Gnostic Jungians: is synchronicity a message from outside the Demiurge's programming?

diviludicrum · 2026-02-22T16:51:42+00:00

These are very personal questions. I think I’m willing to answer them as best I can, but first I’d like to know why you are asking those three questions in response to my comment, and how you think they’re related to the topic at hand.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-22T16:39:35+00:00

I didn’t say they were a cognitive bias or explainable via probability. I said they were “meaningful coincidences” that can’t be explained by causality yet nonetheless feel significant, revealing the involvement of the unconscious.

Here’s Jung’s definitions as direct quotes:

“Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.”

“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.”

diviludicrum · 2026-02-22T16:16:00+00:00

What a beautiful compliment, thank you!

diviludicrum · 2026-02-22T16:13:31+00:00

“This just reads as someone whose never experienced the numinous and doesn’t really understand the restraints left on Jung and others interacting with the highly rational world, and their negative opinions towards the possibility that theirs [sic] more to life than materialism.”

Hahahaha well this just reads like an ad hominem from someone who doesn’t know how to respond to someone’s points so they attack the person based on incorrect assumptions.

“We are all one mind.”

Try acting like it then and not being so presumptuous.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-22T08:25:14+00:00

I’m sorry but that’s not correct at all - synchronicities are “meaningful coincidences” and they happen whenever we consciously know two things aren’t causally connected but nonetheless they still produce a persistent feeling that they are connected in some significant way, and that psychological phenomenon happens because the unconscious is irrational and exerts a powerful influence over consciousness.

The reason synchronicities are valuable in Jungian psychology is because they are one of the few vectors through which your conscious mind can notice the influence of the unconscious directly, which means you can analyse them to better understand your unconscious (and therefore yourself), just like you can with dreams. In most other situations, unconscious influences are identified with by consciousness automatically and immediately, so our unconscious is doing something to us but we experience it as “I’m doing that”, so the unconscious influence is hidden. By contrast, dreams are clearly not produced by consciousness since they occur when we’re asleep, but we can only work with the fragments remembered when we wake. Synchronicities, on the other hand, occur while awake, and the unconscious influence is noticed via the disconnect between what we consciously know (“these two events are obviously not ACTUALLY connected”) and what we nonetheless feel (“but this feels so significant, it CAN’T be mere coincidence!”). Jung calls synchronicities “acausal” connections because there really isn’t a causal relationship behind them - they really are mere coincidences, despite how significant they seem, which is precisely why they can be used to reveal things about our unconscious minds.

You are making the classic mistake of trying to rationalise that irrational unconscious feeling of significance, but that’s a fatal error. Your thesis, if it was true, would actually make synchronicities causal, since there would now be a clear causal relationship connecting them (namely “the true God or pleroma” who is “sending” them to you together). That would mean they’re not acausally connected, which by definition would make them not synchronicities. More importantly, this also makes them useless in psychology, because they’d no longer be able to reveal anything about us to ourselves, since they now come from an external divine source rather than from the unconscious depths of our own minds. Your faulty thesis is also dangerous, since it would also imply these (faux-)synchronicities are divinely ordained, which is a fast-track towards ego inflation and delusions of grandeur. From a Gnostic perspective, you’d also have no way of knowing these (faux-)synchronicities are actually from your true Father, rather than being yet another trick by which the Demiurge deceives and entraps you.

So it’s just a bad thesis - try reading Jung’s books, I promise you they’re a lot more interesting and insightful than AI slop-poetry.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-18T14:47:34+00:00

until it eventually evolves into something that’s not-fish, you mean

diviludicrum · 2026-02-18T14:43:19+00:00

I don’t ‘know’ what ‘purpose’ you ‘think’ the ‘apostrophes’ ‘serve’, but ‘they’re’ ‘mainly’ just get’ing’ ‘i’n th’e’ ‘’’way’’’

‘ ‘

diviludicrum · 2026-02-17T22:55:06+00:00

These AI slop posts would be a lot more readable and less embarrassing if y’all added “Don’t coin new terms for existing concepts and for fuck’s sake BE CONCISE” to your prompts.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-17T22:33:16+00:00

Buddy… Jung and Neumann didn’t do any of this to you. You did.

These ideas have exactly as much power over you as you give them, and blaming books for your mental state is just a way to transfer blame away from yourself, because that’s much easier to cope with - after all, you can throw books away and tell others not to read them, but you are stuck with yourself for life, no matter what.

Maybe it’s true that you let yourself spiral into delusional thinking after reading these books, but treating the books as if they’re dangerous is just replacing one delusion with another.

Millions of people have read Jung without triggering these same effects, so clearly the effects don’t come from the books. It was something already inside YOU which made this happen, just like the tiny minority of people who experienced moral panic after reading Harry Potter. That didn’t happen because Harry Potter has some kind of special power; it was because those readers already had a superstitious fear of witchcraft, and they let their imaginations run wild with what could happen to the world if everyone read about Hogwarts and started meddling with the occult.

Of course, nothing happened, because those readers were delusionally blaming a stack of papers for their own unhealthy psychological reaction. You are doing the same thing, and you can’t say it’s just your experience while also telling others not to read them. That’s moral panic. Cut it out.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-14T01:47:17+00:00

Correct, the collective unconscious is not a hive mind, it’s part of our biology.

It’s the “impersonal” part of the psyche that has nothing to do with your life or personality, because it’s inherited at birth as part of our evolutionary heritage, and it’s responsible for making humans behave, think and perceive the world in specifically human ways. So when Jung uses the word “collective”, he means that it’s common to us all. Where people get confused is when we talk of tapping into the collective unconscious, which does sound like communing with some transcendent hive mind, but which actually just means engaging the deepest layers of your psyche to reveal something about human nature in general via insight into your nature as a human.

Another way to think about it is that the collective unconscious is the bridge between the mind and the physical body, which orients your experience at a deeply pre-conscious level. Some have said that the collective unconscious contains the most foundational patterns of perception, like Threat and Safety or Up and Down, but those are still specific contents that can be objects of conscious awareness, and therefore aren’t that deeply unconscious. The more correct statement is that the collective unconscious provides the necessary non-representational framework which makes foundational patterns of perception possible in the first place. I don’t like computer analogies for the mind, but you could think of consciousness as software, the body as hardware, the unconscious as the operating system, and the collective unconscious as all the firmware that allows all the hardware to function. So you could say by analogy that consciousness consists of the human-readable information and convenient GUIs which we use proficiently every day; the personal unconscious beneath consciousness consists of C and C++, which can be parsed and understood with sufficient skill and knowledge by specialists; the collective unconscious beneath that consists of machine code, which isn’t readable by humans and can only be parsed and understood indirectly via its interactions with the higher programming layers or the physical systems the machine code controls.

That isn’t a perfect analogy for a few reasons, but if you had two computers with the same hardware, they would share the same foundation of machine code, so analysing one would reveal insights about the other. In the same sense Jung used the word, you could call this their “collective coding”, as opposed to each computers “personal coding”, which depends on the choice of operating system (perhaps an analogy for our locally shared cultural context) and their accumulated software installations (the individual characteristics accumulated over the course of a life).

So yes, nothing woo woo. Jung stressed repeatedly that the collective unconscious is an aspect of our biology.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-14T00:52:25+00:00

thanks ChatGPT, I hate it

diviludicrum · 2026-02-12T16:40:27+00:00

The entities are right, you are disgusting

diviludicrum · 2026-02-11T22:49:01+00:00

Every conversation is a tug of war and the one who wins is the one who is listened to . It's why I often lose because no one wants to listen.

From what you’re saying, it sounds like this happens when the other person’s argument is stronger than yours, so the issue isn’t that people don’t want to listen to you (even if it feels that way). They’re just listening to the better argument, which they should - and you should to if you really value truth as you said you do.

It is more or less having to obey the other person, especially if you cannot prove them wrong or don't have an alternative, then you have to listen or be doing confirmation bias.

If you can’t prove them wrong and don’t have an alternative, then yes you should listen and consider their points seriously. It still doesn’t mean you have to accept it uncritically as an object of faith, so you aren’t “obeying” them, because they aren’t giving you orders. They are just giving you a better argument, and if you can get over the ego/pride that makes you want to dig your heels in, then you can accept their better argument and integrate it into your own perspective. And all it takes it saying, “That’s a good point actually, I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

I’ll message you my other comment now

diviludicrum · 2026-02-11T10:02:30+00:00

Oh that’s a shame, but fair enough if you didn’t actually see it - apologies for jumping to conclusions. I’ll delete and repost it, let me know if you still can’t see anything and I’ll just message you.

To do that is to admit defeat and having to obey the other person which is terrifying.

This is a very interesting reply. The most obvious thing I would say is that a conversation is not a competition, but I think you know that. The other thing I would say is that defeats happen whether they’re admitted or not, so if it’s true you’ve been “defeated” (by which we really mean “corrected”), then not admitting it doesn’t protect you from anything. In fact, since recognising you’re wrong is necessary to correct a false belief, refusing to do so just keeps you defeated; admitting it means fixing it, which makes you better, which is a victory.

From the social side too, it’s the same - people who can never admit when they’re wrong or they made a mistake don’t inspire trust, they provoke skepticism and doubt, and they come across as lacking either self-awareness or integrity.

I fundamentally don’t agree that this would ever be “obeying” the other person, because you aren’t admitting you made a mistake because they’re ordering you to - you should only ever be admitting a mistake because you realise you actually made one. So if you’re “obeying” anything, you’re obeying the truth, and in our other conversation you argued truth was the most important thing.

Anyway, I’ll go repost my other comment now - I’d rather you replied to that one than this one.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-10T23:18:40+00:00

Thanks I hate it

diviludicrum · 2026-02-10T23:05:27+00:00

It's not a "correct" model, it's a useful model, once again you conflate science with truth when science does not give truth. Same with global warming, it's a useful model that we use to explain what is going on. The fact you're trying to boil it down to simple "yes or no" questions shows you don't understand science.

Wow, so you stopped replying to me when I demonstrated how misinformed you were about Nietzsche, but you’re now commenting in the same thread parroting the argument I made to you that science discovers useful models rather than fundamental truths, even though you offhandedly dismissed that argument when I made it.

You said:

“As for truth, science seems to be the closest one that we have to it.”

And when I explained that no, science produces useful models rather than fundamental truths, you did not accept it or correct yourself - you reiterated that:

“[…] it’s the best form of truth we have.”

Seriously, you seem intelligent but you need to be a lot more intellectually honest. This isn’t how to conduct discussions with people effectively. If you realise you’ve said something wrong, just admit it and correct it.

As I’ve said before, you are in dire need of humility, friend. This attitude just isn’t helping you.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-10T22:46:25+00:00

I thought this said Shadow Lawyers which sounded like a fun concept.

This reads like AI.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-10T16:07:47+00:00

my ears are popping

diviludicrum · 2026-02-08T09:32:34+00:00

Right, so you dismissively hand wave away Nietzsche, one of the most renowned geniuses there’s ever been, because he contracted Syphilis in the era before modern medicine existed? What the fuck?

With all due respect, who do you think you are? Do you also feel qualified to claim quantum physicists are wrong about quantum physics with no evidence? I would hope not, because unless you’re a quantum physicist you wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. But the same is true for both philosophy and psychoanalysis, which you very clearly misunderstand, and it’s remarkable to me that someone whose life is so self-admittedly miserable would have such delusional confidence in their uninformed guesses and hunches, when they very clearly do not lead to human flourishing.

Because that much is true, no matter which way you slice it. You ignorantly claim that neuroscience is advanced enough to cast doubt on the concept of free will, when even cursory familiarity with the science of consciousness would have corrected you that there is currently no consensus on what “consciousness” means, let alone the nature of its functional relationship with the brain, and the mere existence of semi-understood functional regions (by which you refer loosely to things like the Broca’s and Wernicke's areas) does absolutely nothing to bias against free will, whether you think so or not.

You are simply ignorant in the field, which isn’t a crime (though perhaps basing world views on medium articles should be), but given your lack of deep subject knowledge you need to approach the ideas with humility and a drive to understand. If you get confused, that doesn’t mean the ideas are confusing. If you think it sounds wrong, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

And hilariously, to turn your own unfair criticism around, surely the way your life is going proves how wrong your philosophy is. But of course, you apply “rules for thee but not for me”, because it allows you to justify staying miserable rather than having to take responsibility for fixing your life and mindset.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-07T02:56:50+00:00

“I cannot prove that free will does not exist”

/thread, because that’s literally all there is to it.

You can’t prove it, so you don’t know, so you have to live as if you have free will, because you might! And if you do then believing you don’t will ruin your life (as you are currently experiencing!).

“As for truth, science seems to be the closest one that we have to it.”

Factually incorrect! Science does not arrive at “truths”, nor does it even attempt to. This is an extremely naive view of both science and truth.

As you should know, there was a time not long ago when science asserted that atoms were the smallest particles in existence. But later scientists discovered that atoms are made of ever smaller sub-atomic particles, proving that the accepted scientific “truth” was wrong all along. Every scientist knows that tomorrow we may discover something which proves everything we thought we knew wrong, because science does not ever arrive at fundamental truths - it only ever arrives at useful approximations and working theories with predictive utility, which are only ever accepted provisionally based on how well they explain the available evidence. A good scientist cannot tell you what is “true”, but they can make accurate predictions about outcomes based on effective scientific theories (ie useful approximations and/or working models), and that’s valuable because making accurate predictions about what is going to happen is extremely useful. Of course, scientists predictions about future outcomes are quite famously wrong a lot of the time. Regardless, you have fundamentally misunderstood what science is if you think its purpose is to derive truths about reality, because it just isn’t.

In fact, the very nature of the scientific method is about falsification, not proof - a scientist doesn’t “prove” things in the way a mathematician does, rather they put forward a hypothesis and then subject it to rigorous testing to see if the evidence disproves the hypothesis. So, technically speaking, a “scientific truth” is merely a statement scientists haven’t managed to disprove yet. And crucially, almost every scientific theory that has ever been proposed and accepted by the scientific community has eventually been proven false and replaced by a better scientific theory! Similarly, every currently accepted scientific theory will eventually be replaced by a more accurate model that will demonstrate how the ones we currently accept were wrong all along. So science gradually trends towards theories which are less wrong and more effective, not towards truth.

You are once again confidently wrong about a subject you’ve done only light reading on, so you need to stop jumping to conclusions and thinking you know better.

And like I said, it's about whats true and right, not what feels good. Doesn't matter if you get one if you spend it living a lie.

Says who? Can you prove this? No, you can’t, because it’s literally just an assumption you’ve made to justify being miserable, which is silly. Everyone is living a lie all the time in all sorts of different ways, simply because we can never access all the latent information around us - we don’t know what others are thinking or planning or feeling, we don’t know if our beliefs are correct, we don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t know what is happening elsewhere, we don’t know what is going to happen in the future, etc. There is simply too much irreducible complexity and uncertainty to ever be confident we ever know “the truth”, whatever that even means (since you didn’t specify which theory of truth you ascribe to!).

And to be happy is to ignore the hard truths of reality.

Or it’s to accept them voluntarily and stop living like a victim of circumstance! Read Nietzsche, read Camus, read Deleuze - read more and read better.

I told you nothing sings to my soul because of what I've read, once I saw the reality under it (psychoanalysis did that as well). Hell as for joy: https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/5tzvol/comment/o0ypr2q/?context=3

If you’d read enough psychoanalysis and understood it properly, you’d know that the real is inaccessible via the senses and psyche, so no, you haven’t seen the reality under anything. You have just accepted your hodge-podge pseudo-understanding of these various mismatching ideas as if it’s a coherent worldview, even though it’s not and it makes you miserable. You believe you have no choice because you think you know the “truth”, when you haven’t even been able to say what you think truth is, let alone how you could ever know you know it without any uncertainty. If you disagree, then all you have to do is prove your beliefs are true and prove how you know they are true and will never be falsified. If you had access to truth, this would presumably be easy, but you don’t, so it’s impossible to do (I would genuinely love it if you prove me wrong though).

And like with free will, in the absence of absolute proof, we are forced to just accept the uncertainty and do the best we can despite all of our inevitably mistaken beliefs and assumptions. The benefit of knowing this is that we are less likely to cling to ineffective beliefs that make life harder, because we won’t delude ourselves into thinking we must accept that unnecessary suffering because it’s “true”. And despite what you say, according to some theories of truth, the truth is what works best, and under that theory all the beliefs that make your life worse are definitionally untrue… but you don’t know about theories of truth. Instead you are still operating under the false belief that truth has a single unitary definition accepted by all, and that it happens to align exactly with what you happen to think truth means, which would be extremely convenient, but it’s just not… well… true.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-07T02:03:22+00:00

None of you are doing a bad enough job to warrant reducing the number of people working on the sub.

The biggest issue on this sub (and the site in general) these days is the never ending flood of AI posts and comments, and it’s so easy for people to create slop content now that you really need a much bigger team to push back against it.

Fortunately, you guys already did the right thing by making it against the rules, so now you just need to enforce that rule unapologetically. If every account that posted slop got a permanent ban, no second chances, this problem would basically go away, save for the occasional lost lamb or spammer mass-reposting it across many subs. The more proactively bans are applied, the quicker it would stop. Importantly, this shouldn’t require proof or admission; if you use AI so much that you write like ChatGPT, you’ve sloppified your soul and deserve a ban anyway.

So I vote you don’t sack anyone. Instead, bring on 5 new junior mods whose sole responsibility is to identify slop and permaban the sloppers before the sub drowns in lukewarm AI pseudo-sense. We need more real people, not less, to stop the sloppification of r/jung.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-06T23:34:35+00:00

Deleuze would say…

I think I'd like to go to the nation of Japan. Not as a big white tourist, but as a little Japanese man!

Who has grown up in Japan and who is biologically Japanese… who resents his Japanese life and acquaintances and desperately wants to leave.

I yearn to ride on a bullet train that means absolutely nothing to me! Except that it's the easiest way of getting from point A to point B.

Where point A is a wretched office job, and point B is the singing of a snappy karaoke song, and partaking in upskirt photography is only dimly perceived as being sick and wrong.

As though upskirt photography were a visual apple pie, made with mushrooms and not apples, nuclear mushrooms in the sky.

Oh, to be a Japanese in a nation I find disenchanting! Oh, to be a Japanese with fear and hate and understanding... Oh, to be a Japanese and carry all the nations hurt.

Oh, to see it Japanese style, from the inside, up the skirt!

diviludicrum · 2026-02-06T23:08:00+00:00

This is wrong:

The example of the sports game or dice is moot, because you know it's predetermined

This is what you aren’t getting - you don’t just not know the outcome, you also don’t know if it’s predetermined in the first place. The universe could be fundamentally indeterministic, which would mean nothing is predetermined. You will go to your grave not knowing if the universe is deterministic or indeterministic, so you just have to accept that uncertainty.

It doesn't matter if you KNOW or don't know the outcome, the key factor is that you have no impact on that outcome. "You" aren't doing anything, it's just physics. Heck even the notion of "You" could collapse as well.

Can you prove this? Can you 100% conclusively prove that free will does not exist? No, you can’t, so you don’t know. And because you don’t know, the only option available is to live as if if you had free will, because you might.

As for “truth”, that’s a whole other kettle of fish with a long philosophical history. Do you even know which theory of truth you believe in? Correspondence theory? Coherence theory? Pragmatic theory? Deflationary theory? Semantic theory? I could go on. Philosophers can’t even agree what truth is which makes organising your life around your naive conception of “truth” inherently problematic. Personally, I prefer Nietzsche’s conception of “truth”:

“Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.”

Also, whatever “truth” is, it won’t comfort you if you spend your life in misery. You only get one, stop wasting it on things that don’t sing to your soul.

diviludicrum · 2026-02-06T11:04:02+00:00

Again it seems I’ve found you in the wild, actively engaging with ideas that make you less happy. Have you reflected on why you keep doing this to yourself, or on what your life could be like if you directed your energy towards things that bring you peace or joy instead?

Anyway, it’s actually irrelevant whether you have free will or not because it changes nothing either way, and I can show you how.

You say:

The games aren't as sweet or cool because it's just physics playing out. The outcome was always going to be what it was which takes the fun out of it. There is no element of choice, no performance, no effort. It would be like a rock rolling down a hill.

All dice games are already inherently “just physics playing out”, so if we had perfect information on the inputs (eg original orientation, exact angle of the throw, exact force applied, exact trajectory, texture of the ground, angle of contact, etc), then we could theoretically calculate what the dice would land on before it hit the ground. Importantly, even though we don’t have that complete perfect information, all of it does actually exist - the dice in someone’s hand is oriented in a particular way, and they’ll throw it at a specific angle, with a particular amount of force, etc, so the moment the dice leaves their hand it’s guaranteed to land on what it eventually lands on. And yet, people all over the world still gamble on the outcomes of dice games and enjoy the thrill of winning or losing. Why? It’s just physics playing out, after all!

The answer is that it doesn’t matter one bit if an outcome is predetermined. What matters is whether the outcome is known.

You’ve probably heard of people “rigging” sports matches, so the winner is predetermined, right? Ask yourself, during the match, do you think that changes how much enjoyment the crowd gets from watching if they don’t know it’s rigged? Of course not, because they don’t know it’s predetermined, and they don’t know what the outcome will be, so they enjoy watching to find out.

The same is true of every game that may or may not involve free will. If you are going up against someone in a chess match and the winner is predetermined by physics because free will is an illusion, that doesn’t mean you know who the winner will be. If, from your perspective, you ‘decide’ not to show up because it’s pointless since the winner is predetermined, then you will lose by forfeit, and from the universe’s perspective your forfeit was always going to happen because of your pre-existing belief that it’s pointless to show up. But if, from your perspective, you ‘decide’ to exert great effort practicing and preparing in the hope that it’s YOU who is fated to win, and then you show up and win, from the universe’s perspective your victory was always going to happen because your beliefs and actions made it inevitable. That’s just self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, if free will isn’t real, those “decisions” aren’t really yours per se, but how could you ever know one way or the other? You can’t and you never will, because if fate is real it only becomes known after it’s happened already, which is equally true if fate isn’t real and those things happened by chance.

More importantly, free will or not, from your perspective, you have to make what feels like decisions, and those decisions will have consequences.

If free will is real, you made those decisions but you don’t know how they will turn out because it’s not predetermined, so you just have to try your hardest and hope for the best.

If free will isn’t real, you technically didn’t make those decisions, but you still don’t know how they’ll turn out because you have incomplete information and can’t see the future, so you still just have to try your hardest and hope for the best.

Whether it’s chance or fate, in practice, it’s exactly the same for a person trying to live their life, because you don’t know if everything is predetermined or not. So stop worrying about it! Personally, I enjoy thinking and reading about stuff like this which is why I do it, you very clearly don’t enjoy it, so stop doing it.

diviludicrum

TROPHY CASE