Speaking of sub-atomic laws, Carl Jung worked with quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli to try and find sub-atomic causes for Synchronicity, convinced that that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus.

Wolfgang Pauli

Another example of Synchronicity’s supposed reach. A falling star and a phone call and unrelated events, however extraordinary coincidences between how that phone call is made or where that falling star lands could be a product of Synchronicity.

Jung wrote about a personal experience in his book, Synchronicity (1952):

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.
- Synchronicity, Carl Gustav Jung, 1952.

Paul Bowles has written very many books but he wrote a book called The Sheltering Sky which became a film by Bertolucci, a few years ago. I read it long before it was a film. It’s one of the most beautiful, sustained, poetic novels I’ve ever read… There was a story within that story – that was a sort of Arab legend that was told in the story of three sisters who invite a prince to a tea party out in the desert to have tea, tea in the Sahara. They have tea, and it’s wonderful, and he promises to come back and he never does. They just wait and wait and wait until it’s too late. I just loved this story and wrote a song called ‘Tea In The Sahara’. I don’t know whether Paul Bowles ever heard it, probably not, but it’s still one of my favourite songs.“
- All This Time, Interactive CD-ROM, 1995

There’s a primary difference between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the prospect of the extinction of humans. With dinosaurs, it’s widely agreed that they all died by natural causes. Human extinction, however, is widely predicted to be caused by homicide. The Cold War instilled a constant fear of nuclear warfare for decades and in the 1980s it seeped into popular culture more and more thanks songwriters like Sting and Billy Joel.

For a specific lyrical parallel with “would they say that we were dumb” in Sting’s other work, consider “Russians” on his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles:

It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too.

A clever bit of lyrical witticism here. At first we are told that the subject’s uniform doesn’t fit, with us assuming the uniform is too big or too small. Instead, because the narrator’s environment is within a totalitarian, military government, the narrator explains that she is too “alive” in it. As in, the conformity of their government and its uniforms doesn’t “fit” her uninhibited freedom at all.

For an example of the Western perception of Soviet bloc uniforms, see the Wendy’s hamburger chain ad from 1985 (2 years later), “Soviet Fashion Show”.
http://youtu.be/5CaMUfxVJVQ

As previously mentioned here, Sting picks out a moment of vulnerability or pain, like a black spot on the sun, as a metaphor for the pain in his soul. He then goes into the chorus explaining that he’s completely wrapped in his own demolition. While he may have someone who could potentially pull him out of his depressive “funk,” he claims his ultimate destiny is to be absorbed in his misery.

I was full of hyperbole.
- “In the Studio,” radio show.

Sting explained how a walk with his partner, future wife Trudie Styler, prompted the creation of these lyrics:

I was in Jamaica and I was looking at the sun one day. I noticed some sun spot activity and the following conversation took place with my significant other, Trudie. I say, “There’s a little black spot on the sun today,” Trudie waits expectantly for the pay off, “that’s my soul up there.” Trudie lifts her eyes to heaven and goes, “There he goes again, the king of pain”.

Every harmony you play

“Every Breath You Take” follows the Aeolian I-vi-IV-V harmony progression, one of the most used structures in pop music. In fact, it even has a code name, “the 50s progression” based on its heavy use in the early soul and rock music of the 1950s. The best example of this song’s influence comes from Ben E. King’s classic 1961 song, “Stand By Me.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE

So why two Grammy awards, millions of albums sold, nine million plays on the radio and the $2000 a day Sting receives in royalties?

Musical genius

Sting leans over and says, ‘Go on, go in there, make it your own.’ …It’s a simple chord sequence and shouldn’t prove a problem… What are the criteria? It should sound like the Police—big, brutal barre chords won’t do, too vulgar; it has to be something that says Police but doesn’t get in the way of the vocals; it should exist as music in its own right, universal but with just a hint of irony, be recognized the world over… The track rolls and I play a sequence of intervals that makes it sound like the Police, root, fifth, second, third, up and down through each chord. It is clean, succinct, immediately identifiable… I play it straight through in one take. There is a brief silence, and then everyone in the control room stands up and cheers… With this lick I realize a dream that maybe I have cherished since first picking up the guitar as a teenager — to at least once in my life make something that would go around the world, create a lick that guitarists everywhere would play.
- Andy Summers, One Train Later: A Memoir, pg. 323

Production genius

Hugh Padgham is the record producer behind Synchronicity and was called upon by the band after their previous success with 1981’s Ghost in the Machine. Padgham had previously worked with bands like Yes, XTC and Peter Gabriel and was not much of a referee to the squabbling musicians. Recording took place at AIR Monserrat, a recording studio built by George Martin and located in the Caribbean. It was known as a “recording getaway” because it was the best way to record an album outside the reach of the record company.

The band during the recording of Ghost in the Machine.

In that environment, many tricks were employed to give this song, and the rest of the album, its timeless sound. With Stewart Copeland’s drums, Padgham had him record hitting a tightly-wound snare drum with a Tama gong drum at the same time. Copeland explains the rather unorthodox way his sounds were recorded:

The big studio that George Martin built was at one end of the building, and I was upstairs in the old house in the dining room, all by myself with a television monitor connecting me to the studio downstairs across the way… The first thing you have to do when you record music is lay down a drum track, but we were making it up as we went along, and I wasn’t in the room with them. So, instead of finishing playing and going, ‘Hey, that was good there, and that went there,’ there is silence. I can’t hear what one of them is saying unless one of them presses the talk-back button. They aren’t pressing the talk-back button, but I can see that they are talking and I assume it’s bad. The drums sounded incredible because that was definitely the place to get the best sound out of the drums. Inarguably, the drums sounded brilliant in that room.
-Stewart Copeland, mixonline.com

Funny enough, a lot of press would harp on the idea that each member of the band would record in separate rooms, though mainly it was a circumstance of finding the best sounds for the recording.

These lyrics originally appear in the song “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” from the album, Ghost in the Machine. However, in 1977, a pre-Police band called Strontium 90 (featuring Sting, Copeland, Summers and additional bassist and producer Mike Howlett) recorded an earlier version of “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” Since “O My God” also features lyrics from “Three O' Clock Shit”, which was als originally written around 1976, and was later fleshed-out for this album, it makes sense that lyrics from another early song (and fully produced later) would make their way here.

In the Sting song “Seven Days”, he also uses these lyrics at the end.