Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Encountering Jung Book 1)

Introduction

11. “My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology.” (Jung 1973: 24)

15. In fact, Jung suggests that spatio-temporal relativity of this kind is the basic condition within the unconscious psyche, as though space and time ‘did not exist in themselves but were only “postulated” by the conscious mind’ (Jung 1952: 435). Knowledge of events at a distance or in the future is possible because, within the unconscious psyche, all events co-exist timelessly and spacelessely

15. Rhine’s work also appeared to support Jung’s observation that paranormal experiences are usually attended by heightened emotionality.

18. Jung thereby concludes that under certain psychic conditions time and space can both become relative and can even appear to be transcended altogether.

19. He states in conclusion that general acausal orderedness (which includes such phenomena as the properties of natural numbers and the discontinuities of modern physics) is a universal factor existing from all eternity, whereas meaningful coincidences are individual acts of creation in time.

31. Without exceeding the levels of dispersion that would be expected due to chance, the data none the less patterned themselves in ways which corresponded to a known psychic disposition. #lawofattraction

35. “how does it come that even inanimate objects are capable of behaving as if they were acquainted with my thoughts?” (Jung 1976: 344)

36. There are also many important implications for the practice of psychotherapy. For example, Jung recognized that states of mind, such as bad conscience, can sometimes express themselves synchronistically in the thoughts and feelings of another person (Jung 1963: 60-1, Jung 1958d; 450-1) or even through the arrangement of events in the environment (Jung 1963: 123-4).

39. ‘uncomprehended purpose’ of ‘any nocturnal, numinous experience’: ‘to make us feel the overpowering presence of a mystery…shaking our certitudes and lending wings to the imagination’ (Jung 1958c: 328-9).

Part 1: Encountering the Paranormal

1. Spiritualism

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

47. why, after all, should there not be ghosts? How did we know that something was “impossible”? …For myself I found such possibilities extremely interesting and attractive.

48. ‘There certainly are curious accidents’, I thought.

From ‘On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena’ (1902)

50. Her movements were free and of a noble grace, mirroring most beautifully her changing emotions.

51. Her indignation was not faked, for in the waking state she could barely control herself and her affects, so that any change of mood was immediately reflected in her face.

52. Premonitions, forebodings, unaccountable moods and rapidly changing fancies were all in the day’s work.

52. But she always preferred the darkness. According to her account, the visions were generally of a pleasant nature. Gazing at the beautiful figures gave her a feeling of delicious bliss.

53. Every in any way striking event from her earlier years stood in a clear and necessary relationship to her present situation.

From: ‘On Spiritualistic Phenomena’ (1905)

53. Mediums are as a rule slightly abnormal mentally.

54. One can, with a few skillful suggestions, teach a remarkably high percentage of people, especially women, the simple spiritualistic manipulations, table-turning for instance, and, less commonly, automatic writing.

2. Spirits and Hauntings

From: ‘The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits’ (1920/1948)

55. Accordingly, primitive pathology recognizes two causes of illness: loss of soul, and possession by a spirit. The two theories keep one another more or less balanced.

57. The parallel with the primitive belief in souls and spirits is obvious: souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious, and spirits to those of the collective unconscious.

58. I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

59. Stewart White book: The Road I Know … serves as an admirable introduction to the method of ‘active imagination’

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

60. The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen.

60. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated sometimes!

From: ‘Foreword to Moser (1950)

61. Extraordinary and mysterious stories are not necessarily always lies and fantasies.

61. In this vast and shadowy region, where everything seems possible and nothing believable, one must oneself have observed many strange happenings and in addition heard, read, and if possible tested many stories by examining their witnesses in order to form an even moderately sure judgment.

62. Rationsalism and superstition are complementary.

65. constellated unconscious contents often have a tendency to manifest themselves outwardly somehow or other.

3. Analytical psychology

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

72. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.

From: Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930 (1984)

74. We are moved by the dreams, they express us and we express them, and there are coincidences connected with them.

74. The East bases much of its science on this irregularity and considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West. The more we busy ourselves with dreams, the more we shall see such coincidences-chances. Remember that the oldest Chinese scientific book is about the possible chances of life.

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

76. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

From: Letter to L Kling (14 January 1958)

77. We certainly shouldn’t think we know what goo advice to offer or what, if anything, ought to be done.

4. Astrology and the I Ching

 

From: Letter to Sigmund Freud (12 June 1911)

From: Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930 (1984)

79. Astrology consists of all these little tricks that help to make the diagnosis more accurate.

From: Letter to B. Baur (29 January 1934)

80. the stars themselves radiate certain effects.

From. Letter to BV Raman (6 September 1947)

80. In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle.

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

82. Time and again I encountered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it).

From: ‘Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam’ (1930)

84. Astrology would be an example of synchronicity on a grand scale if only there were enough thoroughly tested findings to support it.

86. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.

86. it must be admitted that moments can leave long-lasting traces.

From: Letter to the Rev. WP Witcutt (24 August 1960)

88. One could even define the I Ching oracle as an experimental dream, just as one can define a dream as an experiment of a four-dimensional nature.

From: Letter to Andre Barbault (26 May 1954)

88. Qualitative time. This is a notion I used formerly but I have replaced it with the idea of synchronicity, which is analogous to sympathy… or to Leibniz’s pre-established harmony.

Part II: The theory of synchronicity

5. Synchronicity

‘On Synchronicity’ (1951)

94. But it is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

94. Now, the more the foreseen details of an event pile up, the more definite is the impression of an existing foreknowledge, and the more improbable does chance become.

94. The sentiment du déjà-vu is based, as I have found in a number of cases, on a foreknowledge in dreams, but we saw that this foreknowledge can also occur in the waking state.

95. The result of the spatial experiment proves with tolerable certainty that the psyche can, to some extent, eliminate the space factor.

96. An initial mood of faith and optimism makes for good results. Skepticism and resistance have the opposite effect, that is, they create an unfavourable disposition. #lawofattraction

96. the affective factor has the significance simply of a condition which makes it possible for the phenomenon to occur, though it need not.

96. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.

6. Parapsychology

From: Letter to JB Rhine (November 1945)

105. The fact that the future can be occasionally foreseen does not exclude freedom in general, but only in this particular case. Freedom could become doubtful only if everything could be foreseen.

105. The animal behaves as if it were a partner in the human situation. (One fact is no fact, but when you have seen many, you begin to sit up.)

Letter to AD Cornell (9 February 1960)

106. It is important to remember that novelty represents an emotional situation (beginner’s luck).

106. A miracle is an archetypal situation which is accompanied by a corresponding emotion.

107. What I mean is that a telepathically perceived event – a vision, let us say – is not the product of a telepathic faculty but rather that the outer event occurs simultaneously inside the psyche and reaches consciousness by the usual pathways of inner perception.

108. Exceptions are just as real as probabilities. The premise of probability simultaneously postulates the existence of the improbable.

109. Because of its ubiquity, the archetype can by its very nature manifest itself not only in the individual directly concerned but in another person or even in several people at once—for instance, in parallel dreams, the ‘transmission’ of which should be regarded more as a Psiphenomenon than anything else.

7. Jung’s astrological experiment

‘An Astrological Experiment’ (1958)

116. Hence there is in nature a background of acausality, freedom, and meaningfulness which behaves complementarily to determinism, mechanism and meaninglessness; and it is to be assumed that such phenomena are observable.

116. Meaning arises not from causality but from freedom, i.e., from acausality.

 

117. That is so because nature is still beyond us and because science gives us only an average picture of the world, but not a true one. If human society consisted of average individuals only, it would be a sad sight indeed.

From: ‘Letters on Synchronicity’ (1950-55)

118. It seems to me synchronicity represents a direct act of creation which manifests itself as chance. The statistical proof of natural conformity to law is therefore only a very limited way of describing nature, since it grasps only uniform events. But nature is essentially discontinuous, i.e., subject to chance. To describe it we need a principle of discontinuity. In psychology this is the drive to individuation, in biology it is differentiation, but in nature it is the ‘meaningful coincidence’, that is to say synchronicity.

8. Physics

Letter to Wolfgang Pauli (29 October 1934)

122. if you look long enough into a dark hole you perceive what is looking in.

From: ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’ (1947/1954)

Highlighted passage on energy

Part III: Outer limits

 

9. Visions and altered states

 

From Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963):

135. Her fate and her whole being were vivid presences to me; with her intense nature, she was a suitable embodiment for my anima.

135. To the individual, the anima is all life that has been in the past and is still alive in him.

136. Since my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with certainty that something interior can seem to be exterior, and that something exterior can appear to be interior.

137. This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fulness.

138. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end.

138. For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box.

140. Those inner states were so fantastically beautiful that by comparison this world appeared downright ridiculous.

140. Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

140. We shy away from the word ‘eternal’, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one.

141. I no longer attempted to put forward my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts.

10. Life after death

From: The Soul and Death (1934)

142. I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward situation.