Synchronicity Cambray

Series Editor’s Foreword
Everything is connected and the web is holy.
—Marcus Aurelius
In my back yard there is a Japanese garden with a pond containing
numerous koi. Shortly before Joseph Cambray arrived to give his Fay
Lectures in Analytical Psychology, which became this book, a snake
caught and swallowed a koi. When I saw figure 1 of “Jung’s carving
of a snake swallowing a fish,” I wondered if this was an example of
synchronicity. By the lakeshore at Bollingen, Jung had found a snake
that had choked in the act of swallowing a fish; both animals died. At
the time Jung had been working on the symbolic relationship of the
fish in Christianity and the snake in Alchemy. This incident struck a
chord with me as the snake in my garden was at the edge of the pond
but managed to swallow the fish, which was alive for several hours as
its tail fin moved back and forth. I had not observed such an event
before or after this occurrence.
In the introduction to this book Cambray defines synchronicity
and links it to Jung’s discovery of a science of the sacred, when nature
and psyche come together. He describes synchronicity as a unique
moment “falling together in time.” Since I write haiku, I’m familiar
with such moments when psyche and nature connect in a meaningful
way. We actually characterize these as “haiku moments.” For example,
the haiku below was written when I was on a sabbatical at a Buddhist
university in Japan. I was leaving the school to go home and stopped
by a fishpond on the grounds; I saw that the koi made a moving circle,
or mandala, which symbolizes wholeness.