For Blake, the image of Jacob's Ladder as a gate to heaven was closely allied to the anatomy of the ear, whose passages he calls "the endlessly twisting spiral ascents to the Heaven of Heavens (...)." According to Swedenborg, with whose writings Blake was familiar, the "opening of the inner ear" is the precondition for making contact with the higher worlds."

...when Pythagoras heard the different sound made by hammers in a forge, he realized that tones can be expressed in quantitative relationships.... Using stringed instruments, he then discovered the connection between vibration frequencies and pitch. The whole world, according to Pythagoras' theory, consisted of harmony and number. Both the Microcosmic Soul and the Macrocosmic Universe were assembled according to ideal proportions, which can be expressed in a sequence of tones.

(I've always adored the rain and the grey sky, as well as grey in general. It isn't the bland, depressing color to me that it is to most people.)

I had no idea what they were saying, but phonetically it sounded like, "are-bahs en-oo-tay En-vick-tay moon-day."

oh me too!!! It's hard to explain - somehow I just feel "right" when the day is overcast - everything feels right and I feel more motivated and creative throughout the day.

[Psychologist Carl] Jung was treating a woman whose staunchly rational approach to life was made it difficult for her to benefit from therapy. After a number of frustrating sessions the woman told Jung about a dream involving a scarab beetle. Jung knew that in Egyptian mythology the scarab represented rebirth and wondered if the woman's unconscious mind was symbolically announcing that she was about to undergo some kind of psychological rebirth. He was just about to tell her this when something tapped on the window, and he looked up to see a gold-green scarab on theo ther side of the glass) it was the only time a scarab beelte had ever appeared at Jung's window). He opened the window and allowed the scarab to fly into the room as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The woman was so stunned that she tempered her excessive rationality, and from that point on her response to therapy improved.

Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotheraputic work and noticed that they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental changes in belief, sudden and new insights, deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient's consciousness.

[...] Zurich-based psychiatrist Carl Alfred Meier, a longtime associate of Jung's, tells of a synchronicity that spanned many years. An American woman suffering from serious depression traveled all the way from Wuchang, China, to be treated by Meier. She was a surgeon and had headed a mission hospital in Wuchang for twenty years. She had also become involved in the culture and was an expert in Chinese philosophy. During the course of her therapy she told Meier of a dream in which she had seen the hospital with one of it's wings destroyed. Because her identiy was so intertwined with the hospital, Meier felt her dream was telling her she was losing her sense of self, her American identity, and that was the cause of her depression. He advised her to return to the States, and when she did her depression quickly vanished, just as he had predicted. Before she departed he also had her do a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital.

Years later the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine containing a double-page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital, and it was identical to the drawing she had produced nine years earlier. The symbolic and highly personal message of her dream had somehow spilled beyond the boundaries of her psyche and into physical reality.

Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, and acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science.

[...] Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection - more precisley a correlation - between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden."

[... Physicist F. David Peat] believes that Jungian-type synchronicities are not only real, but offer further evidence of the implicate order. As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity. Peat believes that synchronicities are therefore "flaws" in the fabric of reality, momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature.

Put it another way, Peat thinks that synchronicities reveal the absence of division between the phyisical world and our inner psychological reality. Thus the relative scarcity of synchronous experiences in our lives shows not only the extent to which we have fragmented ourselves from the general field of consciousness, but also the degree to which we have sealed ourselves off from the infinite and dazzling potential of the deeper orders of mind and reality. According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order of extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtley, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself."