Stein is pointing at one of the most seductive moments in depth psychology: the sudden convergence of inner and outer, when the world seems to rhyme with what you carry inside, and the word that rises to meet it — Tao, God's will, ultimate reality — comes preloaded with finality. Notice how quickly the language ascends. Synchronicity begins in concrete particularity, a dream and a phone call, an image and an encounter, and within two sentences Stein has arrived at "as much of ultimate reality as humans are capable of realizing." That is a remarkable altitude to reach from a coincidence.

The experience being described is real. What bears watching is the interpretive move made inside the experience — the feeling that the self has been lifted out of ordinary suffering and placed inside a larger order that holds it. Every tradition that has named this feeling has simultaneously made a claim about what the feeling means, and the claim is nearly always that the convergence is benevolent, foundational, salvific in some register. Jung himself was more cautious: the Self that orchestrates synchronicities is not identical to goodness. The archetype is autonomous, not benign. To live in the Tao or the will of God may be no more comfortable than to live anywhere else. The rhyming of worlds does not promise that what rhymes is something you would have chosen.