Jung is not describing magic here, and he is not describing luck. He is describing a structure of meaning that exists prior to the question of cause — a third thing, neither mechanical sequence nor arbitrary coincidence, but what he calls "peculiar interdependence." The word peculiar is doing quiet work: not supernatural, not ordinary, but specifically odd in the way that genuine psychic events are odd, which is to say irreducible to the categories we use to dismiss them.

What synchronicity names is the moment when inner and outer lose their insulation from each other. The dream that prefigures the phone call. The image that walks off the page into the street. For the pneumatic tradition — and most of us have inherited it — the reflex is to make this numinous, to treat the collapse of inside and outside as a visitation, a sign from above, evidence of something governing the whole. That reflex is understandable. It is also a way of not staying with what the experience actually discloses: that the psyche is not sealed, that meaning is not a property of the mind alone, and that the world occasionally answers in a language the ego did not write.