Jung loved to repeat a story about a Chinese rainmaker which his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower, told him was a personal experience. Wilhelm was visiting a village devastated by a drought at a time when they sent for a rainmaker. When the rainmaker - who, as was normal in China at the time, was a Buddhist priest - arrived, he was asked what he would require. He asked only for a small hut to live in at the edge of the village. He then retired to that hut. \r\nAt the end of three days, he came out of the hut and it began to rain. While the people of the village scampered in delight, Wilhelm asked the priest how he had brought the rain. The priest said that when he came to the village, he could feel that it was 'out of Tao'; that is, emotionally disturbed. That made him feel 'out of Tao' as well. So he withdrew to the hut until he was once more 'in Tao'. When he did so, the rain came. \r\nThe goal is to experience life simultaneously as both a personal experience and a symbolic act. This is hard to describe, but it can become normal to look at every action in the day, every person we come into contact with, every event we hear about in the world as symbolic. Outer events seem to speak to our inner needs. Personal experience seems to speak to outer events. Out lives seem synchronous with those around us, for better or worse.

• experience
• myth
• taoism
• tao
• symbolic action system
• synchronicity
• balance
• life
• time
• jung

We are culturally and linguistically blind to the world of forces and interconnections clearly visible to those who have retained the Archaic relationship to nature.

• culture
• language
• linguistics
• synchronicity
• relationship
• nature
• understanding
• humanity

Normally we think of causes and effects. I give this book a push and it moves. It moved because I pushed it. The cause preceded the effect. What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.

• external causes
• hyperstition
• relationship
• past
• future
• time
• synchronicity

Q. What is meant by the law of accident? \r\n \r\nA. The life of man-machine, of man who cannot 'do', who has no will or choice, is controlled by accident, for things in ordinary life happen mechanically, accidentally; there is no reason in them. And just as man's external life is controlled by accidental external influences, so is his inner life also controlled by both internal and external influences which are equally accidental. You will understand that, if you realize what it means that man is asleep, that he cannot 'do', cannot remember himself; when you think of the constant unconscious flow of thoughts in man, of day-dreaming, of identifying and considering, of mental conversations that go on in him, of his constant deviation towards the line of least resistance. People think that accidents are rare, but in actual fact most things that happen to them are accidental. What does accident mean? It means a combination of circumstances which is not dependent on the will of the man himself nor the will of another person, nor on fate, as do, for instance, conditions of birth and upbringing, nor on the preceding actions of the man himself. An accident happens when two lines of events cross one another. Suppose a man stands under the roof of a house, sheltering from rain, and a brick falls and hits him on the head. This would be an accident. There are two separate lines of cause and effect. Take the line of the man's movements and the fact that he happened to stop under the roof of that particular house; every small thing in it had a cause, but the brick did not enter into this line of cause and effect. Suppose the brick was negligently set and the rain made it loose and at a certain moment it fell. There is nothing in the life of the man or the life of the brick to connect them. The two lines of cause and effect meet accidentally.

• law of accident
• will
• mechanicalness
• external causes
• self-remembering
• unconscious
• identification
• circumstance
• synchronicity
• the fourth way
• fate
• circumstances
• life
• reason
• influences
• choice
• law
• birth

It is wrong, then to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

• fate
• synchronicity
• coincidence
• circumstances
• beauty
• death
• life

Seven years earlier, a complex neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in Tereza's town.  They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the provincial hospital in his place.  The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed.  He happened to have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant.  Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's table... And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.

• fate
• love
• synchronicity
• suffering
• duty
• time