Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock
Creating Time Through Synchronicity
Time Beside Time: Carl Jung's Three Types of Synchronicity
Excerpted from Creating Time by Marney Makridakis | Updated 4/29/23
When we embrace nonlinear time, we can explore synchronicity as a new way to order our personal time. Synchronicity refers to the awareness of meaningful connections between objects, people, events, symbols, and feelings.
The word literally means "same time"; Carl Jung coined it to describe what he called "an acausal connecting principle" that links mind and matter. He identified three types of synchronicity:
- The coinciding of a thought or feeling with an outside event
- A dream, a vision, or a premonition of something that happens in the future
- A dream or vision that coincides with an event occurring at a distance
Scientific fields of quantum physics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory provide a context for synchronicity, as many scientists believe that all components of life, from people and animals to cells and molecules, are part of an all-encompassing web of information and that no event is ever isolated unto itself. In my own "web of life," I've noticed that synchronicity reveals itself in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. Examples include, but are not limited to, premonitions about events and ideas, surprising connections with other people, meaningful associations taken on by objects and symbols, and inspired ideas and plans that seem to "match up" with external experiences.
Synchronicity and Time
Observing synchronicity allows us to get out of sequential time and invite a sense of enchantment and new possibility into our lives. By their very nature, synchronicities involve patterns that transcend the usual limits of space and time. They provide a glimpse of something beyond our normal rationality and our general understanding of how space and time work. Curiosity about how the world works is inherent in all of us, regardless of culture or religious background. Nurturing our curiosity stimulates both our creativity and our humanity.
Synchronicity awakens and expands our natural curiosity with new examinations of what we believe, what we don't believe, and what we might believe. Stretching our belief muscles in this way spills over into stretching our perception of time and how time works. When we can grasp the possibility that the connective space-time threads in synchronicity are a natural flowing of time, then we see synchronicity no longer as events but simply as a way to experience space-time itself.
Perhaps synchronicity is more ordered than we think it is. Perhaps synchronicity is a more natural ordering of time, but it seems rare to us because our experience of time is fragmented. Perhaps the more present, connected, and aware we are, the more we see that synchronicity is the norm and not the exception.
Excerpted from the book Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life ©2012 Marney Makridakis. Printed with permission of NewWorldLibrary.com.
About Marney Makridakis
Marney K. Makridakis is the author of Creating Time and Hop, Skip, Jump and founder of the online community Artella Land. ...
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