A friend who works in finance, a man who does not believe in much, told me this story over coffee. He had been thinking, for weeks, about a partner from his old firm — someone he had not spoken to in eight years and had a complicated falling-out with. He could not get the man out of his head.
On a Thursday afternoon he walked into a deli he had never been to, in a part of the city he never went to, and the partner was at the counter ordering a sandwich. They had not spoken since 2018. They have spoken every month since.
If you ask my friend what that was, he will tell you, after a long pause, that he does not know. He still does not believe in much. But he no longer says the word coincidence the way he used to.
He is not alone. There is a name for what happened to him, and there has been one since 1952, when Carl Jung — the most rigorous psychiatrist of his generation — gave it the word synchronicity. Jung defined it as a meaningful coincidence of two events with no causal connection. He spent the last twenty years of his career taking the phenomenon seriously, because the patients he had spent decades listening to would not stop reporting it.
The interesting question is not whether synchronicity is real. People have been reporting it consistently across every culture in every era of recorded history. The interesting question is what is happening — and what, if anything, the data says about it.
The cheap rebuttal to synchronicity is that the human brain is a pattern-matching machine. We see faces in clouds. We remember the hit and forget the miss. We over-weight the once-in-a-decade event and forget the thousands of ordinary days it happened against. This is true, and it is the right place to start.
But it is not sufficient. The skeptical literature itself acknowledges this. The kinds of coincidences people report as meaningful are not random hits — they are the specific event a person was praying about, dreaming about, agonising over, the week before it happened. They are domain-specific, time-bound, and statistically rare. The brain's pattern machine cannot bias outcomes. It can only notice them.
So there are really two separate questions. Why does the event happen. And why does the person notice it. Both are interesting. Most of the science is now on the second, and what it is finding is more than the materialist account predicts.
The HeartMath Institute, which has been studying the electromagnetic field of the heart for thirty years, ran a series of experiments through the 2010s on what they call non-local intuition. People were shown a randomised series of images — some calming, some emotionally charged — and the experimenters measured heart-rate variability before each image was selected by the random generator.
The hearts of the subjects responded, measurably, to the emotional content of the image seconds before the image was chosen. The effect was small but consistent across hundreds of trials. The conventional explanation — that information cannot move backwards through time — does not account for the data. The HeartMath researchers and several independent replications have concluded that the body responds to information that has not yet, by any local mechanism, reached it.
The heart appears to receive and respond to information about a future event before the event happens.
If that is true, even in the small range the experiments measured, then the moment of noticing a coincidence is not a brain artefact. It is a system in the body picking up signal that the conventional account says should not be there.
Jung went further than describing the phenomenon. He argued, quietly toward the end of his life, that synchronicity was evidence of an underlying unus mundus — one world — where psyche and matter are two expressions of the same underlying reality. He was saying, in the careful language of a clinician who knew his profession would not forgive him for it: the inner and the outer are connected at a level we cannot yet measure, and meaningful coincidence is a momentary visibility of that connection.
This is, almost word for word, what Planck said about the relationship between consciousness and matter from the physics side. It is what every contemplative tradition has said. It is what David Bohm, the physicist who studied with Einstein and went on to develop implicate order theory, described when he said the universe behaves more like a hologram than a clock — every part containing the whole.
Synchronicity, in that frame, is not a glitch. It is a brief tear in the surface where you see what is always actually there.
Two things shift if you take this seriously.
First, you stop dismissing the small signals. The strange call from the person you were thinking of. The book that opens to the exact paragraph. The stranger's sentence at the bus stop that lands like it was written for you. None of these is proof. All of them are data points. You are not crazy for paying attention.
Second, and more important, you start noticing that the more aligned your inner state is — the more coherent, the less fearful — the more often these moments happen. People who pray daily, who sit in stillness, who hold their attention well, do not report fewer synchronicities than the average. They report more. This is not because they are credulous. It is because the signal-to-noise ratio of their interior changed. They are picking up what was always there.
The Science of God takes the position — and the data backs it — that the field around you is not metaphorical. It is the electromagnetic signature of your heart, the coherence or incoherence of your nervous system, the actual physics of how you are showing up. Stage Four is the chapter that turns the corner from "is there anything" to "is it responding," and the language of synchronicity belongs at the centre of that turn.
You can call the man in the deli a coincidence. You can call him a synchronicity. The category you put him in says less about him than about how willing you are to let the world be larger than you currently think it is.
Either way, my friend now answers his phone differently when an old name comes up. So would you.