The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds. Werner Heisenberg Carl G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli: The Synchronistic Principle Text from: Metanexus. Jung’s fascination with physics actually began early in his career as a result of a series of dinners with Albert Einstein between 1909 and 1912. He later wrote that “It was Einstein who first started me thinking about a relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality…years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.” His first public mention of the concept occurred 1928 during a seminar on the interpretation of dreams. Jung noted then that, in addition to the frequent appearance of common mythic motifs, dreams are often connected to coincidences in people’s lives. Taking a phenomenological stance, he said that while it would be “absurd” to consider the conjunction of dream material and life events to be causal, “it is wise to consider the fact that [these coincidences] do happen…The East…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.” In 1930, Jung mentioned the concept again in his speech honoring Richard Wilhelm, a scholar of Chinese philosophy who had died earlier that year. In this address (later published as part of his commentary on Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower), Jung said “the science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which-hitherto unnamed because unfamiliar to us-I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle.” He concluded that “the causality principle” cannot explain “psychic parallelisms” that must somehow be connected but are not causally related. In 1935, he referred once again to the idea during lectures given in London. This time he equated synchronicity with the Chinese Tao and described 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.” It was to be many years before Jung would write about this concept again, and when he did, his focus would shift from the empirical and phenomenological aspects of synchronistic phenomena to the ontological and archetypal nature of such events.This shift was the outcome of his long term relationship with Wolfgang Pauli, which began in 1932, when Pauli sought help during a period of intense psychological distress.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:17:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015