.

Coincidence #1

In late October 1997 ("around 1998" in the video), my friends and I entered a bookstore at a local shopping mall. I recalled something, "I'm looking for a book I recently saw on the subject of 'synchronicity' that I wanted to read next."

Explained to my friend, I tried to recall the other term for it (which was then "synchronicity"), but I could not. "I remember the book cover but I forget the title. On the cover, there were birds flying out a window or something." Then, I jokingly declared, "I am going to use my intuition to find it and see if it works." I intuitively scanned across the books in the Psychology section.

"No luck," I sighed.

Again, I intuitively scanned across the books. The book, "Practical Intuition," caught my eyes. I pulled it out and judged it by its cover, "It's a New York Bestseller, hmm". To assess its writing style, I randomly opened the book at once. The chapter title boldly spoke right in front of my eyes, "There Are No Coincidences" on page 57. I stared at the page. Wow! My friend looked over my shoulder and laughed. "Not funny," I told her sarcastically.

A Chapter

This was the clue!

Coincidence #2

A week later in another bookstore, I carefully scanned row by row across several rows of the books from the top to the bottom in a large Psychology section. As I scanned across the last row, chances gradually decreased. Unbelievably, I spotted the book there! The title on the spine showed "There Are No Accidents." I pulled it out and the cover showed the "birds flying out of window"!

Book

Coincidence #3

A week or two later, a few other signers and I were invited to tell any of our stories, which were also videotaped, to the ASL students in the ASL/English interpreter program at a college. Naturally, I told this "coincidence" story to the students who pleasantly learned a new word "synchronicity" -- a worthy term added to their arsenal of vocabulary.

At the end of this class, as I walked toward the exit of the building near the main entrance doors, I noticed something out of the corner of my eyes. I turned my head to see a stack of free Calgary-based spirituality magazines in the main entrance/exit facade. I was struck by the title of this magazine, called "Synchronicity".

Magazine

This illustrates one of the magazine issues that were available at that time, for example.

-- Jolanta Lapiak, circa 1998. ASL video 2009.

Quotes

If you would like to submit your view or interpretation, email through the link in the footer below.

"Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world." -- Carl G. Jung (1875-1961)

"Causality as a statistical truth presupposes the existence of acausality, otherwise it cannot be a statistical truth. In other words, the exceptions to causality are real facts which I try to envisage from the standpoint of their meaningful coincidences or synchronicity. As a rule the improbability of a series of meaningful coincidences (i.e., of identical meaning) increases with the number of its individual occurrences." -- C.G. Jung

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why." -- Albert Einstein

"They demonstrate the unity of psyche and matter, forcing us to transcend our rational, scientific, materialistic attitudes." -- Mansfield, 1995. Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-making.