Carl Jung's Work on the I-Ching
Carl Gustav Jung is the founder of what has come to be known as "depth psychology." The breathtaking scope and depth of his work still commands the highest respect in psychological and academic circles. His postulation of universal principles, or "archetypes" operating in the field of what he defined as the "collective unconscious," as well as the synchronicity theory, make for fascinating study. As for the latter, in his work "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" Jung explained
"This ... involves a certain curious principle that I have termed 'synchronicity', a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers."
According to Jung, synchronistic thinking is "field thinking," the center of which is time, a moment in time. From a synchronistic point of view, the important question is not why has something occurred, or what factor caused this effect, but rather what likes to happen together in a meaningful way at the same moment. What types of events, including psychological events, happen together in time?
