There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives

While people have ""a tendency to deny, dismiss, or discount"" synchronistic events, Hopcke contends that when greeted with openness and acceptance, these occurrences, which briefly connect one's inner and outer life by shattering normal interpretive frameworks, have the power and purpose of transformation. As Hopcke, Director of the Jungian Center for Symbolic Studies, explains Jung's 45-year-old coinage, a synchronistic event must take place at a transitional moment in one's life and must defy a simple cause-and-effect explanation. It must also be personally meaningful or symbolic; one person's life-transforming event is another's banality. The bulk of the book focuses on relationships, work, dreams, spirituality and ""matters of life and death,"" anecdotally illustrating how synchronicity often leads people in the direction they unknowingly need to go. While synchronicity has gotten a lot of play in psychological and New Age circles, skeptics remain. Hopcke's lively, accessible interpretations of a plethora of real-life events will make their doubts difficult to maintain. BOMC, QPB and One Spirit Book Club selections; audio rights to Audio Literature; foreign rights sold in the U.K., Australia, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the Czech Republic. (June)