Synchronicity, Science, and The Search for Meaning

A podcast conversation, the new surgeon general nomination, and the I Ching

Raymond Jonson, Casein Tempera No. 1, 1939; The Albuquerque Museum

I was honored to be a guest on

Elise Loehnen

’s podcast last week to talk about synchronicity and The I Ching. Our conversation was far-ranging as we explored the tension between science and the sacred, the constant dance of the feminine and the masculine, and the search for stability and meaning. Elise invited me on her show this time not to promote a specific book, but to travel together into terrain that we could both spend hours and hours exploring. (You can listen here.)

Our conversation also took on more weight for me with the concurrent nomination of a new surgeon general. In ways that make my head spin, the far right and liberal wellness world meet each other in RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement (one that includes some dear friends). The pick for surgeon general is in my demographic in various ways, including being a Portlander practically in my neighborhood, and she says many things about preventative healthcare, personal agency, and the failures of the American medical system that I agree with. Yet, in a display of extreme cognitive dissonance, she is fully aligned with an administration that has gutted healthcare infrastructure for people in this country and all over the world. They’ve already stripped women of access to lifesaving healthcare, leaving many dead, disabled, or in handcuffs for having miscarriages or high-risk pregnancies (the majority of them being low-income Black and brown women). They’re gutting Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for low-income Americans. They’re destroying trans healthcare and promoting attacks on LGBTQ+ people. They're jettisoning basic preventative medicine, rolling back decades of progress in public health, and overall promoting a very middle class, white supremacist, heteronormative, ableist, misogynistic narrative around healthcare and “self-care.” The new surgeon general nominee is promoting personal agency in a vacuum.

This strange, inconsistent meeting ground of the left and right on science and healthcare will lead to more deaths and worsened health for all of us. It’s like announcing the urgent need to address the extreme inequality of car safety for women, while simultaneously directing all municipalities to turn off traffic signals, remove stop signs, shutter DMVs, and promote a drive-fast-without-your-seatbelt lifestyle. Just as a progressive person might find themselves nodding along to the common-sense notion of addressing safety over here (you can almost see the magician causing a distraction), the lives of millions of people are being placed at risk over there, there, and there.

In response to our collective disillusionment with insurance companies and the hyper-specialization of American medicine, MAHA has erected an almost comically narrow worldview. I’d be laughing if it weren’t putting all of our lives in danger, while actively targeting the most vulnerable among us.

I say all of this because in our conversation, Elise and I talked all about the need for our understanding of science to expand (not contract). We spoke about the frustration of having Western science consistently disregard profound personal experiences like inexplicable healing and moving synchronicities as being utter nonsense, despite modern physics acknowledging this expanded reality for nearly a century now.

This is a fight that Jung was up against at the time, working alongside leading quantum physicists to try to make sense of their joint reality and research.

Having spent many years learning about science from an Eastern viewpoint, Jung explained that modern physics had encountered limits to the standard Western perception of how the world works. In a lecture he delivered in 1935, Jung tried to introduce the European mind to a more expanded view of science.

The principle of causality is not the only principle; it is only relative.

People may say: ‘What a fool to say that causality is only relative!’ But look at modern physics! The East bases its thinking and its evaluation of facts on another principle. We have not even a word for that principle. The East naturally has a word for it, but we do not understand it. The Eastern word is Tao.

…I use another word to designate it, but it is poor enough. I call it synchronicity. The Eastern mind, when it looks at an ensemble of facts, accepts that ensemble as it is, but the Western mind divides it into entities, small quantities. You look, for instance, at this present gathering of people, and you say: ‘Where do they come from? Why should they come together?’ The Eastern mind is not at all interested in that. It says: ‘What does it mean that these people are together?’ That is not a problem for the Western mind. You are interested in what you come here for and what you are doing here. Not so the Eastern mind; it is interested in being together.

…[They experiment] with the being together and coming together at the right moment, and it has an experimental method which is not known in the West, but which plays a large role in the philosophy of the East. It is a method of forecasting possibilities, and it is still used by the Japanese Government about political situations; it was used, for instance, in the Great War. This method was formulated in 1143 B.C.¹

This method, of which Jung speaks, is the I Ching.

During our conversation, I read the following quote from the preface to The Secret of the Golden Flower, an ancient Chinese alchemical text that Jung explored as a parallel to his work on individuation. The author of the preface is Jung’s colleague and translator of many of his works from German to English, Cary F. Baynes. Here, she is speaking about the tension between science and the sacred that so many of us are still trying to hold today; a tension that, with vaccines, climate change, and nuclear technology in the balance, remains a rather life-or-death issue.

Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophes. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the demonic forces of the latter and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture. The solution cannot be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent or mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to the spirit for the meaning of life.

I don’t know if it strikes you this way, but for a quote that is nearly 100 years old, it feels like a shout into the future and a reflection of almost the exact same issues that we’re wrestling with today.

The answer, as always, resides in holding the tension of the opposites, as difficult as that is. Not, as the strange saying goes, cutting off the nose to spite the face. MAHA’s work is all about the latter.

Listen to Our Conversation:

You can also learn more and read the transcript here.

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Upcoming Group Consultation of the I Ching:

Paid subscribers can join the live gathering.

Sunday, June 22nd, 10am-12pm PDT / 1-3pm EDT

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Learn to Consult the I Ching — 60min video:

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.

1. Tavistock Lectures in Analytical Psychology: It’s Theory and Practice, C.G. Jung, 1935