I was always looking for something in between, you know, something that linked that remote past with the present moment. And I found, to my amazement, it is alchemy. Jung's early realization of his own consciousness sets the stage for his lifelong exploration of the mind.
Never do human beings speculate more or have more opinions than about things which they do not understand. From his childhood. Carl Jung experienced strange and seemingly unexplainable phenomena.
He feared that he was going mad and went on the quest to discover what they meant. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble and the death of countless thousands. Two weeks passed, then the vision returned, still more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke.
Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this. Jung had these vivid visions just before the First World War broke out.
When this happened. he was sure that no schizophrenia was threatening him. He understood that his dreams and visions came to him from the subsoil of the collective unconscious.
Jung's visions continued into adulthood, providing eerie premonitions that aligned with significant historical events. As far as I can remember, nothing had happened before that would explain this sudden coming to consciousness. You hadn't, for instance, been quarreling with your...
Parents or anything? No, no. What memories have you of your parents?
Were they strict and old-fashioned in the way they brought you up? Oh, well, you know, they belonged to the later parts of the Middle Ages. And my father was a person in the country, and you can imagine what people were then, you know, in the... 70s of the past century, they had the convictions in which people have lived since 1,800 years.
Jung's upbringing and environment also played crucial roles in shaping his perspectives on consciousness and reality. For Jung, the pressing question was, how are such meaningful events, not linked by any apparent causal chains, possible? What does this say about the physical universe? These were surprising juxtapositions that scientific rationality could not adequately explain. Jung's ideas intersect intriguingly with modern scientific discoveries, such as the principles observed in quantum physics.
The double-slit experiment in quantum physics demonstrates that particles can behave differently depending on whether they are observed. This shows that our observation has a direct impact on reality, supporting the idea that synchronicities are a profound interaction between our consciousness and the physical world. These concepts aren't just theoretical. They can manifest in our daily lives through meaningful coincidences. Let's say you're feeling stuck in your job and unsure about your future career path.
One weekend, you attend a community event out of curiosity. While there, you meet a speaker who talks passionately about their journey of changing careers and following their dreams. Inspired by their story, you strike up a conversation with them after the talk. This connection leads to a mentorship, providing you with the guidance and encouragement you need to pursue your own passions and make a successful career change. As you delve deeper into the realms of psychology and personal transformation, you discover that even renowned figures like Carl Jung had their own experiences with the extraordinary.
As a youth, Jung not only experienced unusual visions, but also events that could not be explained in any manner. During the summer holidays, Jung was studying his textbooks and heard a sound like a pistol shot. He rushed to the room and saw that a solid table had split from the rim to be on the center. Some two weeks later, he heard another sound. This time he saw that inside a cupboard, the bread knife, which had been used shortly before, had been snapped off in several pieces.
These inexplicable events sparked Jung's fascination with the unknown, driving him to explore the depths of the human psyche and the mysteries of the supernatural. Jung finished his medical studies and became a psychiatrist. During this time he attended seances for communicating with the dead and had an interest in parapsychology and the occult, mainly due to his own personal experiences.
This formed the basis of his medical dissertation, published in 1902, entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena, a Psychiatric Study. The connection between our perception and reality is echoed in the words of prominent physicists like Niels Bohr. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
This highlights how our perception shapes reality, aligning with the concept of synchronicities. On one occasion, Jung was having a conversation with Freud about parapsychology. Freud, in his materialism, rejected most of Jung's questions as nonsensical. Jung had a strange sensation, as if his diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot.
At that moment there was a loud noise in the bookcase, which stood right next to them, that both of them stood up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over them. Jung told him, There, that is an example of so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon. Freud replied that it was sheer bosh. Jung replied that it was not, and to prove his point, he predicted that in a moment there will be another such loud noise.
Another detonation went off in the bookcase. Jung wrote in his autobiographical work, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty, but I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind or what his look meant.
Jung's dialogues with contemporaries like Freud often highlighted their differing views on the nature of the psyche. Oh well, I just paid a visit to him in Vienna and then we talked for 13 hours without interruption. 13 hours without interruption?
For 13 hours without interruption. We didn't realize that we were almost dead at the end of it, but it was tremendously interesting. He was the old man and had a great experience and he was way ahead of me and so I settled down to learn something first. In 1928, when Jung was drawing the mandalas present in his Red Book, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Taoist alchemical book of life that teaches an ancient Chinese meditation practice for achieving wholeness. Jung was struck by the parallelism between the Chinese mandala and the one he was working on, and he immediately devoured the book.
In remembrance of this event, he wrote under his mandala, In 1928, when I was painting this picture, showing the golden well-fortified castle, Richard Wilhelm in Frankfurt sent me the thousand-year-old Chinese text on the yellow castle, the germ of the immortal body. Jung's work with mandalas and his interest in Eastern philosophy was a great success. further illustrate his quest for understanding the interconnectedness of all things. I had written that book that cost me my friendship with Freud because he couldn't accept it.
To him the unconscious was a product of consciousness and it simply contained the remnants. I mean it was a sort of of a store room where all the discartance... Things of consciousness were heaped up and left. But to me, the unconscious then was already a matrix, a sort of basis of consciousness of a creative nature, namely capable of autonomous acts. At the heart of Jung's theory lies the concept of archetypes.
fundamental patterns influencing both our psyche and the physical world. This was a decisive point in Jung's life, where his writings shifted to a focus on the psychological significance of alchemy. He wrote that from Wilhelm, the spark leapt across and kindled a light that was to become for me one of the most significant events of my life. Indeed, I feel myself so very much enriched by him that it seems to me as if I had received more from him than from any other man.
Jung was particularly struck by a drawing of a yogi with five human figures growing out of the top of his head, and five more figures growing out of the top of each of their heads. The picture, thought Jung, portrays the spiritual state of the yogi who is about to rid himself of his many egos and pass into the more complete objective state of the self. Carl Gustav Jung's exploration of synchronicity ultimately leads to the profound idea of a unified reality, the Unus Mundus.
Jung coined the term synchronicity and mentions it publicly for the first time in 1930 in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, who also translated the I Ching, or Book of Changes, from Chinese into German. He referred to it as,"...a peculiar principle active in the world so that things happen together somehow, and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not."Dr. One thing is sure, a great change of our psychological attitude is imminent, that is certain.
Why? Because we need more. We need more psychology.
We need more understanding of human nature. Because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little.
His psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil. By studying the psyche and understanding our inner world, we can begin to grasp the true nature of synchronicity and its implications. Man's soul is a complicated thing and it takes sometimes half a lifetime to get somewhere in one's psychological development.
You know, it is by no means always a matter of psychotherapy or treatment of neurosis. It is all psychology has also the aspect of... Pedagogical method in the widest sense of the word. It is an education.
It is something like antique philosophy and not what we understand by a technique. It is something that touches upon the whole of man and which challenges also the whole of man. Jung equated it with the Chinese concept of Tao, the union of opposites, from the complementary pairs of yin and yang. It is based on the oneness of man and the surrounding cosmos.
This is akin to the hermetic alchemical credo, as above, so below, referring to the inner world and outer world, the psyche and matter being one and the same. The aim of the Taoist sage is to live in harmony with the Tao, avoiding extremes and achieving balance. This is, in fact, the goal of Jungian psychology. The balance of opposites, consciousness and the unconscious, is aligning the ego to the self, as the center of the personality. Here, synchronicity plays a vital role.
There is no linear evolution for individuation, self-realization. There is only a circumambulation, the circling around, in which everything is related to the center. This is represented by the symbol of the mandala. For Jung, finding one's own mandala symbol is crucial for the development of the self.
For this circular movement to take place, the mandala must have a symbol such as the sun, a castle, or a golden flower in its center. It is a visual image of the divine pattern, a manifestation of the self. The end result is the alchemical procedure, Mysterium Coniunctionis, which is also the title of Jung's last great work. The opposite sides of life are united in a holy marriage.
There is a heightening and clearness of consciousness and a deepening sense of unity of being. Jung comments that Atman, Tao and Christ are different cultural symbols for wholeness that correlate the inner self with the animating principle of the cosmos. It is no longer you who live, it lives you. The Oracle of the I Ching played an important role in developing his idea of synchronicity. He used it with his patients in psychotherapy and could remember a great deal of meaningful answers and unusual psychological insights.
For instance, he recalls the story of a patient who was diagnosed with a chronic disease called suffering from a mother complex, who feared his prospective marriage partner might be domineering. Jung opened the I Ching and it showed the hexagram 44, entitled Coming to Meet, which stated, The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.
Jung's experiments demonstrated that there are meaningful connections between the psychic realm and the physical world. For more than 30 years I have interested myself in this oracle technique or method of exploring the unconscious. for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance.
It relates to a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity, a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance. The peculiar faculties of the psyche, that it isn't entirely confined to space and time. You can have dreams or visions of the future. You can see round corners and such things.
Only ignorance denies these facts. It's quite evident that they do exist and have existed always. Now these facts show that the psyche, in part at least, It's not dependent upon these confinements. And then what?
When the psyche is not under that obligation to live in time and space alone, and obviously it doesn't, then to that extent the psyche is not submitted to those laws. And that means a practical continuation of life, of a sort of psychical existence, beyond time and space. Understanding the psyche's freedom from the constraints of time and space opens up new possibilities for experiencing synchronicity.
The archetype is a force, it has an autonomy. It can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure.
So, for instance, falling in love at first sight, that is such a case. You see you have a certain image in yourself without knowing it of the woman, of the woman. Now you see that girl, or at least a good imitation of your type, and instantly you get a seizure and you're...
you are gone. And afterwards you may discover that it was a hell of a mistake. And that is the archetype. That is the so-called archetype of the anima. When a man sings very high, then he must have a very wonderful spiritual character, because he can sing the highest C.
And she's badly disappointed when she marries. at that particular number. Well, that is the archetype of the animals.
Causality explains the connection between successive events, but synchronicity reveals deeper, meaningful patterns beyond mere cause and effect. The cause of striking a billiard ball with a cue leads to the effect of the ball moving in a specific direction. This fundamental principle is important in physics and also for the explanation of free will.
However, This worldview leaves out an important question. Why do events sometimes coincide in a meaningful manner? What does it mean if, at the exact moment a distant relative dies, a bird crashes into the window?
This coincidence is as meaningful as the possibility that the falling bird caused the person to die. For Jung, this meant that there was another factor, a causal in nature, which he called synchronicity. This he derived from Hermann Usiner's work on the origin of religious history.
Synchronicities rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. Consciousness is one factor and there is another factor. Equally important that is the unconscious that can interfere with consciousness any time it pleases.
And of course I say to myself now, this is very uncomfortable because I think I am the only master in my house, but I must admit that there is another somebody in that house that can play tricks. Jung highlights the unsettling reality that our unconscious mind can unexpectedly influence our conscious thoughts and actions. This duality within our psyche is crucial to understanding synchronicity.
One of Jung's patients, a woman, was having difficulties because of her highly rationalist worldview. She described a dream she had about a golden scarab. During the session, Jung heard a tapping at the window. When he opened it, a golden green scarab beetle flew in.
This meaningful coincidence broke the ice of her rationalist outlook. It became possible for her to consider the existence of a reality outside of her own head. For Jung, synchronistic events were a glimpse into the underlying order of the universe, which he called the Unus Mundus, or One World. The physicist Pauli described the underlying order as a cosmic clock, in which everything has its own place and time, even if we do not see the connections.
Pauli It was out in nature. I stood in a field of wheat, you know, a field of wheat that was ripe for harvest. Anna was a giant.
And I held her in my arms like a baby. And the wind was Blowing over that field of wheat. Now you know when the wind is blowing over wheat fields, these waves in the wheat fields.
And with these waves I swayed like that, putting her as if it were to sleep, you know. And she felt as being in the arms of the Godhead. Therefore you see it in me. That clicked. She suddenly became aware of an entirely hidden image that comes fresh from the archetype, because that value is in herself, and that is a sort of liberation.
And that is, of course, what makes her complete, you know. Jung's idea of archetypes illustrates how deep-seated patterns influence our personal behaviors and dreams. Jung attempts to account for synchronistic events primarily in terms of his concept of archetype, which are patterns of instinctual behavior responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes. Archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious, which represents a psyche that is identical in all individuals and contains the images of all creation.
It is the master pattern of life. The archetypes arrange the psychic material and produce meaningful patterns in the physical world. They cannot be directly perceived or represented, in contrast to the perceptible psychic phenomena.
On account of its irrepresentable nature, Jung has called it psychoid. soul-like, which refers to the relationship between a person's psyche and the physical world beyond that person's body. We find ourselves with a factor that has nothing to do with brain activity, but rather with meaningful patterns in our personal life.
Meaningful coincidences rest on an archetypal foundation. These archetypal patterns also manifest in societal myths and cultural phenomena, shaping collective experiences. This unitary dimension to all experience is the alchemical notion of the Unus Mundus, the One World. Jung writes, If mandala symbolism is the psychological equivalent of the Unus Mundus, then synchronicity is its parapsychological equivalent.
The world hangs on a thin thread and that is the psyche of man. Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There's no such thing as an H-bomb. That is all man's doing. We are the great danger.
The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? You see?
And so, you see, it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of the psyche is of man. How important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it.
recognizing the interconnectedness of our psyches can be transformative. Seeing one person as radically separate from another is limiting. It is the field that connects and includes the two participants that is transformative.
The unconscious communications that link both partners may usefully be described as emerging out of the psychoid realm because it transcends limited perceptions of analyst and patient possessing separate encapsulated psyches. It is particularly in the heightened tension generated by such a field that synchronistic events tend to occur. The psychic life, fundamentally a shared, unitary realm. The fullness of Ami-self is the Pleroma, the place where past, present and future exist simultaneously. It is the idea that everything that will happen has already happened.
That is the magic of synchronicity. Harnessing synchronicities offers valuable life insights, understanding their types. and aligning them with hermetic principles unlocks deeper meaning and personal growth. Here's how to identify and act on them.
Warning or alert synchronicities. These occur before stressful or pivotal events. Cultivate acute awareness by paying close attention to seemingly insignificant details in your daily life and be mindful of patterns or recurring themes signaling upcoming challenges.
Recognizing vibrations and movements helps anticipate pivotal events. aligning with the Hermetic Principle of Vibration. Nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates. Confirmation Synchronicities These affirm that you are on the right path.
Keep a detailed journal to record coincidences and patterns, reflecting on entries to understand their significance and confirmation. Journaling helps see the correspondence between inner experiences and external events. In line with the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence As above, so below.
As below, so above. Prophetic Synchronicities These are symbolic messages that guide you. Evaluate whether your life is on autopilot, if synchronicities seem absent, breaking free from routine by embracing new experiences and challenges.
Exploring your consciousness and breaking free from routine aligns with the hermetic principle of mentalism. The all is mind, the universe is mental. Manifestation Synchronicities These occur when your thoughts or desires come to fruition.
Actively step out of your comfort zone, embracing a sense of awe and wonder towards reality, and pursue new adventures that align with your true passions. Your actions, causes, lead to the manifestation of your desires, effects, consistent with the hermetic principle of cause and effect. Every cause has its effect. Every effect has its cause. Opportunity Synchronicities These represent the perfect intersection of preparation and opportunity.
Hone your discernment by developing the ability to distinguish between impulses driven by social conditioning and those emanating from your authentic spiritual core. Aligning your actions with your spiritual intelligence and true intuition helps recognize and seize opportunities, reflecting the hermetic principle of polarity. Everything is dual.
Everything has poles. Everything has its pair of opposites. Recognizing the rhythms in your life can help you understand the timing of synchronicities in line with the hermetic principle of rhythm.
Everything flows, out and in. Everything has its tides. All things rise and fall.
Balancing the masculine and feminine principles within yourself can help you tap into the creative forces that drive synchronicities, aligning with the hermetic principle of gender. Gender is in everything. Everything has its masculine and feminine principles. I was always looking for something in between, you know, something that linked that remote past with the present moment and I found To my amazement, it is alchemy. It is the basis of our modern way of conceiving things.
And therefore, it is as if it were right under the threshold of consciousness. This is a wonderful picture of how the development of archetypes That means the movement of archetypes looks, when you look upon them as if from above, namely from today, you look back into the past and you see how the present moment has evolved out of the past. And we can construct or even predict our, the unconscious of our days.
When we know what it has been yesterday,