Synchronicity (a short essay)

(It has been too long since i have written, my mind has been scattered and wandering about the broken bits, too spread out to find the time to put them together, to find the time to breathe. This is just a short essay i was assigned for my college composition class, the assignmet was to write about a general concept and explain it, since i hate writing about things that do not interest me i tend to find a way to make the paper easier for me to write, hopefully my professor and a few of you like it, thanks for reading. En Lak'ech.)
Synchronicity is a philosophical theory relating to the experience of a series of events that are subsequently unrelated or unlikely to occur together by any chance that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s when working with patients in psychotherapy. This concept does not compete with the notion of causality, cause and effect, or with purely coincidental happenings, but it explains that just as most random events may be grouped together by certain cause, or chance, they may also be grouped together by their meaning, but since meaning is only a highly abstract and complex mental construction that is subjected to both conscious and unconscious influence, a synchronicity is specified by a level of personal and logical understanding of the event as it unfolds. In other words, a synchronicity is a pairing of events that is meaningfully inter-related, and that in no way has a causal explanation for being inter-related. For a simple example, on the way to board an airplane you find that your passport is missing so you are unable to make the flight, purely a happening of chance and cause and effect, but, if the flight you were supposed to be on crashes in a freak accident shortly after takeoff and consequently you were not onboard, this would offer a highly more emotional sense of meaning to you individually. To me, synchronicity is just one other of the many mysterious ways in which the universe, and conscious life itself, resides on it’s own as we all live our personal lives day to day. A synchronism to me is a grouping of events in the personal life that, when noticed for what they are, can completely change certain perspective on that particular happening in one's life.
A lot like the concept of fate or the Buddhist concept of Karma, synchronicity is very much a powerful governing factor in all of our lives that we hardly give appropriate attention to, just as the decisions we choose to make leading to the actions and reactions in our lives that consequently result in the kind of person we are and the way we live our life as a whole. To help further illustrate this event, I will share a personal, life changing experience of synchronicity. Around this time a year ago, a dear friend of mine chose to take his own life at the age of nineteen for reasons unknown to me, the night before his funeral I was unable to sleep as this reality kept haunting me. I eventually became tired of tossing and turning in my bed, and so I arose into the early hours of the morning just before I were to arrive to my the funeral, and went outside to find my father on the porch fervently reading his copy of the Holy Bible. When I confronted him, he told me that he was growing very uneasy as he could not find a certain passage in the Bible, which he believed was in the book of Romans, but had scoured the entire scripture and still could not find what he was looking for. I asked him if he remembered a few words and he told me, “Character, perseverance, and hope”. I then went inside to Google search those few words and to find the correct passage in the book of Romans, chapter five, verse three through five. “Aha!” he exclaimed, and continued to read the passage to me after he had finally found it. The passage quotes as follows; “Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” At the time, I accepted this passage as a powerful and meaningful one to my father, being a great man of faith and love and compassion, but at the time it really had no significant impact on me, I was just glad I could help my dad out. I went inside to get about an hour of sleep before the service, and then went on to somberly drag myself to the church where my friend peacefully lay in a casket surrounded by family and friends. Arriving a few minutes late, I chose a seat in the back by myself and found it hard to focus on the words being spoken by his little sister when finally the priest of the church stepped up to speak a few words on my beloved friend’s behalf, and close the service for a brief viewing ceremony. I continued to only slightly listen as I struggled with the numbness of this all-too real reality, but then something happened as I caught a few words mentioning the book of Romans. I looked up and listened as the bald man at the podium perfectly recited, word for word, Romans chapter five, verse three through five, the exact passage that I had just read that morning, due only to the fact that I was awake at the exact moment my father was looking for this passage, and I chose to look it up. Chills were sent shocking down my spine and the back of my neck as the hairs on my arms stood on end and my head fell into my hands.
To some, synchronistic events are just happening of pure chance, causality or perhaps sheer coincidence, but to others, like Mr. Carl Jung, it reveals an underlying pattern of conceptual framework that is much larger than any of the systematic events that display the observed synchronism. Much similar to déjà vu, the experience of feeling as if an event has already happened, who’s to say if it has or hasn’t? I understand that this idea as a whole may be a little out of reach, but so is the concept of time and of space, of this universe and it’s unfathomable depths, of our planet Earth and the enormous ball of burning gasses and metals that warms your face on a cool fall evening. In whatever way you look at it, this concept, like most others, is only showing how we humans go about trying to figure out ourselves, as well as this world in which we all live in.