Magic and Synchronicities

About Real Magic and Synchronistic Stories

Nov 27, 2025

I’d like to explore two subjects I’ve been fascinated by for years: Magic and Synchronicities.

In some sense, they both converge, and I’ll explain why.
I’ll also tell you some stories of my own synchronicities.

With magic I don’t mean the card-trick type magic, I mean the real magic - the practice of bending reality in accordance with one’s-will type of magic (sometimes spelled Magick), the ceremonial magic, the type witches were accused of and that our ordinary world thinks doesn’t exist.

Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences. But looking closer, they are no coincidences at all.
They are the living proof that space-time and causality are very shaky concepts after all, because synchronicities break down the barrier between the subjective and the objective. They show how our individual experience affects the material world.

Probably, most of you had some of these already.

Maybe someone you haven’t heard from in months calls or texts, the moment you’re thinking about doing the same. Maybe you’ve experienced or heard a story of someone who felt a death in the family without being able to know. Maybe you’ve heard about precognitive dreams, or felt telepathic connections. Maybe you’ve observed impossible things happening and brushed it aside.
(Below I provide some resources for the curious and the sceptical.)

“Yer a wizard, Harry!”
-Hagrid, Harry Potter

Natural magic saw more connections between things than science, hypothesising harmonies, sympathies and correspondences. Natural magic also tended to believe that matter […] had more active properties.
-Andrew Gregory, The Presocratics and the Supernatural

I’ve began studying synchronicities mainly in Jung around 6 years ago and since then I’ve experienced countless ones in my life.

Later, I began to study magic and parapsychology. I was a little sceptical in the beginning, as my worldview couldn’t bear the weirdness and implications of it. After all, we’re told, magic only exists in fantasy stories and in stage-performances.

But curiously, magic was widely accepted as real until early modern times. Essentially, every civilization before modernity believed in some form of magic. The Romans even had laws regulating it. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, an encyclopaedic work of history (77CE), contains approximately one hundred references to “magi” and at least twenty-seven magical formulas.
Today, it’s usually called superstition. And yet, most people knock on wood when they state their hopes out loud or ask you not to “jinx it.” What we think of today as ridiculous was regarded a high art for a very long time.

Manifestation as a mainstream trend is a major way this is returning to us today.

“Magic is a bridge that allows you to walk from the visible world over into the invisible world, and to learn the lessons of both those worlds.”

“And how can I learn to cross that bridge?”
“By discovering your own way of crossing it. Everyone has their own way.”
-Paulo Coelho, Brida

What is Magic?

Magic is nothing supernatural.
It is simply that the natural is not co-extensive with the physical.

Magic implies non-physical causation.
So do synchronicities.

Both imply that our subjective consciousness has influenced matter in some form. In magical practice, ritual action, invocation, and spells can be added. But the core is focused attention, in other words, psychic energy directed with intention.

Magic is the placebo effect times a hundred.

So, by definition, magic is intentional, synchronicities are not.

Magic is our birthright.

We are it, because we are continuous with the cosmos.
Our being is not limited to the firing of neurons inside our skull.
Magic is nothing other than a rediscovery of our connection to the immaterial realms around us.

By limiting ourselves to the purely material, we have decided magic isn’t real, therefore casting a spell onto ourselves so that it won’t be real. Synchronicities are a reminder to us that this isn’t true.

One of the more celebrated physicists of the twentieth century, John Archibald Wheeler, put it this way:

“Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a ‘participatory universe.’ ”
-John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (1977).

Doubt and scepticism are of course warranted. But they may also become defence mechanisms against looking at the facts of a seemingly strange reality.
As the mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré put it:

“Doubt everything or believe everything: These are two equally convenient strategies.
With either we dispense with the need for reflection.”

Synchronicities

Jung called Synchronicities meaningful coincidences and in the next article I’ll explore his position and explanation for it.
Here, I’ll share some of my personal experiences instead.

Jung worked with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli to understand and explain them, but they both agreed that these are a-causal occurrences that can only be explained through the influence of the experiencer’s psyche on the world.

In other words, consciousness has to interface with matter for them to occur in the first place.

It seems more likely that scientific explanation will have to begin with a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other.
-Jung, GW8, parag. 840

If you begin to notice them, you have a choice:
Either you explain them away, or you take them at face value.

Synchronicities can be weird and disorienting or wonderous and reassuring, depending on your worldview. Some people may think they’re going mad, others are excited and grateful. In any case, they are there for you to notice and they will often appear special only to you. You can follow them or you can deny them. But if you do take them on, a conversation may ensue, and you might see them pointing you towards something, or you might see how things align in specific ways.

Sometimes, I perceive them as a nod of the universe, that all is going well, and I don’t need to worry. Sometimes, I perceive them as signs showing me the next necessary step. If you’re in front of a bookshelf and a book falls out, read it. If you’re meeting someone whose name has come up again and again over the last two days, it may be important to listen to them.

When I was writing my Master’s thesis and I was looking for a clue what I needed to explore next, I would often go to the bookshelf in the library, take a breath and choose a book that looked enticing. I would then open it wherever it felt right and started reading. Some days, I had one hit after another. I would find precisely the passage I needed to read precisely at that time. It was always incredible reading something “at random” that fit the exact topic, or chapter I was working on that day. It was as if an immaterial hand guided me. All I needed to do was trust and listen.

Some other examples.

Recently, I woke up with some inspiration in my head to write down. So, I stretched for a moment, drank some water, and turned on my laptop. At once, a groovy track started playing from my Bluetooth speaker. I didn’t turn on that speaker, neither did I choose that playlist or track, nor did I press play anywhere and my laptop doesn’t simply start playing music when connecting to a device. This had never happened before, yet, I knew it wasn’t an accident. The track fit my mood perfectly, and it was just meant to be an inspired and light-hearted start into the day, not something I was experiencing every day at that time.

When I moved to Berlin around 3 years ago, and I was looking for a new job, I came into contact with a woman, Marlene. At the time, I was doing personal assistance, which is 24-hour care for a disabled person that includes assisting in daily tasks like cooking, going for a walk, cleaning, as well as care-related tasks like washing, showering, etc. Marlene had told me she had an operation and I was glad to hear it went well and that the hospital she was staying at, was less than 10 minutes by bike from where I lived. In Berlin that is basically next door. This was unusual as there wasn’t much else in that area.

When I arrived, it was a fun encounter. The assistant who was with her had studied philosophy too and was low-key (progressing quite slowly) writing his doctoral thesis on Hegel, which I was also fascinated by at the time. We resonated well and had a great chat and laugh. I was already surprised how well everything was coming together, but so far, it wasn’t anything crazy. Then, I saw that Marlene had on her nightstand my favourite novel, Shantaram. It’s a tale about an Australian fugitive stranded in Bombay and building a new life there in the 80s. It wasn’t just my favorite novel, I had also just recently picked it up for a re-read after not touching it for years. That was conspicuous. Everything before could’ve easily been chance, but that was unusual. Later, I heard she didn’t continue reading it. There was literally a window of maybe two or three weeks at max were this could’ve happened.

The interview went well, and I thought to myself, I’d have to show up for the job, even just to see what this was all about. Once I found out that the number on her door was 36, my favourite number, I knew I would have to take that job, if I’d like or not. And it turned out to be not an easy, but a very valuable experience. At that time, I was able to make a positive influence on her life, and I was entertained by her incredible life story and circumstances. I also constantly learned new things in that encounter, though the work hours and overall situation were quite messy.

Three years ago, after I visited Breaking Convention, a conference for psychedelic therapy and consciousness research in Exeter, I had two days left in the UK. I could’ve gone to London and done some sight-seeing, but I also had the possibility to visit an authentic Sikh guru, a true enlightened person, the brother of a friend had introduced me to. He was in India for half a year, and for half a year he was touring the world, visiting Sikh communities in Europe, America, and Asia.
He was only in Europe for a few weeks. At that time, I would’ve had to take a train from London all the way to Birmingham and back to just be there for a day and the train tickets were expensive. So, I was doubting whether I should go.
I was literally sitting on a park bench debating whether it’s worth going. That’s the exact moment when I received a mail stating that all Erasmus students were to receive an extra payout of 500 Euro a month as a scholarship from Santander bank. Amazing. I’d been accepted to do Erasmus next semester, so this was a pleasant surprise. (Never got a mail like that before or after in my life.) It turned out later, that this was only for the ongoing year and I wouldn’t see a penny of it. Yet, the sign was there, telling me clearly, that money shouldn’t be an issue.
So, I bought my train tickets, went and certainly didn’t regret it.

A year later, I wanted to fly to Birmingham to revisit Babaji, that time before (instead of after) going to Breaking Convention. But this time, my flight was cancelled last minute, and no other flight was leaving that day. That’s the first time this happened to me, and apparently, I wasn’t supposed to visit that year.

One time, while studying in Barcelona, I put on some shamanic drumming in the morning to prepare my food for uni. I listened to that music so I could later use it in my Breathwork sessions.
That time, it put me into a trance, and I went with it. But as I was really chill with preparing everything I was taking much more time than usual and I would’ve been half an hour late for class.
When I arrived, I saw that the building was filled with fake smoke because a fire alarm test was taking place. After all, I was one of the first to re-enter the building, and after waiting 2 minutes, everyone else arrived. Class hadn’t started. My timing couldn’t have been better.

These were but a few stories among many.

Conclusions

Some important things in life are laid before us in a certain way.

We can either go with it and be happy about the guidance, no matter if we understand it or not, or we can fight and quarrel, wondering why things happen the way they do.
After all, many things might make sense in hindsight, but even then, they may not. Our rational minds are simply offering us only a very limited perspective.
Once we relax the need to be in control of everything, we open ourselves to many possibilities that we may not have known about.

The more we accept this, the less anything seems accidental anymore.

The more we embrace that magic and synchronicities are real, the more they happen and the more we begin to notice them.
If you’re in doubt, ask for a confirmation that I’m right. It’ll arrive soon.
For me, it clusters especially around certain times in my life. Some days, I notice and follow them daily. Others are less eventful.

But the more I listen to what the universe tries to communicate, the more things fall into place. I arrive just at the right time at a place, or I’m doing just the right thing I need to do, often enough against what my thinking mind tells me to do.

“A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
-Gandalf

Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive more into Synchronicities, magic, and psi-phenomena, exploring the science behind them (yes, that’s a thing) and what I’ve learned from them.

I’d be super curious and excited to hear some of your stories…

Some selected reading recommendations if you’d like to dive deeper, practice magic, or if you’re sceptical:

Practical

· Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts by Donald Michael Kraig
- BIG recommendation

· Ancient Magic: A Practitioners Guide to the Supernatural in Greece and Rome by Philip Matyszak

Science

· The Science of Magic: How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality (2025) by Dean Radin PhD
- BIG recommendation

· Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe by Dean I. Radin

History

· Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook by Daniel Ogden

· Arcana Mundi: A Collection of Ancient Texts: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds by Georg Luck

· The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic by Thomas Hatsis