connections between events causally, but rather as synchronicities. Thus we could say that man can pose two legitimate questions to nature. He can ask: Why does this happen when I do that? This question leads to the establishment of the causality principle, which has now been relativized to the level of probability. Or he can ask: What in nature tends to coincide in the same moment? That is also a legitimate question, the one that the Oriental peoples have asked. This idea was implicit in their idea of Tao. The Tao is more or less the cosmic meaning at each moment. Thus we should say: the total meaningful moment of time that lies behind all appearances is the Tao. For instance, Lao-tzu says: Because the eye gazes but can catch no glimpse of it, It is called elusive. Because the ear listens, but cannot hear it, It is called the rarefied. Because the hand feels for it but cannot find it, It is called the infinitesimal.... These are called the shapeless shapes, Forms without form, Vague semblances. Go towards them, and you can see no front; Go after them, and you see no rear. [Chap. 14] Heaven's net is wide; Coarse are its meshes, but nothing slips through. [Chap. 73]13 Chinese thought presumes that the whole of nature is a psycho-physical unity or has a unitary wholeness, which, however, escapes observation that concentrates on details. In the West we find the beginnings of a similar outlook in antiquity and the Middle Ages, primarily in the doctrine of the sympathy of all things and in astrology. This element can also still be found in the philosophy of the Renaissance, where a symbolic and psychophysical wholeness of all cosmic existence is referred to. This wholeness is based on the postulated existence of a world soul or on the sympathy principle. The idea of synchronicity that comes closest to Jung's is Leibniz's concept of a prestabilized harmony. 14 In his view, God as the author of things, as the first Monad, "flashed" the other monads or essences out of Himself. There is no causal relationship among the monads. Human souls are monads, and as human beings we cannot causally affect one another, for the monads are "windowless." The fact that we can communicate with one another and that apparent connections do develop rests on all monads being like synchronized watches. They all experience the same thing at the same time because they are in harmony; thus seemingly causal contacts take place. The only difference between Jung's concept of synchronicity and Leibniz's prestabilized harmony is that the latter assumes that synchronistic phenomena are general and regular phenomena, while the Jungian view is that this does not appear empirically to be the case. For example, we are not able to predict synchronistic phenomena. They elude all predictability. If they took place regularly, then we would be able to predict them. However, the most we can say is that something synchronistic might happen when an archetype is constellated; and if something does happen, then it will have the same meaning as the archetype. But we cannot predict this with certainty-it might happen, it might not.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is pointing at something the Western mind keeps trying to domesticate. Causality asks why events follow one another; the question Lao-tzu poses is entirely different — what tends to coincide, what meaning gathers at a given moment the way weather gathers at a given place. That second question has no foothold in predictability, and this is precisely what makes it threatening to a mind trained on control.
The Leibniz comparison is instructive because it shows what happens when the Western tradition reaches toward this idea and cannot quite let go of its own assumptions. Prestabilized harmony salvages regularity — God winds the clocks, the monads stay synchronized, and the phenomenon becomes, in principle, predictable from the outside. Jung refuses that comfort. Synchronicity is not a law; it is an event. It constellates when an archetype is active, it carries the meaning of that archetype, and then it either happens or it doesn't. No formula survives contact with it.
What this means practically is that the soul's most significant moments will never submit to the causal register. You cannot engineer them, cannot schedule them, cannot use preparation to guarantee their arrival. Heaven's net is coarse — the meshes are wide, the weave looks loose — and yet nothing slips through. The assurance is not mechanical. It is of a completely different order, and the mind that wants to verify it in advance has already missed what it was asking.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Psyche and Matter·2014