Part 9. "Unus Mundus" and Synchronicity Jung, in common with other thinkers at different periods of history, believed in an ultimate unity of all existence.unus Using mundus. the terminology of medieval philosophy, he referred to this as the This unity is outside the human categories of time and space, Psychologyand beyond andour separationAlchemy of reality into physical and mental. In Jung writes of actualizing those contents of the unconscious which are outside nature, i.e. not a datum of our empirical world, and therefore an priori of archetypal character. The place or the medium of realizationa is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can adequately be expressed only by the symbol. [CW 12, par. 400] Ifour categories ofphysical and mental are artificial, "objective" events and states of mind may be interrelated. Jung certainly believed that archetypes manifested themselves,at atthe least same occasionally, time. in physical events and insynchronicity. states of mind He named this phenomenon From "Flying Saucers: a Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Skies" CW 10, pars. 779-80 Thus it is a fact of singular importance that number also characterizes the "personal" nature of the mediating figure, that it appears as a mediator. From the psychological standpoint, and having regard to the limits set to all scientific knowledge, I have called the mediating or "uniting" symbol which necessarily proceeds from a sufficiently great tension of opposites the "self." I chose this term in order to make clear that I am concerned 332 "UNUS MUNDUS" AND SYNCHRONICITY primarily with the formulation of empirical facts and not with dubious incursions into metaphysics. There I would trespass upon all manner of religious convictions. Living in the West, I would have to say Christ instead of "self," in the Near East it would be Khidr, in the Far East atman or Tao or the Buddha, in the Far West maybe a hare or Mondamin, and in cabalism it would be Tifereth. Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is with psyche. Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue whichone, should promptone Christians, for the sake of charity­ the greatest of all virtues - to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot onesee this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word. All of us gaze into that "dark glass" in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By "self' we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know, because psychic contents cannot be observed in their unconscious state, and moreover the psyche cannot know itself. The conscious can know the unconscious only so far as it has become conscious. We have only a very hazy idea of the changes an unconscious content undergoes in the process of becoming conscious, but no certain knowledge. The concept of psychic wholeness necessarily implies an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious components. Transcen­ dence in this sense is not equivalent to a metaphysical postulate or hypostasis; it claims to be no more than a borderline concept, to quote Kant. That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest them­ selves in patterns of order. These patterns include not only causally explicablea priori phenomena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally. They are the parapsychological phenomena FLYING SAUCERS 333 which I have summed up under the term "synchronicity" and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The positive results of his experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts. This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we now know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensura­ bility of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of "psychic" faculty and the psyche a kind of "materiality," by means of which the one can work on the other. That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own. But materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect. If we give due consideration to the facts of parapsychology, then the hypothesis of the psychic aspect must be extended beyond the sphere of biochemical processes to matter in general. In that case all reality would be grounded on an as yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same time psychic qualities. In view of the trend of modern theoretical physics, this assumption should arouse fewer resistan­ ces than before. It would also do away with the awkward hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism, and afford us an opportunity to construct a new world model closer to the idea of the The "acausal" correspondences between mu­ tuallyunus independent mundus. psychic and physical events, i.e., synchronistic phenomena, and in particular psychokinesis, would then become more understandable, for every physical event would involve a psychic one and vice versa. Such reflections are not idle speculations; they are forced on us in any serious psychological investigation of the Ufo phenomenon. (The Inter­ Jung'spretation collaboration of Nature andwith thethe Psyche,physicist Wolfgang Pauli London and New York, 1955) led to the recognition ofa shared problem. Jung repeatedly emphasized 334 "UNUS MUNDUS" AND SYNCHRONICITY the fact that, in psychology, the observer could not be separated from what he observed, and that making the contents of the unconscious conscious altered the way in which each functioned. Modern physicists, trying to observe the behaviour of minute particles, found that their observations altered the behaviour of the particles. As Pauli writes: "In microphysics, however, the natural laws are of such a kind that every bit of knowledge gained from a measurement must be paid for by the loss of other, complementary items of knowledge."211) ("The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler's Theories," p. Both physicist and psychologist, therefore, are up against the problem of defining an objective order of nature. Pauli also points out that scientific laws and theories are not derived entirely from the observation of the external world, but that "intuition and the direction of attention playa considerable151) role in the development of the concepts and ideas." (ibid., p. Pauli writes: "It seems most satisfactory to introduce at this point the postulate of a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena." (ibid., p. 152) From "The Conjunction" CW 14, pars. 767-80 Mysterium Coniunctionis, If Dom, then, saw the consummation of the mysterium coniunctionis in the union of the alchemically produced with the he expressly meant not a fusion caelumof the individualunus with mundus,his environment, or even his adaptation to it, but a with the potential world. Such a view indeed seems tounio us "mystical,"mystica if we misuse this word in its pejorative modem sense. It is not, however, a question of thoughtlessly used words but of a view which can be translated from medieval language into modem concepts. Undoubtedly the idea of the is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity ofunus the mundusempirical world rests on an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world, which is not the world of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now no one has been able to discover a world in which the known laws of nature are invalid. That even the psychic world, THE COXJUXCTlOX 335 which is so extraordinarily different from the physical world, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evident from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point te their underlying unitary nature. All that is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a positionis to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcenden­ tal background - a fact which, as Sir James Jeans has shown, can be expressed by Plato's parable of the cave.