Meaningful coincidence

Charles, you told me you have seen 11:11 on clocks mostly since the day you started the business. This essay is the only serious attempt anyone ever made to say what that is, and it was made by a psychiatrist and a Nobel physicist working together, which is not a sentence you get to write often.

A doctor who ordered horoscopes

In June 1911 Carl Jung wrote to Freud to confess something. He was looking into astrology, he said, and Freud should not worry, because it seemed there was real knowledge in it, knowledge that had been projected onto the sky. Freud worried. They split a few years later over bigger things, but that letter is where this lineage, quiet for two centuries, picks back up.

Jung used horoscopes on patients. In hard cases, he said, he usually had a chart drawn up, because it gave him an angle on the person's character he could not get another way, and it fit often enough to be useful. He did not think the planets did anything to anybody. He thought the chart was a very old picture of the human psyche, a map of the kinds of people there are and the tensions they carry, and that a map drawn by thousands of years of watching people might be worth a look. The archetypes he spent his life on, the mother, the hero, the shadow, the trickster, are cousins of the planetary gods, and he knew it.

The idea

In 1952 he finally published the thing he had been circling for twenty years. Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle. The claim: alongside cause and effect, there is a second way events connect, where two things happen together not because one caused the other but because they share a meaning. He was careful with the word. Not synchronous, merely at the same time. Synchronistic: at the same time, and meaningfully so.

His example is the one everyone tells. A patient who shot down every interpretation he offered was describing a dream about a golden scarab. Something tapped the window behind him. He opened it and caught a beetle, a rose chafer, the nearest thing to a scarab that flies in Switzerland, and handed it to her. The wall came down. Nothing caused the beetle to show up at that second. The beetle and the dream meant the same thing, and the meaning was the connection.

That is how Jung thought astrology worked, if it worked. The chart does not cause you. The chart and you coincide, meaningfully, because both come out of a deeper order he called, borrowing straight from the Hermetic writers, the unus mundus. One world. As above, so below, in a psychiatrist's handwriting.

He actually ran the numbers

He tried to test it. He gathered the horoscopes of 180 married couples, then more, until he had 483 marriages, and counted how often the classic marriage aspects showed up between the partners: one person's Sun on the other's Moon, Moon on Moon, Moon on Ascendant. In the first batch, Sun conjunct Moon topped the table, exactly what the tradition predicts. In the second batch, a different marriage aspect topped it. In the third, a third one. Each batch confirmed astrology and the three together confirmed nothing, because the odds of some aspect topping a table are roughly even.

He published all of it, including the collapse, and then made the collapse part of the argument. The experiment, he said, behaved like a synchronicity itself, handing each batch the answer the experimenter was hoping for and then taking it back. His statisticians were not amused. I find it kind of magnificent.

Pauli

The strangest part is his partner. Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for the exclusion principle, the rule that gives atoms their structure. He was also Jung's patient after a breakdown, and the two wrote to each other for twenty six years about whether physics and psychology were looking at one thing from opposite sides. Pauli took synchronicity seriously enough to publish alongside Jung in 1952, his essay on Kepler sitting next to Jung's on synchronicity in one volume. He also had a reputation among physicists for breaking lab equipment by walking into the room. They called it the Pauli effect. He thought it was funny and he also thought it might be real.

Your 11:11

Here is what Jung would say about the clocks, and it is the honest answer. He would not tell you the universe is texting you. He would ask what the number means to you, point out that a mind primed for a pattern will find it, and then refuse to say that finding it is therefore nothing. Meaning, in his world, is not a weaker kind of fact. It is a different kind, and a life is made of it.

You started a business and the clocks started lining up. In Jung's terms, the business is the scarab. Something in you decided to pay attention at the moment you decided to build something, and the number is the receipt.

Physics did not take him up on it. But physics was about to say some things about time and order that would have made him sit up, and those are on the other side of this shelf.