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Although there have been numerous semi-popular reports of Jung's statistical presentation of the concept of synchronicity in Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle, none is so successfully presented, with the freshness of a personal response, as this compact volume by Jean Bolen of the San Francisco C. G. Jung Institute. Dr Bolen acquaints us with her own life and cultural background from the beginning as a medium for demonstrating how synchronicity works and what it is felt to become in the course of individual development and in the practice of psychotherapy. Coming from a Japanese-American family and married to Jim Bolen, the editor and publisher of Psychic magazine, now called New Realities, she is well-fitted to rescue some of the mysteries of Eastern philosophy and Western parapsychology from their habitual obscurity, and she places them in a psychological context with conversational ease.
There have been other references in recent years to the applicability of the Tao to certain arts and sciences—e.g., The Tao of painting by Mai-Mai Sze, a Bollingen Series publication of the nineteen-fifties, and recently The Tao of physics by Fritjof Capra.
Dr Bolen's study applies the Tao to psychology in a direct elaboration of Jung's statement that: ‘The understanding of synchronicity is the key which unlocks the door to the Eastern apperception of totality that we find so mysterious.’
Therefore we are informed without further doubt or argument that ‘synchronicity is the Tao of psychology’. This certainty may give some readers pause; but, as they read through her opening chapter, what may at first seem unscientific, or at least unscholarly, is the best way of showing that an experience of synchronicity can be meaningful only if Jung's ‘apperception’ includes intuition and feeling, of a personal as well as an impersonal nature. Dr Bolen states: ‘Every time I have become aware of synchronistic experience, I have an accompanying feeling that some grace came along with i