GRACE AS SYNCHRONICITY

In his lecture "The Mystery of Consciousness," spiritual teacher Depak Chopra describes divine grace as synchronicity, a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung in the 1920s. 

In his book Synchronicity (1952), Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

After describing more examples, Jung wrote, "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them—for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."