Jung- The Key Ideas

by Ruth Snowden

  Synchronicity

  Science has tended to train people to think that A causes B which causes C, in a neat, orderly, linear fashion – so related events are connected by cause and effect. This idea is known as causality. Eastern thinking, as Jung discovered by playing with the I-Ching, has long taught that there is another way in which events can be connected: A and B are connected, but neither need be the cause of the other. This is what Jung called synchronicity and he suggested that coincidences worked in this way.

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  Insight

  Causality is the idea that related events are connected by cause and effect. Synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events. Western minds often seem to have problems accepting the later idea, which is much more widely accepted and understood in Eastern thinking and philosophy.

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  Jung wondered if a law of synchronicity could be established, contrasting with the law of causality. He was very excited by the idea of discovering a place where psychology and physics could meet. The renowned physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was several times a guest of Jung’s at dinner, and he attempted to explain his theories of relativity to the non-physicists present. This started Jung thinking that there could perhaps be relativity of time as well as space, and this led eventually to his ideas about synchronicity.

  Jung’s ideas were very unusual and he waited many years before putting them forward publicly. Eventually he discovered that some scientists, notably physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–58, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1945), were interested in his ideas. He finally published his findings in tandem with Pauli in a collection of essays called The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Modern quantum physics seems happy to accept acausal effects in its physical theories. Physicists have even suggested that physical bodies can sometimes have an effect upon one another without any apparent exchange of energy taking place between them. The universe seems to consist no longer of facts, but of possibilities.

  Jung was especially interested in the more startling coincidences, those that seemed to be so meaningful that it was virtually impossible for them to have occurred by chance alone.

  For example, he was listening one day to a young woman patient who was relating to him a dream about being given a golden scarab. As she spoke he heard a tapping on the window, and upon opening it he found a scarabaeid beetle, the local equivalent of the golden scarab. The woman was so surprised by this event that it changed her whole way of thinking, breaking down her rational defences and leading to new mental maturity. The scarab, as Jung pointed out, is an archetypal symbol of rebirth.

  Simple coincidences, such as reading a new word in the paper and then immediately coming across it in the crossword, did not hold quite such fascination for Jung.

  Such archetypal symbolism often seems to crop up in connection with synchronous events. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung gives a startlingly vivid example of this when he describes an event that took place one night at Bollingen in the late winter or early spring of 1923–4. It was a very still night, but he was disturbed by weird dreams: first of all he felt that someone was prowling around the tower, and then later on he dreamed that a long procession of hundreds of young men was coming down from the mountains and pouring around the tower, trampling, shouting, singing and playing music. On both occasions he was puzzled to look outside and find that there was nobody there and the night was as still as before: he describes the dreams as being so real that it felt much more like an experience of haunting.

  It was much later that he stumbled upon an account in a seventeenth-century chronicle that described a very similar experience: a man climbing in the local mountains was disturbed one night by a procession of men pouring past his hut, playing music and singing. In the morning a local herdsman told him that Wotan’s army of departed souls was in the habit of appearing in this way.

  Jung felt that it was not enough to describe his own experience as a mere dream or hallucination. He felt that it had to be real in some strange way, especially in the light of the seventeenth-century account, and suggests that it was in fact a synchronistic phenomenon. Such phenomena often prove to have some correspondence in external reality. Jung later discovered that there was indeed a real parallel to his experience in the outer world, when he found out that such gatherings actually took place in the Middle Ages. Local young men would gather together, usually in spring, to celebrate and bid their homeland farewell before marching off to serve as soldiers in foreign lands.

  Astrology

  Jung was interested in astrology because it, too, tied in with his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious. He did a great deal of careful research, and by 1911 he had learned how to draw up natal charts and studied how they linked up with events in people’s lives. He was fascinated by the idea that a person’s private world could be affected by far-reaching aspects of cosmic activity. However, he was not at all interested in the generalized type of astrology that appears in newspapers and magazines, and he was not convinced that people are much influenced by their sun sign. He was more interested in the season in which a person was born, and the effects that the planets could have on the personality.

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  Insight

  Astrology is the study of the ways in which celestial bodies (sun, moon, stars, planets) affect human affairs. A natal chart shows the position of the celestial bodies at the exact time and place of someone’s birth.

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  Jung decided that astrology would be a good way of conducting experiments to show synchronicity at work as a natural law in its own right. He studied the birth charts of married couples, to see if the positions of the planets in the two natal charts tied in with the actual marriage event. If this could be shown to happen, then he would have established a meaningful acausal link. He did not find a direct correlation, but what he did find was equally fascinating – he found that the results of analysis varied according to who was doing the analysis. In other words, a person’s subjective expectations were somehow mirrored in the results. Modern quantum physics is beginning to see this as a real possibility – the observer can affect the results of an experiment simply by the act of observing.

  Jung was also interested in the ‘precession of the equinoxes’. This phrase refers to the fact that the astrological sign in which the spring equinox occurs moves slowly backwards through one degree of longitude every 72 years. So, every 2000 years the sign on the horizon at the time of equinox changes.

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  Insight

  The equinoxes are the two days in each year on which day and night are of equal length. They occur during spring and autumn.

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  At the moment we are just leaving the Age of Pisces and entering the Age of Aquarius. Jung believed that this phenomenon had far-reaching effects upon both historical events and human spirituality. Each 2000-year change heralds the beginning of a new spiritual trend. Interestingly, Jesus was born at the beginning of the Age of Pisces, and his sign is often shown as that of the fish. We are now apparently due for a change as we enter the Age of Aquarius.

  Astrology was not considered to be a subject for serious study in Jung’s day. In fact, it was very much frowned upon as a superstitious practice: many of his followers and students have seen his interest as a great source of embarrassment and tried to gloss over it. The Freud/Jung Letters show that he tried to get backing from Freud for his interest, saying that he considered astrology to be essential to a proper understanding of mythology. Initially Freud encouraged his interest, but cautioned him that he would be accused of mysticism, and should not dwell too long on astrological studies. Jung was undeterred and in a subsequent letter to Freud he said that he was hoping to discover much archetypal knowledge in astrology, particularly in connection with the signs of the zodiac. Once again Freud replied with encouragement, but also another caution, warning Jung to be careful about publishing his ideas. After their bre
ak-up in 1913, Freud became openly critical of Jung’s excursions into the paranormal.

  Jung never lost his interest in astrology, and if he was working with a particularly difficult case he sometimes had the person’s birth chart cast in order to gain greater understanding. In 1947, he wrote a letter to Hindu astrologer B. V. Raman, in which he explained that astrological data often shed light on aspects of a person’s personality that would otherwise have been very hard to understand. His opinion was that astrology was interesting to the psychologist because projected psychological experiences were evident in the constellations. Although Jung never lost his interest in astrology, he eventually concentrated more upon alchemy in his writing and public speaking. This was probably safer, because nobody was paying much attention to alchemy at the time, so it did not have the same stigma attached to it as astrology had, although alchemical writing actually contains a great deal of astrological material and is full of archetypal symbolism.

  As above so below

  Jung’s view of the human psyche in many ways reflected the ancient occult maxim ‘as above so below’. For him, events in the outer world of material things were often reflected in the inner world of the psyche. He found this idea reflected in his studies of astrology and alchemy. The effect could also take place in reverse, with the individual affecting the surroundings, for example in the case of the loud bangs in the bookcase when Jung was talking to Freud about the paranormal. Jung discovered that as patients got deeper into therapy, synchronous psychic events became more frequent in their lives. These often seemed to occur in connection with strong emotions, and Jung suggested that as the threshold of conscious control is lowered, so the unconscious and its contents begin to show themselves in the outer world. He concluded that a human being is not an isolated little psyche, but part of a vast network of interacting energy that can affect us in many unexpected ways. Since psyche and matter are part of the same unfathomable universe and in constant contact with each other, Jung thought it possible, if not probable, that they actually represented two different aspects of a whole.

  Jung felt that a lot of personal psychological problems arose from a sort of family or cultural karma – problems that had not been resolved by one’s forebears were passed on to be sorted out by the next generation. He said that many problems are more to do with the social environment than the individual and are therefore linked to the collective unconscious. Jung observed that so far psychological therapy has been slow to take this into account.

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  Insight

  Karma is a Hindu and Buddhist idea that all our actions during a lifetime determine the type of life we have next time around.

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  Jung’s view of the world was often subjective, concentrating on the inner world of dreams, visions and synchronous events. He saw his life’s quest as being one of achieving understanding of his own unconscious and so, in many ways, the inner world was even more important to him than the outer world. At times, he would deliberately try to shut himself off from the sensory input of the outside world and spend time alone in order to enter his own rich, inner world. If we live too much in the outer world, he said, we become too much involved in the present, and gain little understanding of the ways in which our unconscious, ancestral psyches are listening and responding. It is essential to listen to the voice of the unconscious in order to balance the historical psychological aspects of our being with the ever-changing conditions of the present.

  Jung explained that in our ordinary, everyday minds we are caught in the worlds of time and space. Beyond that, when we are in touch with the archetypes and the collective unconscious, we enter a world where the normal rules of space and time are no longer relevant.

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  Insight

  Jung seems to have been way ahead of his time here. Modern physics is grappling with similar ideas today, for example in recognizing that an observer can actually affect the outcome of an experiment simply by watching it.

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  Through his studies of the esoteric and the paranormal, in the peace and silence of his retreat at Bollingen, Jung was able to achieve this state of being and ‘see life in the round’. But he stressed that he was sailing here into uncharted waters, and there was much to be discovered by those who followed after him. He said that he could not enter what he called the ‘four-dimensional system’ at will – it could only happen to him. It was therefore not an experience that was easily open to scientific experiment. Modern psychology is still struggling with this kind of difficulty.

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  THINGS TO REMEMBER

  Jung was fascinated by a wide range of esoteric and paranormal studies.

  In these studies he was searching for universal truths within human psychology that would link up with his theories about the collective unconscious.

  In both Gnosticism and alchemy he discovered archetypal symbolism and mythology that supported his theories.

  His studies of divination and astrology led him to suggest the existence of a second natural law, that of ‘synchronicity’, that worked alongside the law of causality.

  Jung believed that events in the outer world of material things were often reflected in the inner world of the psyche and vice-versa.

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  9

  Religion and spirituality

  In this chapter you will learn:

  more about Jung’s spiritual attitude

  the basics of what he had to say about the problem of evil

  how he turned to the East to gain greater understanding of religious psychology.

  Jung’s spiritual attitude

  Jung was by nature a spiritually aware person – in fact, this was one of the most important aspects of his life. However, he had a tendency to attack the dogma of the great religious faiths, asserting that only spontaneous, personal religious experiences led to real spiritual truth.

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  Insight

  Dogma: the principle beliefs laid down by religious authorities.

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  In religious matters, as in psychotherapy, it was the individual’s unique life experience that really counted in Jung’s view. He maintained that the unconscious is the only source of our spiritual experience and that the individual can only attain enlightenment through a process of painstaking self-examination. Jung always tried to approach religious questions from the point of view of a rational scientist, and he explored many different religious angles in his search for universal truths.

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  Insight

  Spiritual matters concern the inner world of the soul, spirit, Self or Higher Self, rather than the external world. They are not necessarily connected with any particular religion or dogma.

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  Jung used biblical references quite frequently in his writing and also made references to the Apocrypha. This is a collection of texts that is included in some versions of the Bible as ‘inter-testamental’ material – meaning that they come after the latest books of the Old Testament and before the books of the New Testament.

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  Insight

  There are several different versions of the Apocrypha, because different denominations cannot agree upon which texts are to be included in the Bible. The word comes from Greek and means that which is hidden away – a rather Freudian phrase for stuff that one doesn’t approve of! The word apocryphal has gradually acquired rather negative, disapproving overtones and now tends to refer to something that is not true. This just shows how dogma can easily come to be seen as absolute truth.

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  As was the case with his studies of Gnosticism and alchemy, Jung used these texts as a source of material to support his own analytical psychology. Once again he emphasized the symbolic and mythological aspects, which gave archetypal insights and were used to express ideas that could not be expressed directly in ordinary language.

  Although Jung was always drawn to discover more about the numinous, his relatio
nship with Christianity was always somewhat ambiguous. He found the conservative dogma and ritual of his father’s type of Christianity too limiting. In fact, he found some of the ideas involved positively distasteful – above all, the idea that God, who had made people imperfect in the first place, could be appeased by the sacrifice of his own son. As he attempted to grow away from his religious upbringing, he developed some ambivalent attitudes. Meanwhile, his mother’s views were less rigid and she introduced him to ideas from other religions and encouraged his early interest in the paranormal.

  During a BBC radio broadcast in 1959, John Freeman asked Jung if he believed in God. His famous reply, ‘I don’t need to believe … I know’, led to more controversy for Jung. He later explained that he had been put on the spot and had uttered the first words that came into his head. What he had meant to convey was that he was aware of the existence of archetypal God-images, and also of his own experience of what is commonly referred to as God. This experience was an experience of a greater will, over and above that of his individual consciousness. He found that it often put strange ideas into his head, and sometimes prompted him to move in directions that seemed beyond his conscious knowledge or comprehension. Jung said that this archetypal pattern of God existed in all people, and contained all the energies for transformation and individuation in the individual.