By Sue Kientz

In June, 2024 I joined The Coincidence Project as part of the TCP Speaker Series, delivering a longer talk with the same title as this post. I invite those who are interested in delving deeper to view the replay of this talk on the TCP YouTube channel, HERE. This post helps to break down my fundamental perspective of the deep and meaningful relationship between astrology and meaningful coincidences.

Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung has the double distinction of inventing the concept of synchronicity (aka meaningful coincidences) and encouraging mainstream consideration of the ancient art of astrology in order to understand symbolism in dreams as well as in synchronicity stories. But who could imagine there might be similarity between the two?

Certainly not me, even as decades ago I began studying astrology at the same time I started having synchronistic experiences. I didn’t relate the two as I was investigating astrology’s symbols to learn more about literary symbolism, and my synchronistic experiences seemed something else, just fortuitous “signs” of what was up ahead. Both intrigued me and led me on lifelong quests of understanding. It’s only recently that I put two and two together and realized that both astrology and meaningful coincidences show how one’s life story is part of a greater, literally epic narrative. 

Each person’s story naturally starts when you are born and plays out day by day. You must live your life to see what happens. But some people, for various reasons, engage an astrologer to draw up their birth chart and use it to track their life experiences. Comparing the planets’ past and future movements against the initial birth chart positions, reveals the timing of one’s past and future successes, trials, and many other milestones.  

With a synchronicity, the situation seems different, as a person is typically taken unawares by a sudden resemblance of events around them matching a larger personal concern, and that leads to the notion that those events offer a personal directive, warning, or encouragement. But consider the entire tableau delivering this message, which requires players, props and scenery: the Earth itself, its nearby life forms and even inert matter, produce the fortuitous setting for synchronicity’s meaningful message. This grand stage of so many unwitting participants, all living out their own ongoing stories, is a slice of the truly epic “Story of Earth Life.”  

This is only outdone in grandeur by astrology’s background narrative, in which every person living, dead, or yet to be, also takes part, namely the “Story of the Solar System”!  For a few hundred dollars, astrology software generates charts as far back as 3000 BCE and forward to 3000 CE, so all of recorded history, and then some, is up for examination. 

The two systems are not only related, they are in sync. If you have a powerful meaningful coincidence, an astrologer can check its chart and tell you if it is as important as you think (or hope). And the reverse is possible: anyone can look up great discoveries, Nobel Prizes won, famous meetings between lovers, businessmen, great minds — and so much more! — and see how there is a resemblance, a “matching” of the event with the person(s) involved, in that the planets positioned at the great moment are arranged in configurations similar to the lucky one’s birth positions. Maybe there was a synchronicity, noticed or not, but the heavens record a personal resemblance!

Doubtless you must see this to believe it, and the proof is presented in my Speaker Series talk, “Astrology, the Persistent Synchronicity.” No prior knowledge of astrology is needed, as I provide a crash course in what professional astrologers look for and walk you through, so you can appreciate real-life examples like Martin Luther King Jr.’s big moment, in planetary terms, when he organizes the Montgomery Bus Boycott days after Rosa Parks’ arrest for not giving her bus seat to a white person; Leonardo Da Vinci meeting his model for The Mona Lisa; and Albert Einstein making his great discoveries, Special Relativity, then General Relativity, followed by the solar eclipse of 1919 proving his mindbending claims of curved spacetime (the eclipse came “on time” for him, too!) and lastly, receiving the Nobel Prize, all represented by an elegant march of planets in time with his historic milestones. I also show astrology validating important synchronicities whose stories are related during the program. 

Astrology is a persistent synchronicity, in that the solar system is an ever-present wheel of meaningful symbols that can be consulted at any time by those who learn astrology’s language. The advantage of seeing a synchronicity is, it’s immediate, personal, and delivered in a message you understand. Noting their operation to be part of something so much greater, emphasizes how truly interconnected we are, both as children of Earth and heirs of the Sun’s domain.

About Sue Kientz

Sue Kientz, M.A., is an astrologer and a technical writer and researcher, and author of More Plutos (2015), the definitive book on new Dwarf Planets for astrologers, covering Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, and more. Sue experienced her first synchronicity in 1981, which she named “parallel situations,” unaware of Jung’s work. She has devoted her life to understanding and explaining both astrology and synchronicity and now believes they serve the same function and differ mostly in accessibility — astrology requires learning its symbolic language and analysis techniques, while meaningful coincidences need one to simply pay attention and be open to numinous experience.