An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Synchronicity
C. G. Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist who initially worked with 
Freud is particularly known through 
Memories, Dreams and Reflections
, 
which became central to the thinking of the counter-culture of the 1960s. 
He was interested in the workings of the unconscious and in the way 
events seemed linked in ways inexplicable by causality. He saw synchron-
icity as an acausal link between events, in other words, meaningful coin-
cidences. Jung thought that part of the psyche was not subject to the laws 

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Types of Spiritual Experience
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of space and time and that synchronicity showed the inherent meaning-
fulness of the world. This way of looking at life has become quite wide-
spread, with many people today maintaining that there is no such thing 
as a coincidence, everything is part of a pattern.
In his popular books beginning with 
Conversations with God
, Neale 
Donald Walsch builds on this sense of presence, interpreting it as God’s 
communication with us. We just need to recognize the way the communi-
cation takes place, enter into a conversation, move on to friendship and 
then communion. In the last in the series, Walsch writes:
Each of us has the ability to access eternal wisdom. Indeed, I believe 
that God is inspiring all of us, all of the time. And while all of us have 
had this experience, some of us have chosen to call it something else:
Serendipity.
Coincidence.
Luck.
Accident.
Freak experience.
Chance encounter.
Perhaps even Divine Intervention.
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Here is an event which meant a lot to a grieving son, which enhanced 
his respect for his mother’s spirituality:
When my mother, aged 83 was taken into hospital with pneumonia, 
I was sent for and got to her bedside about 7.00 pm. She was just 
able to talk, and the nurse said she might live for some time. My 
sister was visiting tomorrow so I decided to go home to my wife 
and children, but first I would go the Reception and leave a note for 
the chaplain asking him to give her Holy Communion. Walking down 
the long corridor in this huge hospital I saw a man in a clerical 
collar approaching. I asked him if he was the chaplain. He was. 
He gave her the sacrament at 9.00 pm. She died at about 4.00 am the 
next morning. What a Synchronicity between my thought and his 
appearance. [005452]