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Jung & Synchronicity
by Peter A. Jordan
In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced
to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century,
which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the
physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has
demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective
reality presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is
a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he
added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world
picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between
the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum."
These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip
of its materialistic world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized
intuitively: that matter and consciousness--far from operating
independently of each other--are, in fact, interconnected in an
essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified
reality.
In exploring the parallels between modern science and the mystical
concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the
evolution of science during the past one-hundred-and-fifty years to
a vast river system, in which each tributary is "swallowed up" by
the mainstream, until all unified in a single river-delta. The
science of electricity, he points out, merged, during the nineteenth
century, with the science of magnetism. Electromagnetic waves were
then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant heat and
Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics. The
control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to
electrochemical processes, and atoms were broken down into the
"building blocks" of protons, electrons and neutrons. Soon, however,
even these fundamental parts were reduced by scientists to mere
"parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according to
certain mathematical formulae."
What all this reveals, then, is that there may be what Koestler
refers to as "the universal hanging-together of things, their
embeddedness in a universal matrix." Many ecologists already
subscribe to this sense of interrelation in the world, what the
ancients called the "sympathy" of life, and the numbers of
scientists now converting to this world-view are beginning to
multiply. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione of the University of
Texas at Austin is studying the "spontaneous formation of coherent
structures," how chemical and other kinds of structures evolve
patterns out of chaos. Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford
University, has proposed that the brain may be a type of "hologram,"
a pattern and frequency analyzer which creates "hard" reality by
interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. On
the basis of such a model, the physical world "out there," is, in
Pribram's words, "isomorphic with"--that, the same as, the processes
of the brain.
So, if the modern alliance evolving between quantum physicists,
neuroscientists, parapsychologists and mystics is not just a
short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may
well be imminent. We may soon not only embrace a new image of the
universe as non-causal and "sympathetic," but uncover conclusive
evidence that the universe functions not as some great machine, but
as a great thought--unifying matter, energy, and consciousness.
Synchronous events, perhaps even the broader spectrum of paranormal
phenomena, will be then liberated from the stigma of "occultism,"
and no longer seen as disturbing. At that point, our perceptions,
and hence our world, will be changed forever.
Mystery
of Chance
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