Synchronicity. We’ve all had them. Without fail, they manage to arise unexpectedly. Sometimes, they are simple or fun, like a Universal wink and nod. Sometimes, they are profound – teaming with meaning, enough to provoke a complete u-turn on one’s life path.

Regardless of what we call synchronicity, one thing is certain: we know they happen. But how do they occur? What is the recipe by which a synchronicity comes together to create the perfect food for thought (or action)? Moreover, how is it that synchronistic events are able to bring about a coming together of “past” “present” and “future?”

This is a question I’ve pondered previously, but not until a few short weeks ago, did I muse over this conundrum like never before. I’d run into an old-old friend. A childhood friend whom I hadn’t seen for probably over 40 years. After she “arbitrarily” popped into my mind one evening, I temporarily became pre-occupied with locating her, if only to find out how and what she was doing with her life some forty or so years later. To no avail, I finally let the idea of finding her go back to where it came from – wherever that might have been.

And then…

As if on cue, per my thought-felt request, several weeks later…there she was! Both of us shopping in a local discount store only five minutes from my home. I found out she’d been living in a neighboring town for years, essentially right next door to me!

Repeat: I hadn’t seen her for 40+ years!

It was this jaw dropping, irrefutable synchronicity that caused me to explore how these events actually occur, but with one caveat: that I may never truly know the process that is ultimately at play.

Here were my questions:

Pertaining to the latter – I certainly don’t think so!

Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung was one who considered such questions with great enthusiasm as well. In his book On the Nature of the Psyche, he attempts to explain the means by which synchronicity can and does occur. He says…

Since psyche and matter are contained in one in the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that the psyche and matter are two different aspects of one in the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the non-psychic can behave like the psychic and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.

If the thought of my friend represented the “psyche” and the actuality of our meeting represented the “matter” of reality, then Jung’s hypothesis is a point certainly worth pondering. Because we, as linear thinking habitual creatures, tend only to rationalize phenomena (no matter how irrational it may be), we can only decipher its reality by thinking in terms of cause and effect, when in actuality, particularly when looking at it from a quantum perspective, what appear as separate events (or states) may in fact be one-in-the-same, only appearing as if they’re different and separated by space as well as time.

While taking all of this into account and re-asking myself the aforementioned questions, I had a lucid realization that this is not a case of multiple choice: scenario 1, 2, 3, or 4, but rather a blending, blurring, and coalescing of time, space, wave, particle, thought, action, cause, effect, physical, non-physical, etc.

This indeed may be the true nature of reality and of synchronicity.

And the true understanding of what it means when it is said,  “All resides in the present!”

Synchronicity may just be our biggest clue!

Alexis Brooks is an award-winning broadcast journalist, #1 best-selling author of Conscious Musings – Contemplations to Transform Life and Realize Potential and is the host of the popular Higher Journeys Radio program, presented in association with Conscious Life News. Visit Alexis on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube!