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What is "Sync"?



This four-letter word is hard to pin down.

It's become a catchall,
somewhat similar to "Meta",
but "Sync" usually denotes an interconnectedness,
a correspondence or co-occurrence,
often between inner mental states
and outer waking life.

Perhaps it is the very indefinable/unexplainable nature of Sync that keeps us continually exploring its strange and beautiful mysteries.





Our focus is on Synchronicity

with offshoot topics, such as:
Art, Philosophy, Science, Politics, High-Weirdness, and Esoterica.





Synchronicity

aka
"meaningful coincidence"


"Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity; this is his definition: 'Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.' A shorter definition would be a meaningful coincidence. Shorter still would be to just say pay attention. The shortest definition of synchronicity is magic."

—Mike Clelland, Sync Book Vol.2



"Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality.
Just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape through the seemingly outer world.
There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds,
not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light,
but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum."
—Paul Levy, Sync Book Vol.2



Synchronicity, as "meaningful coincidence",
is a fascinating phenomenon by itself.

And yet, the additional
metaphysical/psychological implications
caused by examining the word "meaning",
particularly within the context of
non-linear phenomena that already have us
questioning the nature of reality,
serve to open a few more rabbit holes.



"The research being done by those of us in The Sync Books and a much larger online field, deals not only with synchronicity, but also a number of related topics —such as comparative mythology & mythological archetypes, symbology & iconography (often focusing on esoteric symbolism), media analysis, trend recognition & forecasting, consciousness, dreaming and the nature of reality . . . Ours is a study that combines all of these into a kaleidoscope lens with which to view the world —essentially an applied study of synchronicity— achieved by developing an understanding of, and relationship with, the syncs. While some of us tend to think of it as a science, others as an emerging art form, and others still as a spiritual tool, most of us agree that it is probably a mix of all three."

—Alan Abbadessa-Green, Suicide Kings



Myths and Archetypes


"Even before the break with Freud, Jung's readings in mythology had turned his center of concern from the daylight world of time, space, and personalities to a timeless eviternity of satyrs, nyphs, centaurs, and dragons to be slain . . . It was this radical shift of ground from a subjective and personalistic, essentially biographical approach to the reading of the symbolism of the psyche, to a larger, culture-historical, mythological orientation, that then became the characteristic of Jung's psychology. He asked himself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that he did not know. 'So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.'"

—Joseph Campbell


"The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations.
For the root matter is the mother of all things."

—Carl Jung





"It seems to me their origin [i.e. archetypes] can only be explained by assuming them to be
deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity."
—Carl Jung



Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth" or "the Hero's Journey"



Magic(k) and Correspondences


Crowley defined Magick as "the Science and Art of
causing Change to occur in conformity with Will".
Carl Jung defined synchronicity as a mirroring of the
outer world with inner mental processes.
Clearly these two are relating to similar phenomena,
though one is attributing it to unconscious expression
and the other is doing it consciously, willfully.

"Ah! Well the thing about magic that appeals to me is its difference to religion. The two words are very different. Religion is from the Greek or Latin root religari, which is the same root as ligamenta and ligature, and so it means bound together in one space. Now that always feels a bit unnatural to me. It seems very unlikely that any two human beings on the face of the planet would believe, be bound together, in exactly the same thing. So, alright, magic is a language but perhaps a better analogy is to say: Each religion is a language, and magic is linguistics. In the sense that, if you are a linguist, there's no such thing as a false language. It's not like, Oh yeah French is real, but Russian is not a real language. So if you're a magician, you have to accept ALL of those religions as being, they're all true languages! So, you get a different array of concepts, a different worldview in each of the religions. To some degree I take the quantum position that ALL of them are right, in a sense. In order to see truth, you have to consider a lot of different possible positions and hold them all to be true in some mysterious way. Magic, in this sense, is moving between those different positions, studying them, seeing what information there is to be gleaned from each of them, seeing how they connect up. How, for example, a story in the New Testament of the Bible seems to connect up with an ancient Egyptian legend from the Parari Anu. And how this in turn relates to one of the Tarot cards. Which gives it a certain position on the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. And you follow through these chains of ideas. You do that long enough, you start to get a different set of synaptic connections in your brain, different pathways. And you start to see things in a different way. You start to put things together differently."

—Alan Moore



"Well, whatever else it is, from my viewpoint as an artist it is a method of multiple vision. To take an example from Sir John's story, I.N.R.I., analyzed Cabalistically, no longer has simply a Christian meaning, but a Greek mythological meaning, an Egyptian meaning, an Alchemical meaning, a meaning within the symbolism of the Tarot cards, and so forth. These correspondences are not illogical but analogical. The Cabalist sees each symbol—Christ, Dionysus, Osiris, the Tarot cards and the rest—as meaningful in its own mythic context, just as Professor Einstein's theory sees each measurement as true within its own coordinate system. And the Cabalist seeks, behind these diverse and contradictory symbols, the archetypal meaning which is in human psychology itself, as Dr. Jung has recently reminded us. Just as Professor Einstein looks beyond the diverse and contradictory instrument readings for the abstract mathematical relationships that translate one coordinate system into another."

—Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati





Media and Symbolism

"The moment one gives close attention to anything,
even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
indescribably magnificent world in itself."
—Henry Miller



"The movie never changes. It can't change. But every time you see it, it seems different because you're different. You see different things."
—James Cole (Bruce Willis), 12 Monkeys






Jake Kotze pioneered an artform
with his "synchromystic" videos.
So much more than mashups,
they explore an interconnected web
running through our pop-culture.

This artform has grown to include styles ranging from narrated documentaries to movie/album syncs,
like "Wizard of Oz" meets "Dark Side of the Moon".
Visit Sync Media Research to watch some of them



Mindscapes:
Beyond the Infinite

"By documenting the interconnected patterns we observe, I believe we have become fractal cartographers—mapping the invisible landscapes of a quantum and/or holographic universe. Synchronicity serves as the compass; the treasure is finding the macrocosm in the microcosm and vice versa. As Above, So Below—and everything in between."

—Alan Abbadessa-Green, Suicide Kings
"Scholars of the psychedelics have frequently commented on the synchronicity of Hofmann's discoveries with the discovery and propagation of nuclear weapons. The effect of LSD was discovered just six months after the atom was split. Huxley might have been the first to call LSD the atom bomb of the soul, and Frank Barron wondered if nature was keeping itself in balance by slipping these sacraments into society at the time they were most needed."

—Robert Forte



"A few years back, while preparing to speak on a panel with members of M.A.P.S. (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), I met a man involved with the organization, Robert Forte, who had lived with Albert Hofmann in Switzerland for a number of years and had the pleasure of discussing some key points of interest with him. What blew my mind was when he told me that it was Albert's personal feeling that he had not actually 'discovered' anything in any real sense of the word, but rather that he considered L.S.D. to be more of an 'intelligence,' if you will, and that he had felt that it was actually our new found ability to split the atom that called this intelligence to be born into existence. Robert later expressed in an email, "it was unusual for Albert to describe L.S.D. like that, as an 'intelligence.' He became much more a mystic in his later years, having been shy about making such statements among his scientific colleagues for most of his life." So, it was the belief of the man who first synthesized the substance of substances that aided the counter-culture in a Dionysian direction, that this happening was the direct counter-balance to the most devastating display of authority to ever rear its terrifying face in the history of planet earth. It was the same month and year Hofmann took his first 'trip' that Oppenheimer brought to Los Alamos the initial group of scientists who would help build the first atomic bomb."

—David Plate, Sync Book Vol.2



To dive deeper into sync and all these subjects,
continue to explore the contents of this site.

"Take what you have gathered from coincidence."
—Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue