Mark Gagnon

The term is actually coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1952.

Jung basically defines synchronicity as the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.

You can see how this is kind of splitting the difference.

The critical word here is meaningful.

A synchronicity isn't just a coincidence.

It's a coincidence that feels like it matters.

But it's also not a miracle because Jung isn't claiming that God or Allah is intervening.

He was proposing something else completely, that the universe might have some type of underlying order, some type of...

cosmic tissue between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of events that doesn't actually operate through cause and effect.

So to recap, a miracle has a divine author, a coincidence has no author, and a synchronicity has...

some meaning, but is kind of a question mark.

And it's important to understand that these aren't scientific categories, right?

These are frameworks for interpretation.

The event itself is the exact same.

The thing that changes is ultimately the story that we tell ourselves about it.

And by the way, these concepts didn't show up at the same time in history.

And I think that the timeline also indicates something to us about what's going on.

So for example, miracles, these are ancient.

They're as old as religion itself.

Every civilization with a god or multiple gods has the concept of miracles.