May 8, 2024
The Jungian Perspective on Mindreading: Awareness and Synchronicity
You’re thinking about something—just turning it over in your head—and someone next to you says exactly what you were thinking. Word for word.
“Get out of my head!” you laugh. But something about it feels uncanny.
Jung had a name for this: synchronicity. And he didn’t think it was coincidence.
In The Red Book, Jung has a conversation with the figure of Elijah where he wrestles with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: are you your thoughts, or do thoughts happen to you? His conclusion was provocative. Thoughts, he suggested, exist outside of us in the same way trees and animals do. We don’t own them. We encounter them.
If that’s true, then what people call “mindreading” isn’t some supernatural power. It’s a heightened state of presence—a tuning in to the flow of ideas and emotions that exist in what Jung called the collective unconscious. A shared stream of consciousness that everyone’s swimming in, whether they know it or not.
I tested this for myself. For a few weeks, I paid close attention to the thoughts entering my awareness and noticed when they lined up with what people around me were saying or thinking. It happened more than I expected. Not dramatically, not every time, but enough to make me pay attention.
Here’s the practical takeaway: most of us live so much in our own heads that we’ve lost the ability to notice what’s happening between us. When you slow down, when you’re genuinely present, you start picking up on things you normally miss. Not because you’ve developed psychic abilities, but because you’ve stopped being so distracted that you can finally hear what’s already there.
Try it yourself. Spend a day paying attention to the flow of your thoughts and how often they intersect with what the people around you are thinking or saying. You might be surprised.
We’re more connected than we realize. Not in a hand-holding, group-hug way. In a way that’s actually kind of unsettling, if you sit with it long enough.