Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts) as the continuous creation 17 of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents. We must of course guard against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as "causeless." This, as I have already stressed, is admissible only when a cause is not even thinkable. But thinkability is itself an idea that needs the most rigorous criticism. Had the atom 18 corresponded to the original philosophical conception of it, its fissionability would be unthinkable. But once it proves to be a measurable quantitity, its non-fissionability becomes unthinkable. Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the (God has bestowed the wish on her and the treasure of [or: found by] the wishingrod). "Beschoenen mit wunsches gewalte" (to make beautiful with the power of the wish) (IV, p. 1329). "Wish" = Sanskrit manoratha, literally, "car of the mind" or of the psyche, i. e., wish, desire, fancy. (A. A. Macdonell, A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary, s. v.) 17 Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive act" of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act, in the sellSe that God "was always the Father and always generated the Son" (Origen, De principiis, I, 2, 3), or that he is the "cternal Creator of minds" (Augustine, Confessions, XI, 31, trans. F. J. Sheed, p. 232). God is contained in his own crcation, "nor docs he stand in need of his own works, as if he had place in them where he might abide; but endures in his own eternity, where he ahides and creates whatever pleases him, both in heaven ami earth" (Augustine, on Ps. 113: 14, in Expositions on the Book of Psalms). What happens successively in time is simultaneous in the mind of God: "An immutable order binds mutable things into a pattern, and in this order things which are not simultaneous in time exist simultancous]y outside time" (Prosper of Aquitaine, Sententiae ex Augustino delibatae, XLI [Migne, PL., LI, col. 433]). "Tempora] succession is without time in the eternal wisdom of God" (LVII [Migne, col. 455])' Before the Creation there was no time-timc only began with created things: "Rather did time arise from the created than the created from time" (CCLXXX [Migne, col. 468]). "There was no time before time, but time was created together with the wor]d" (Anon., De triPlid habitaculo, VI [Migne, P. L., XL, col. 995])' 18 [From 6. ro!-, o$, 'indivisible, that cannot be cut,'- TRANs.] 518 SYNCHRONICITY: AN ACAUSAL CONNECTING PRINCIPLE 9 correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung's move here is more radical than it first appears. He is not asking you to believe in coincidences — he is asking you to notice that "thinkability" itself is a historical achievement, not a fixed aperture of the mind. The atom was once by definition indivisible; then it wasn't. What changed was not the atom but the conceptual equipment available to hold it. Every "unthinkable" marks the edge of a current framework, not the edge of what is real.
The argument about synchronicity rides on this. When meaningful coincidences accumulate past any statistically credible threshold, the reflex is to keep insisting on chance rather than entertain a pattern that has no cause. But that insistence is itself a commitment — to causality as something more than a useful explanatory tool, as a kind of metaphysical sovereign. Jung is uninterested in overthrowing causality; he is interested in catching the soul in the act of treating one cognitive habit as if it were reality itself.
The footnote about continuous creation is not decorative. The Augustinian thread — that temporal succession is simultaneous in eternity, that time arose with created things rather than before them — is what gives the synchronistic pattern its ontological ground. The pattern doesn't visit; it persists. What changes is whether a particular encounter breaks the causal trance long enough to let the pattern be read.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche·1960