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The Collective Unconscious

Throughout his life, Jung had been impressed by clusters of significant events occurring together, and by the fact that these events might be physical as well as mental.  The pshysical death of one individual, for exampl, might coincide with a disturbing dream referring to that death in the mind of another.  Jung felt that such coincidences, which he considered "relative common," demanded an explanatory principle in addition to causality.  This principle he named synchronicity.  Once again, Jung seems to have been influenced by Schopenhouer, who had postulated a link between simultaneous events which were causally unconnected.  Jung's idea was that synchronicity was based on a universal order of meaning, complementary to causality.  He thought that synchronistic phenomena were connected with archetypes which he referred to a psychoid factors of the collective unconscious, meaning by this that archetypes were neither physical nor mental by partaking of both realms, and able, therefore, to manifest themselves both physically and mentally simultaneously.  Jung refers to the case of Swenden borg, who experienced a vision of a fire in Stockholm at the same time as an actual fire was raging,  Jung considered that some change in Swedenborg's state of mind gave him temporary access to "absolute knowledge"; to an area in which the limits of space and time are transcended.

The Essential Jung, Selected and Introduced by Anthony Storr, p. 26, MJF Books, NY,NY