At the very moment I had built the impetus to write that first sentence and plunge myself into the act of putting “black on white” a friend, an expert in paleotypography (Newton, primarily), comes to me with an existential crisis which evolves into a long conversation. The gist of our discussion is the obvious absurdity of his work on seemingly unimportant minutia in the face of unresolved injustices in the world. The hypotheticals of youth, his free time, and frustrated efforts led him to feel guilt for his sins of omission: he has done nothing to make the world better. The man who had dismounted his Harley at the peak of our conversation aptly said, “These are the problems of a man with a full belly.”

Too true and directly relevant to Clay Shirky’s point (text or video):

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

Full bellies and free time can be as much an asset as a deficiency and Clay articulates well they means a society cops with such existential dilemmas:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

In an age where there is cognitive surplus (his phrase), easy exchange of information, I think, exacerbates these sentiments. His point was that the dawn of the internet and its increasing use is a boon for this cognitive surplus, a good medium for its trade, through blogging and content creation. However, in light of the social injustices in this world, I suspect blogging in all its forms is hardly the answer–and Clay, I presume, would agree with me. While it does get people thinking and interacting with ideas in a more engaging way then, say, television, it still is a means for deferral at worst and merely a way to organize data at its best. Cognitive surplus is certainly a blessing for Western culture but only if we can figure out how to cash it in.

This is very much Clay’s idea and I suggest you go check out his perspective.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”

I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.

There are at least two perspectives I should discuss before answering the question:

1. The Western, specifically American, cultural perspective of Christianity

2. A more theological/biblical perspective which tends to be a bit less comfortable for the American mind.

The cultural perspective tends to be rooted in a Charismatic/Pentecostal Christianity. I must admit my expertise in this area is limited, most of my knowledge is experiential and not academic which is gives it an odd nontechnical legitimacy from the anti-expertism of the postmodern condition. That, however, is another matter.

The Holy Spirit, here, is the analogue to the relation of man’s agency to the will of God. The problem with the cultural perspective, since the Holy Spirit is an elusive character in the bible, He is often linked to feeling and emotion, hence those warm fuzzies and hand raising elements at Christian rock concerts and contemporary churches (I think of Cooper Renners little post on Christian muzak).

Here are a few texts which could suggest the sort of special knowledge of Christianity toward such a view:
Ephesians 2:5
Titus 2:5
1 Corinthians 2

I would wager 1 Corinthians 2 is of particular importance since it talks about “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.”

Couple this with Pentacoast in Acts 2, and you have a recipe for all Christians to be able to interpret happenings in the world and understand there “deeper” meaning, a special knowledge of synchronicity with God’s will. It is essential to note there is always an ethical underpinning to claims of “doing God’s will.” People tend to suggest that they are doing God’s will when they feel they are doing the right thing, e.g. have a job they are happy with, giving a homeless person food, marrying so-and-so. Syncronicity for Christians, however, tends to be about “big things” like marriage and less to do with ordering plum pudding.

What I am suggesting is that cultural Christianity claims, rightly, that doing God’s will “feels” right, but finds the inverse statement, quite wrongly, that “feeling right” means doing God’s will. I say wrongly since they often over particularize the promises in scripture and I think they do this because there is a hint of Pelagian thinking in their theology (I’ll explain what that means in a moment).

This brings me to the more biblical perspective:

The question of synchronicity between man’s agency and God’s is always about salvation. Personally, I think there has been too much written on the subject and most folks were asking the wrong sorts of questions. People who are overly concerned with predestination and such issues in the church are concerned about how to secure their salvation: “how can they get to heaven?” (a question which often betrays a more deep seated theological problem about the nature of resurrection and the life to come.) The added factor that the bible does not parse out the mechanics of how the Holy Spirit works in man only complicates the issue further.

What do I mean by asking the wrong questions?

Well, the bible tends to affirm both man’s agency and God’s sovereign will. This leads to the theological morass that we are all, to some degree, well acquainted with. Take Exodus 7-10. You will notice that the text oscillates between “Pharaoh’s hardened his heart” and “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened” (which is called the Divine passive, so named since the implicit doer of the action is God. This crops up constantly in the Scriptures). And here is the almost literal crux of the matter: God’s actions in history are emphasized whenever good, merciful, or glorious actions occur and man’s will is affirmed when action of injustice, evil, and vainglory happen. In other words, all good comes from God and evil from man’s sin. This implies two things: man is incapable of doing good on his own (This is more, though I hesitate to use the word, systematically laid out in the New Testament, particularly the Pauline epistles.) while God is the sustainer of creations and the created order, i.e. the good (Let us not forget the Divine proclamation in Genesis 1 of naming things “good”).

Historically, this tension between the two wills, man’s free agency and God’s sovereign authority, is most fully expressed–or at the very least, assumed in every discussion–in Augustine’s Pelagian letters which John Calvin, who my tradition claims as something of a theological hero, takes cues from.

Pelagius essentially claimed that with hard work and an ascetic sensibility man could attain perfection in this life. In other words, if people try hard they can do good and “merit” heaven. Man is, thus, in control of his salvation and maintains a “free will” This is, I suspect somewhat parallell with Jungian synchronicity: man does good of his own accord and God wills/wants us to do so (or so the argument goes). The corollary is that man damns himself.

Augustine, by contrast, wants to give salvation up to God’s will and requires for man a radical dependence on God. In this scenario we do good only through help from God via the Holy Spirit. What causes the classic heated debate to spark is that this seems to imply that God preordains people to go to hell. In other words, Augustine’s view seems to destroy any sense of synchronicity between wills.

If I had to choose between the two perspectives I would go with the Augustinian view, but if I want to be more biblical–and I do–then I would be softer and just argue that the tension is unresolvable. Plus, the bible’s authors are doing something different than parsing out the mechanics to resolve this tension. Instead, they sketch out salvation history in an effort to show man that he is a slave to sin, i.e. his efforts alone are in vain, and God saves. It is pastoral not philosophical and systematic: it is only through bowing our knee to his sovereignty and proclaim him Lord that the world will be at peace and man is truly free from evil/sin. It is also important to note that the church, at the time, declared Pelagianism a heresy.

Q: if there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?

You are correct in thinking that synchronicity as Jung understands it is not biblical and/or (depending on perspective) Christian. Ephesians 1 illustrates rather clearly how: Christ’s death and resurrection is the center and culmination of history and all things, however obscurely they may do so, point to his victory and our need for him.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will [emphasis added], so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.

I do, however, think that there is a sense in which a Christian could still answer your question. What the bible is not is a work of philosophy. It does not parse out what is meaningful or, more to the point, “what is meaning?” Rather, it assumes it. Recalling the earlier discussion, the bible is more big picture; it is concerned with salvation history. Yet it is speaking directly to us, the particular person, and should be read as such. We are forced to straddle another tension: the big picture of history and the particularity of our own life. The art of the preacher is to take the one and manifest it in the other. (This is much harder than you can imagine.) Nevertheless, there is a sense in which we create meaning. Meaning, after all, is just drawing conclusions and connections to experiences and it is our minds that do so. Fiction writing is a clear example of this. And the fact that the bible is largely a collection of stories or, in the case of the Epistles explications and interpretations of these stories, suggests from a Christian perspective that we are creatures of story. After all, what is language for? To talk, discuss, retell.

Let us take the plum pudding example from wikipedia:

Jung claims that in 1805, the French writer Émile Deschamps was treated to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Forgebeau. Ten years later, the writer encountered plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant, and wanted to order some, but the waiter told him the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be de Forgebeau. Many years later, in 1832, Émile Deschamps was at a diner, and was once again offered plum pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Forgebeau was missing to make the setting complete — and in the same instant, the now senile de Forgebeau entered the room.

Happy coincidences, no doubt, but can we say there is an acausal connection there? Sure, plum pudding and de Forgebeau. In analyzing Jung’s perspective, however, we mustn’t forget that he was extremely fascinated with the occult, séances and such. When Jung talks about the collective conscious, I read this as literal. In the context of Christianity, given the above discussion, we could see this in connection with God, but we cannot declare this as simple an act of the universe. It would be an affront to God’s authority, assuming we are using a more Augustinian tack.

But, if we wanted to be soft with our language and unpresumptive of what God wills–a good thing to be–we could say that man’s character is to draw meaning, i.e. connections, to our experiences in order to place them in a broader context of our lives. We all have stories and we desire to find connections to the broader stories of our cultures, be they secular or religious.

What I am trying to say is that reading is as active as it is passive. We stand within our perspective (our story, our narrative) and in reading a story we put in as much as we take out. This is the trick of biblical hermeneutics, recognizing as best we can the preconceived notions we take to a text and trying to find the original authorial intent outside of that context. “Pure” interpretation, of course, is an impossibility: we don’t know entirely what we think or, to put it another way, we aren’t entirely aware of our what our unconscious is “thinking.” Further, if we are to couple this with the Christian perspective, then we should recognize because of our sin we are “by nature” phobosophic (fear of wisdom and truth) rather than philosophic (lovers of wisdom and truth). In other words, we are inclined to read, say, biblical texts in ways that seem to benefit us, e.g. grant us autonomy since we are more comfortable with that than God’s authority. Hence, the Pelagian heresy and its appeal. This could easily be applied to reading “experiences” as well.

Ultimately, I am arguing that our unconscious plays tricks on us, some nefarious others happy. (David notes that we should also recognize not simply that we are sinful/fallible but also that our creaturely status implies a contingency to our knowledge.) To read the universe as autonomously presenting us meaning, from a biblical perspective, is a cop out to admitting that God is Lord of all.