Coincidence, Meaningful or Otherwise

One aspect of Jungian writings that relates to Taoist/Buddhist philosophy is his term "synchronicity," which he describes in his foreword to my copy of the I Ching or Book of Changes, as the idea that "the coincidence of events in space and time [means] something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observor or observors."

I went to that foreword after my son's van brought him home, and I noticed the last three characters on the van's license plate were "TZU," which of course is part of the name Lao Tsu (or Tzu) the purported author of the Tao te Ching. That got me thinking about synchronicity, so I set out to find (again) my copy of Jung's Synchronicity, another item in my recovered litany of materials. Only I couldn't find the book. So I went to the I Ching where I figured he would talk about it and in fact found the above definition.

So far so good. But I found something else in there, a letter to me from my lifelong good friend who is now a yoga teacher, dated summer of 1979. In that letter he talks about his lack of writing to me, and says "You ask me if I'm 'not-writing'. Ha! I just got the joke -- I wish I could say that my lack of output was a deliberate act of 'not-writing' but it wouldn't be true. I do 'not-write' because I really dread the chore."

Banter between friends referring to a mutual interest, but the fact that my discovery of the contents of the letter (I knew it was in there but had totally forgotten its content) the day after I had talked about "non-action" or "wu wei" in this blog, and especially in the context of not-writing was a bit jarring. Even more especially because of the convoluted way I got there.

So it goes. Or not. Who knows? Not-me.