On Divination and Synchronicity : The Psychology of Meaningful Chance Studies in Jungian Psychology by Marie Louise Von Franz.
Lecture 1
You may perhaps know of the amusing fact that originally divination
was always practiced in churches. The old Jews, for instance, had a
divination oracle in their sanctuaries in Jerusalem and on certain
occasions when the priest wanted to consult Yahweh he tried through such
oracles to discover the will of God. In all primitive civilizations
divination techniques have been used to find out what God, or the gods,
want, but in time this has been discontinued and outgrown; it has become
a dark, magical, and despised practice, but today this lecture is being
given in the (parish church), a nice little synchronicity.
The view of the world which Jung tried to bring back into focus, and
on which divination basically rests, is that of synchronicity; therefore
before we go into details about the problems of divination we have to
remember what Jung said about synchronicity. In his Foreword to the
English edition of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching or Book
of Changes, he gives a very good summary of the difference between
causal and synchronistic thinking. Causal thinking is, so to speak,
lineal. There is a sequence of events A, B, C, D, and you think
backwards and wonder why D appears because of C, why C appears because
of B, and why B because of A, like some kind of inner or outer event.
One tries to trace back in one’s mind why these coordinate effects have
worked.
We know that through the investigations of modern physicists it has
now been proved that on the microphysical level this principle is no
longer completely valid; we can no longer think of causality as absolute
law, but only as a tendency or prevailing probability. So causality is
shown to be a way of thinking which satisfies our mental grasp of a
cluster of physical events, but does not complete ly get at the core of
natural laws, it only delineates general trends or possibilities.
Synchronistic thinking, on the other hand, one could call field
thinking, the center of which is time.
Time also comes into causality since we normally think that the cause
comes before the effect. In modern physics it sometimes looks as if the
effect came before the cause, and therefore they try to turn it round
and say that you could still call that causal; but I think Jung is right
in saying that that is enlarging and twisting the idea of causality ad
absurdum so far that it loses its meaning. Normally, cause always comes
before effect, so there also is a lineal idea of time, before and after,
with the effect always after the before.
Synchronistic thinking, the classic way of thinking in China, is
thinking in fields, so to speak. In Chinese philosophy such thinking has
been developed and differentiated much more than in any other
civilization; there the question is not why has this come about, or what
factor caused this effect, but what likes to happen together in a
meaningful way in the same moment? The Chinese always ask: “What tends
to happen together in time?” So the center of their field concept would
be a time moment on which are clustered the events A, B, C, D, and so on
(Figure 1).
Figure 1.: Field of time (time-bound ensemble of events).
Richard Wilhelm puts it very well in his Introduction to the I Ching
where he speaks of the complex of events which occur at a certain time
moment.
In our causal thinking we have made a big separation between psychic
events and physical events, and we only watch to see how physical events
produce, or have a causal effect upon, each other and on psychological
events. Right up to the 19th century the idea still persisted in the
sciences (and it still does in those less developed) that only physical
causes have physical effects and psychic causes psychological effects;
for instance, Freud’s way of thinking: “This woman is neurotic and has
an idiosyncrasy as the result of a childhood trauma.” That would be the
same kind of thinking but transposed onto the psychological level.
The question now being asked is whether there are interactions
between those two lines. Is there something like a psychic cause for
physical events and vice versa? That is a problem of psychosomatic
medicine. Interactions between those two chains of causality can be
proved: you may read a letter saying that somebody you loved very much
has died, and get physiological effects; you may even faint, a reaction
caused not by the ink and the paper, but by the psychic content of the
communication. There is a causal interaction between those two lines
which one is only now beginning to investigate.
The synchronistic, i.e., the Chinese way of thinking, however, is
completely different. It is a differentiation of primitive thinking in
which no difference has ever been made between psychological and
physical facts. In their question as to what likes to occur together,
one can bring in both inner and outer facts. For the synchronistic way
of thinking it is even essential to watch both areas of reality, the
physical and the psychic, and to notice that at the moment when one had
these and these thoughts or these and these dreams which would be
psychological events such and such outer physical events happened; i.e.,
there was a complex of physical and psychological events. Though causal
thinking also poses the problem of time in some form because of the
before and after, the problem of time is much more central in the
synchronistic way of thinking because there it is the key moment a
certain moment in time which is the uniting fact, the focal point for
the observation of this complex of events.
In modern Western science, algebraic means are used to describe the
probabilities of the sequence of events algebraic matrices of different
forms and algebraic functions and curves. The Chinese also use
mathematics for the description of their laws of synchronicity. They use
something like mathematical matrices but not algebraic abstractions;
they use the individual natural integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), so one
could say that the mathematics of this Chinese way of thinking would be
the different qualifications one can draw from the series of natural
integers, the common laws which one can abstract from them. One uses the
3, 4, and 5 to grasp a cluster of events in a mathematical form.
The basis of the science of mathematics, or the scientific
mathematics of synchronistic thinking, is therefore the series of
natural integers, and one finds that in all techniques of divination.
The simplest form of divination is the binary: hit or miss. One throws a
coin and gets heads or tails and accordingly decides whether one will
go or not to the Rigi, or whichever direction you are undetermined
about. Hit or miss is the basic idea of all divination but in different
civilizations there are differentiated techniques by which to read the
situation better at a certain time moment.
The Western way of thinking is an extraverted orientation, namely
first to look at the events and then to abstract a mathematical model.
The Eastern, or Chinese way, is to use an intuitive mental model to read
the event, namely natural integers. They turn first to the event of
throwing heads or tails, that is a psychic and a psycho-physical event.
The question of the diviner is psychic, while the event is that the coin
falls either heads or tails, from which the further outer and inner
events can be read. So it is an outlook completely complementary to
ours.
What is important in China, as Jung also pointed out in his essay
called ”Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” is that the
Chinese did not get stuck, like many other primitive civilizations do,
into using divination methods only to predict the future whether for
instance one should marry or not. One asks the priest and he says: “No,
you won’t” or you will “get her.” That is something practised all over
the world, not only officially but by many people quite silently in
their rooms
when they lay Tarot cards, etc., or they have little rituals: “If
today the sun shines, then I’ll do such and such a thing.” Man
constantly thinks that way and even scientists have these little
superstitions, telling themselves that because the sun shone into their
room when they got up they knew that today this and this would come off
right. Even if one discards it in one’s conscious Weltanschauung, the
primitive man in us constantly uses this kind of prognostication of the
future with the left hand, so to speak, and then shamefacedly denies it
to his rationalistic brother, though he is much relieved to discover
that the other does that too! In this stage divination cannot evolve and
become differentiated; it remains a kind of primitive guessing
technique, trying to guess the future by some technical means.
That is practiced, as I say, by us and more openly in all primitive
civilizations. If one wants to travel in Africa one goes to a medicine
man who throws a few chicken bones, and according to the way they fall,
whether more into the red or the white section he has drawn on the
ground, and in what constellation, he will say whether the journey will
be successful or not, and whether to go or not. Before any big
enterprise, such as hunting or making a long dangerous journey to
Johannesburg, or whatever it is, one first always consults such an
oracle and then acts accordingly. We do the same thing more secretly but
in both cases I’ll mention some exceptions later it is not built into
the Weltanschauung and therefore remains a kind of undeveloped primitive
practice, a ritual game, so to speak, which we tend not to integrate
into our conscious view of reality.
The Chinese, like all primitive civilizations, still had this
primitive technique until it was forbidden. In the market place of every
Chinese town there were a few I Ching priests who would throw coins for
you or take the yarrow stalks, and get answers to your questions, but
then it was forbidden. In 1960 Mao thought of slightly releasing the
rationalistic political pressure on the masses and found out that there
were two possibilities: either to give more rice, or to allow the use of
the I Ching, and all those whom he consulted told him that the people
were more eager to use the I Ching again than to get more food.
Spiritual food, and the I Ching was their spiritual food, was more
important to them, so it was allowed for I think one or two years and
then he strangled it again. It is very typical for the Chinese that even
a bowl of rice and they are very hungry was less important than again
to have their beloved Book of Changes and its spiritual orientation.
The great merit of the I Ching is due to two remarkable geniuses,
namely the legendary King Wên and the Duke of Chou, who developed what
was originally a primitive oracle system into a complete philosophic
Weltanschauung. They treated the oracle and its ethical consequences
philosophically; they thought about its psychological consequences and
presuppositions and through that it has in China become the basis of a
very deep and very broad Weltanschauung. Jung writes in his paper on
synchronicity that this has happened only in China, but I chanced to
discover that it has also happened in Western Nigeria. There were
certain medicine men there who by their oracle technique geomancy in
their case developed a whole religious philosophy, naturally slightly
more primitive than the Chinese one, but also a complete religious and
philosophical viewpoint about the oracle, not using it just as a
prognostication technique.
Those are the two instances of which I know. There is probably a
third, but I have not been able to get hold of the material; as far as I
can find out only one paper has been written on it, but I cannot get
hold of it anywhere. The old Mayan civilization which, as has become
more and more evident, is dependent on central Asia and therefore linked
up with the Chinese civilization, also had an I Ching type of oracle
technique, and I would guess from the quality of their civilization that
they also had a philosophical outlook and viewpoint about it and that
it was not just a left hand prognostication technique. One man,
Schultze-Jena, published a small paper on it, but though I have been
chasing that for two years I cannot find it anywhere in Switzerland, and
as far as I know the author only writes of the techniques of the Mayan
oracle and not of its philosophical background.
We can, however, do some guessing about this because in Mayan
philosophy all the gods were time and number gods. All the main figures
of the Mayan myths have a specific number which is even expressed in
their names. The greatest hero, for instance, is Hunabku the name comes
from Hun, meaning one and then there is the great hero Seven Hunter;
every great god is both a number and a time moment in the calender year.
So there is a union of an archetypal figure with a certain time moment
and a certain natural integer. This gives a hint that probably the Mayan
oracle was philosophically linked with that kind of view, but as I say I
have not yet found any details on it.
Let us therefore stay for the moment with the Chinese way of
thinking. There is an excellent book on this by the sociologist Marcel
Granet, La Pensée Chinoise, who says that the Chinese never thought in
quantities but always in terms of qualitative emblems. Jung would have
said “symbols,” and I will use that term so as to make it simpler for
us. According to the Chinese, numbers describe regular relationships of
events and things, exactly as they do for us. We try with mathematical
algebraic formulae to describe regular relationships. As a category,
causality is the idea for discovering such relationships, and for the
Chinese too, numbers express the regular relationship of things not in
their quantitative way, but in their qualitative hierarchy they qualify
the concrete orderedness of things. We could not disagree with that for
it is more or less the same as with us, except that their accent is on
the quality level.
But it goes further in China, where they believe that the universe
probably has an ultimate basic numerical rhythm. The same question
arises with us now, for in modern physics it is thought that one might
possibly find one basic rhythm of the universe which would explain all
the different phenomena, but for us that is at present just a kind of
speculative idea held by some modern physicists. The Chinese simply
assumed that this rhythm of all reality existed, that it was a number
pattern, and that all relationships of things with each other in all
areas of outer and inner life therefore mirror this same basic number
pattern in a form conceived as a rhythm.
Until the end of the 19th century, the Chinese also had a much more
energetic and dynamic outlook on the world than we had, believing that
everything was energy in flux. Actually we now think the same but we
arrived at the idea much later and by scientific means. Their primary
assumption from all time was that everything is outwardly and inwardly a
flux of energy, which follows certain basic and recurring numerical
rhythms. In all areas of events one would always finally arrive at this
mirror image, the basic rhythm a matrix of the cosmos. For those who are
not so mathematically minded, a matrix is any regular array of numbers
in several columns; there may be any number of rows and columns, but
always in a rectangular arrangement.
For the Chinese one of the basic matrices, or arrangements of the
universe, was a quadrangular matrix a magic square called the Lo Shou
(Figure 2), which sets the basic rhythm. It is a so-called magic square
because whichever way you add up the figures the result is always 15,
and it is also the only magic square which has only three elements in
each row or column. So it is really a mathematically unique thing.
There are many magic squares with more rows and more possibilities of
addition, but the simplest is this one and it has only eight solutions.
I would say it is one of the most highly symmetrical number matrices to
be found in arithmetic. The Chinese discovered it intuitively and for
them it represented a basic mirror or rhythmic image of the universe
seen in its time aspect. I will return to that later.
The Chinese had two ideas or aspects of time: namely timeless time or
eternity, unchanging eternity, with superimposed on it cyclic time. We
live normally, with our consciousness, in cyclic time, according to
Chinese ideas, but there is an eternal time une durée créatrice, to use
an expression of Bergson’s underneath, which sometimes interferes with
the other. Ordinary Chinese time is cyclical and follows this pattern.
They arranged the innermost chambers of their imperial palace on such
a pattern; also all musical instruments were tuned according to it, all
dances and all protocol, as well as what a Mandarin and what a commoner
had to do at the funeral of his father. In every detail this number
pattern always played a role, because it was thought to be the basic
rhythm of reality; therefore in different variations in music, in
protocol, in architecture, everywhere this same pattern was always put
in the center.
The underlying numerical order of eternity is called the Ho-tou
(Figure 3), a mandala and also a cross. There is again 5 in the middle.
One counts 1, 2, 3, 4, and then moves to the middle 5, then 6, 7, 8, 9,
and then back to 10 10 would really be in the middle. One must always
cross and come back to the middle. Actually it is the movement of a
musical dance because it always emanates into four and contracts into
the middle it has a systole and diastole movement. The Lo Shou is the
world of time in which we live, and underneath is always the eternity
rhythm, the Ho-tou. That idea underlay the whole cultural and scientific
application of mathematics in China. Let us compare it with our
viewpoint.
I want to read you in detail what the well-known mathematician,
Hermann Weyl, says about it in his book Philosophy of Mathematics and
Natural Science. You know that until about 1930 the great and passionate
occupation of most mathematicians was the discussion of the
fundamentals. They hoped, as has been the fashion nowadays, to rediscuss
the fundamentals of all science. But the famous German mathematician,
David Hilbert, created a new construction of the whole building of
mathematics, so to speak, and hoped that this would contain no internal
contradictions.
There would be a few basic axioms on which one could build up all
branches of mathematics: topology, geometry, algebra, and so on; it was
to be a big building with solid foundations in a few axioms. That was in
1926, and Hilbert was even bold enough to say: “I think that with my
theory the discussion of fundamentals has been forever removed from
mathematics.”
Then in 1931 came another very famous mathematician, Kurt Goedel, who
took a few of those basic axioms and showed that one could reach
complete contradictions with them: starting from the same axioms, one
could prove something and its complete opposite. In other words, he
showed that the basic axioms contain an irrational factor which could
not be eliminated. Nowadays in mathematics one must not say that
obviously this is so-and-so, and that therefore that and that is also
so, but: “I assume that it is so-and-so, and if so then that and that
follows.” The axioms must be presented as assumptions, or must be
postulated, after which a logical deduction can be made, but one cannot
infer that what has been assumed or postulated could not be contradicted
or doubted as an absolute truth.
In order to make such assumptions, mathematics are generally
formulated in such terms as: “It is self-evident,” or “It is reasonable
to think” that is how mathematicians posit an axiom nowadays, and from
there they build up. From then on there is no contradiction, only one
conclusion is possible, but in ”it is reasonable to assume,” that is
where the dog lies buried, as we say. Goedel showed that, and thus threw
over the whole thing. Strangely enough that did not reopen the
discussion of fundamentals. From then on, as Weyl says, nobody touched
that problem, they just felt awkward and scratched behind their ears and
said, “Don’t let’s discuss fundamentals, there’s nothing doing: it is
reasonable to assume, we cannot go beyond that,” and there the situation
rests today.
Weyl, however, went through a very interesting development. At first
he was very much attracted by the physicist, Werner Heisenberg. He was
very much of a Pythagorean and was attracted by the numinosity and
irrationality of natural integers. Then he became fascinated by David
Hilbert, and in the middle of his life had a period during which he
became more and more attracted by Hilbertian logic and dropped the
problem of numbers, treating them, erroneously as I think, as simply
posited quantities.
He says, for instance, that natural integers are just as though one
took a stick and made a row of marks, which one then named
conventionally; there was nothing more behind them, they were simply
posited by the human mind and there was nothing mysterious about them;
it was “reasonable and self-evident” that one could do that. But at the
end of his life he added (only to the German edition of his book on the
philosophy of mathematics, and shortly before his death) this passage:
The beautiful hope we had of freeing the world of the discussion of
fundamentals was destroyed by Kurt Goedel in 1931 and the ultimate basis
and real meaning of mathematics are still an open problem. Perhaps one
makes mathematics as one does music and it is just one of man’s creative
activities, and though the idea of an existing completely
transcendental world is the basic principle of all formalism, each
mathematical formalism has at every step the characteristics of being
incomplete [which means that every mathematical theory is consistent in
itself but is incomplete, at the borders are questions which are not
self-evident, are not clear, and are incomplete] in so far as there are
always problems, even of a simple arithmetical nature, which can be
formulated in the frame of a formalism, but which cannot be decided by
deduction within the formalism itself.
That is put in a mathematician’s complicated way; put simply, it
means that I daresay it is self-evident, by which I posit something
irrational, because it is not self-evident. Now one could make an
uroboros movement and say: “But from my deduction I can reprove my
beginning.” You cannot! You cannot from the deductive formalism
afterwards deduce a proof,except by a tautology, which naturally is not
allowed, even in mathematics.
We are therefore not surprised that in an isolated phenomenal
existence a piece of nature surprises us by its irrationality and that
one cannot analyse it completely. As we have seen, physics therefore
projects everything which exists onto the background of possibility or
probability.
That is important because it sums up in one word what modern science
does. In other words, any fragment of phenomenal existence, let us say
these spectacles, contains something irrational which one cannot exhaust
in physical analysis. Why the electrons of these millions and millions
of atoms of which my spectacles consist are in this place and not in
another, I cannot explain; therefore through physics, when it comes to a
single event in nature, there is no completely valid explanation.
The single event is always irrational, but in physics one proceeds by
projecting this onto the background of a possible, i.e., one makes a
matrix. For instance, in these spectacles there are so many atoms and so
many particles of them, and so on, and out of a whole group one can
make a mathematical formula in which one could even count the particles
not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but by projecting onto the background of what is
possible. That is why these matrices are nowadays used in engineering
and so on, because one can cope with the uncountable; they provide an
instrument with which to cope with the things which cannot be counted
singly. Weyl says:
It is not surprising that any bit of nature we may choose [these
spectacles or anything] has an ultimate irrational factor which we
cannot and never will explain and that we can only describe it, as in
physics, by projecting it onto the background of the possible.
But then he continues:
But it is very surprising that something which the human mind has
created itself, namely the series of whole natural integers [I told you
that he has this erroneous idea that the human mind created 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, by making dots], and which is so absolutely simple and transparent to
the constructive spirit, also contains an aspect of something abysmal
which we cannot grasp.
That is the confession of one of the most remarkable because one of
the most philosophically oriented modern mathematicians, Hermann Weyl.
We can naturally say that we do not believe what he believed, namely
that the natural integers simply represent the naming of posited dots,
therefore to us it is not surprising that natural integers are abysmal
and beyond our grasp. He believed that, and that is why he could not
understand. It is incredible that it should be so, but it is so; in
other words, because the natural integers have something irrational (he
called it abysmal) the fundamentals of mathematics are not solid,
because the whole of mathematics is ultimately based on the givenness of
the series of natural integers.
Now precisely because numbers are irrational and abysmal to quote
Weyl they are a good instrument with which to grasp something
irrational. If one uses numbers to grasp the irrational, one uses
irrational means to get hold of something irrational, and that is the
basis of divination. They took those irrational, abysmal numbers which
nobody has so far understood, and tried to guess reality, or their
connection with reality but into the divination problem there also
enters the problem of time.
Divination has to do with synchronicity, and Jung has in so many
words called the synchronistic phenomena para-psychological phenomena. I
want you to keep that in mind because, as you know, in modern science
physicists and psychologists are now trying to find the union of physics
and psychology in the area of para-psychological phenomena. They have a
hunch, or guess, that para-psychological phenomena might give us a clue
to the union of physis and psyche. Now in divination, and I am here
referring specifically to number divination, one would therefore also
have to deal with the para-psychological phenomenon, which at the same
time is linked up with the number. Jung has called number the most
primitive expression of the spirit and so we have now to go into what we
understand, from the psychological standpoint, by the word spirit.
Jung, in trying to specify how he uses the word spirit, first quotes a
lot of colloquial terms in which spirit is used as something like a
non-material substance, or as the opposite of matter.* We also generally
use the word spirit to indicate something that is a cosmic principle,
but we use the same word when we speak of certain of man’s psychological
psychic capacities or activities like the intellect, or the capacity to
think, or reason. For instance, one could say: “He has a spiritual
outlook,” or “This idea comes from a distorted spirit,” or something
like that. Again we use the word as a collective phenomenon such as in
the word Zeitgeist which is now generally not even translated into
English it is a German term to express the irrational fact that each
period of time has a certain spirit.
For instance, the Renaissance had a certain spirit as illustrated in
its art, its technology, mathematics, and religious outlook everywhere.
All these phenomena which characterize the 16th century could be summed
up as the spirit of the Renaissance. In that sense the word is simply
used as a collective phenomenon, the sum of ideas common to many people.
One could also speak of the spirit of Marxism or of National Socialism,
when it would be the common collective ideas of a whole group. There is
therefore, Jung continues, a certain opposition between a spirit, which
has a kind of extra-human existence outside man the cosmic spirit as
opposed to the matter of the cosmos and something which we experience as
an activity of the human ego.
If we say of somebody that he has a distorted spirit, that means his
ego complex is working intellectually in a wrong way. Jung therefore
continues: If something psychic, or psychological (i.e., a psychological
event) happens in the individual and he has the feeling that it belongs
to him, then he calls it his spirit for instance which, by the way,
would be quite wrong, but which many people do. If I suddenly had the
idea of giving you a good example, then I would feel that it was my good
idea, my spirit produced it. If something psychological happens which
seems strange to the individual, then it is called a spirit, in the
sense of something like a ghost, and then one experiences it as
possession.
Let us assume that suddenly I felt impelled to keep saying, “the
geraniums are blue,” “the geraniums are blue,” “the geraniums are blue.”
Then, because that would be crazy, and seem to me quite strange
compared with what I am now doing here, I would say: “My God, what
devil, or ghost, put such a crazy idea into my head, it is possessing me
and making me talk nonsense!”
If it were a good idea then I’d follow it right through! Now
primitives are more honest: everything which comes to them unexpectedly
from within they call spirit; not only that which is bad and which
possesses one, but anything of which they would say: ”My ego did not
make it, it suddenly came to me” that is spirit. In the latter case,
when the spirit is still outside, when I get possessed by having to say
or do something which seems not to belong to my ego, then it is a
projected aspect of my unconscious; it is a part of my unconscious
psyche which is projected and then experienced as a para-psychological
phenomenon.
That happens when you get into a state in which you are not yourself,
or into an emotional upset where you lose control of yourself, but
afterwards wake up completely sober and look at the stupid things you
did during your possessed state and wonder what got into you: something
got hold of you, you weren’t yourself, though while you were behaving
like that you thought you were it was just as if an evil spirit or the
devil had got into you.
These things one must not just take in a kind of colloquial amusing
way, but quite literally, for a devil or we would say, more neutrally,
an autonomous complex temporarily replaces the ego complex; it feels
like the ego at the time, but it isn’t, for afterwards, when dissociated
from it, one cannot understand how one came to do or think such things.
One of the main ways in which we use the word spirit is in speaking
of the inspiring, vivifying aspect of the unconscious. Now we know that
for the ego complex to get in touch with the unconscious has a vivifying
and inspiring effect, and that is really the basis of all our
therapeutic efforts. Sometimes neurotic people, who have become closed
up in their neurotic vicious circle, as soon as they go into analysis
and have dreams, get excited and interested in the dreams and then the
water of life flows again; they once more have an interest and therefore
are suddenly more alive and more efficient. Then somebody may say:
“What has happened to you? You have come alive again” but that only
happens if the individual succeeds in making contact with the
unconscious, or one could say “with the dynamism of the unconscious,”
and especially with its vivifying, inspiring aspect.
Jung therefore defines spirit, from the psychological angle, as the
dynamic aspect of the unconscious. One can think of the unconscious as
being like still water, a lake which is passive. The things one forgets
fall into that lake; if one remembers them one fishes them up but it
itself does not move. The unconscious has that matrix, womb aspect, but
it also has the aspect of containing dynamism and movement, it acts on
its own accord for instance, it composes dreams. One could say that
composing dreams while one sleeps is an aspect of the spirit; some
master spirit or mind composes a most ingenious series of pictures
which, if one can decipher them, seem to convey a highly intelligent
message.
That is a dynamic manifestation of the unconscious, where the
unconscious energetically does something on its own, it moves and
creates on its own, and that is what Jung defines as spirit. There is
naturally an unclear borderline between the subjective and the
objective; but in practice if one feels that it belongs to one then it
is one’s own spirit, and if one does not feel it belongs to one, then
one calls it the spirit, or a spirit. That depends on whether one feels
akin or not akin to it, close to it or not close to it.
Jung sums up by saying that spirit contains a spontaneous psychic
principle of movement and activity; secondly, that it has the quality of
freely creating images beyond our sense perception (in a dream one has
no sense perception the spirit or the unconscious creates images from
within, while the sense perceptions are asleep); and thirdly, there is
an autonomous and sovereign manipulation of those images.
Those are the three characteristics of what Jung calls the spirit, or
the dynamism of the unconscious. It is spontaneously active, it freely
creates images beyond sensual perceptions, and it autonomously and in a
sovereign manner manipulates those images. If one looks at one’s dreams,
one sees that they are composed of impressions from the day before. For
instance, one read something in a paper, or experienced something in
the street, or talked to Mrs. So-and-So, and so on. The dream takes
these fragments and makes a completely new and meaningful potpourri out
of that.
There one sees the sovereign manipulation of the pictures: they are
put into another order and manipulated into a completely different
sequence with a completely different meaning, though one still
recognizes that the single elements have been taken from, for instance,
memory remnants of the day before. That is why many people think that is
the whole explanation of the dream: “Oh, I read about a fire yesterday
in the paper, that is why I dreamt about a fire,” and then one has to
begin, as always, by saying: “Yes, but look at the connections in which
the fire has been put, very different from what you read.” That would be
the spirit, that unknown thing in the unconscious which rearranges and
manipulates inner images.
This factor which produces and manipulates inner images is completely
autonomous in primitive man, but through the differentiation of
consciousness it slowly comes closer to consciousness, and therefore in
contrast to primitives we say we do it in part. For instance, we often
say that we have a good idea or we invent something new. A primitive man
would never say that a bow and arrow, for instance, were his invention
he would say that the way to construct a bow and arrow was revealed to
him by the bow and arrow god, and then tell an origin myth, of how to a
certain hunter his divinity appeared in a dream or vision and revealed
to him how to make a bow and arrow.
So the larger our consciousness is, and the more it develops, the
more we get hold of certain aspects of the spirit of the unconscious,
draw it into our subjective sphere, and then call it our own psychic
activity or our own spirit. But, as Jung points out, a great part of the
original phenomenon remains naturally autonomous and therefore still is
experienced as a para-psychological phenomenon. In other words, we must
not assume that at our present stage of consciousness, where we have
assimilated more than a certain amount of the spirit of the unconscious
and made it our own i.e., made it the possession of the ego complex so
that the ego complex can manipulate it that we have the whole thing.
There is still an enormous area of that spirit which manifests as it did
originally, completely autonomously, and therefore as a
para-psychological phenomenon, as it does among primitive people.
If one looks at the history of mathematics one can see very clearly
how the spirit becomes subjective. For instance, the natural integers or
numbers, as you probably all know, were for the Pythagorean s cosmic
divine principles which constituted the basic structure of the universe.
They were gods, divinities, and at the same time the basic structural
principle of all existence. Even Leopold Kronecker still said that the
natural numbers were the invention of the Godhead and that everything
else was man’s handiwork.
Nowadays, in this time of so-called enlightenment where everything
irrational and the word God anyhow is thrown out of human science, a
real attempt has been made in formalistic mathematics to define number
in a form which would exclude all irrational elements, with the
definition of numbers as a series of marks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and a
creation of the human mind. Now the spirit is seemingly owned by the ego
complex, the mathematician’s ego owns and created numbers! That is what
Weyl believed, and that is why he said: “I cannot understand that
something completely simple which the human mind has created suddenly
contains something abysmal.” He should only have asked whether the human
mind had really created them. He feels as if he were now manipulating
the phenomenon completely, but that is not true.
Primitives, if they have twenty horses, cannot count the horses
themselves but they use twenty sticks and then they say, one stick, one
horse, two sticks, two horses, three sticks, three horses, and then they
count the sticks and with them they can count the number of horses.
That is a very, very widespread way in which man learned to count. We
still do it on our fingers if somebody enumerates things, we point to
our fingers, using them as a “helping quantity.” All counting began with
the helping quantity. When man first could count something and then had
to count more, he used his fingers; or in many, many primitive
civilizations they use dots or counting sticks and then when something
has to be counted sticks are put down and counted and that is the
helping quantity.
Thus if we do what Hermann Weyl did we simply go back to that
primitive way, we count the helping quantity; but that is only an action
of the human mind, not the numbers themselves. To make such helping
sticks or dots is an activity of ego consciousness by which one can
count; it is a construction of the human mind but the number itself is
not, and there is the great error.
So we have to turn back and say, Yes, numbers have an aspect in which
they are entities which the human mind can posit and manipulate. We can
assume a certain amount of numbers, an arithmetical law, a situation,
and that can be manipulated completely freely and arbitrarily, according
to our ego wishes, but we manipulate only the derivative; the original
thing which inspired one to make counting sticks and so arrive at the
number of horses, for instance, that idea one has not got hold of, it is
still autonomous, it still belongs to the creative spirit of the
unconscious, so to speak.
At the time of Weyl, therefore, one simply discarded the study of
single numbers because one always stumbled over something completely
simple and queer: one had just posited four dots, and then suddenly
those four dots developed qualities which one had not posited. In order
to get away from that awkward situation and keep up the illusion that
numbers were something one had posited and could manipulate with one’s
conscious mind, Weyl says: “The single numbers are not emphasized in
mathematics but one projects them by a specific procedure onto the
background of infinite possibilities and then copes with them that way.”
That is what most modern mathematicians do. They simply take the
theory of natural integers, from one to N, and cope with it as a whole;
they say simply that is the series of natural integers which has certain
qualities for instance every number has a predecessor, a successor, a
position, and a ratio. One knows that as a whole, and then one can
construct other mathematics with complex and irrational numbers, etc.
One then derives much higher forms, always of types (one could say of
numbers), and one deals with that simply as what the mathematician calls
a class, ignoring the seven, the fifteen and the 335 in it.
Therefore one deals with an algebraic idea and only with those
qualities which are common to all natural integers. With those one can
build a lot, but more or less, as Weyl says, “ignore the single
integer.” Mathematicians are very honest people; they never deny that
the single number has irrational, individual qualities, they are simply
not interested. Poincare, for instance, is even more honest, he says
that all natural integers are irrational individuals, but that is
exactly why one cannot make many general theories in number theory about
them, and why they are not very prolific for mathematics. They are not
very useful, because there are too many single cases and not enough
generalities from which one can make a theorem. That was Poincare’s
viewpoint, he did not say it was not interesting, but that we do not
like it so much because one cannot make theorems out of it. We would
have to pay attention to the single case and that we do not like as
mathematicians, because temperamentally we prefer to make general
theories which are generally valid.
Therefore in the history of mathematics one can very clearly see what
Jung characterized as the general development of the human mind: that
anything which we now call our subjective spirit, including our mental
activities in science, was once the objective spirit that means the
inspiring movement of the unconscious psyche but with the development of
consciousness, we have got hold of a part that we now manipulate and
call our own, behaving as if it were something which we completely
possess. That has happened in the whole development of mathematics: from
numbers being gods, they have been desecrated into being something
which is arbitrarily posited by a mathematician’s ego. But the
mathematicians are honest enough to say: “No, that is not the whole of
it, strangely enough there are things which I wanted and have had which
still slip and do things which they ought not to do, they have not
become the slaves of our consciousness completely.”
A parallel development has happened in the history of physics where
now, more and more, the concept of probability is used and one tries to
ignore as much as possible the single case. Wolfgang Pauli therefore
said: “Because of the in-deterministic character of natural law,
physical observation acquires the character of an irrational unique
actuality and a result you cannot predict; against it stands the
rational aspect of an abstract order of possibility which one posits
with the help of the mathematical concept of probability and the psi
function.”
In other words, physics is now confronted with a great split, namely
all the pre-calculations are based on the concept of probability and are
calculated in matrix and other algebraic forms, but with them one can
only state a general probability. Then one makes an actual observation
which is a unique actual event. Now these actual unique observations,
even if they cost ten million dollars, for instance and they do nowadays
in the realm of microphysics one cannot repeat infinitely so as also to
get a certain practical probability. There is therefore an immense gap,
and that is why Pauli says the actual experiment (let’s say with a
particle in a cyclotron) is an irrational “just-so story” which
generally does not quite fit the calculated probability. That is why
nowadays one fudges all those equations in physics; in fact one just
cheats a bit to bind them to each other, and one cannot make actual
accurate predictions any more.
Naturally, physicists have thought about that! How does that happen?
Why can one not make an actual prediction which should really give
actual numerical results, not only a statistical probability? Pauli very
clearly states that it comes from the presuppositions, because the
experiment is an actual single event and the means of calculation in
mathematics are based on the principle of probability, which excludes,
and does not apply to, the unique event.
Therefore we now have to go deeper into the problem of probability
and say: “How does that happen?” The simplest way of explaining
probabilities, and the way I am going to use because it is apparently
the archetypal pattern, is with cards. One has a set of 32 cards and may
pick one card. The probability that out of the 32 cards one gets, say,
the Ace of Hearts, is one-thirty-second.
One has just that much chance and no more. If I say you may pick ten
times, then naturally the probability of getting the Ace of Hearts is
much better, and if you may pick a thousand times then the chance
becomes still better, and so on.
In other words repetition is the secret of probability: the more one
repeats the situation, the more accurately the probability can be
formulated, till finally, and that is the statistical formulation, one
gets to a limit value where one can say that when one has N (that means
an infinite number of draws) then a limit can be made pretty accurately.
That, in popularized, simplified form, is what underlies calculable
probability.
Not being a mathematician and physicist I had generally to rely on
rather popularized material and there the physicist, when he wants to
explain probability, always uses the example either of dice or cards.
Just keep that in mind. If he explains the theorem of Bernoulli he
begins by saying, “Well you see if you have so and so many cards,” and
so on. The same way is always used to explain probability to a lay
person. But why just that example? That is amusing! But to go now to the
fact, it means that all mathematics, and their use in modern physics,
are based on the principle of admitting an inability to make single
predictions of single events, but aiming at being able to do so when it
comes into thousands and billions of events which then gain a great
amount of accuracy.
Now, as a wicked psychologist, and not believing in this, or rather
seeing this as a very one-sided operation of the human mind, one has to
ask two questions: first, naturally, one sees oneself that it is a very
questionable or a very one-sided grasp of reality which modern science
gets by applying these techniques, and therefore one is justified in
asking if there are not other possibilities with other means. For the
moment, however, I want to ask the other question: “Why on earth did
millions of highly intelligent scientists in Western Europe and America
and the Western world believe in the law of great numbers as if it were
God?” Because, actually, if one discusses these problems with modern
natural scientists they just believe this is it that it is our way of
getting at reality and describing it scientifically and accurately.
There is the implication that this is where one gets at the truth of
inner and outer factors and everything else; it must be statistically
proved and it must cover itself with this concept of probability.
That is my great criticism of Rhine of Duke University. Even he was
foolish enough to believe that if he wanted to sell parapsychological
phenomena to the scientific world then he must prove them statistically
or with the concept of probability and what a fool he ended up by that
in enemy territory. He should have stayed on his own territory. He tries
to prove with the very means which eliminates the single case,
something which is only valid in the single case. That is why I do not
believe in that whole investigation. I do not believe in what they do in
Duke University. They became seduced by the Zeitgeist of America, and
because they wanted to prove to other scientists that their
parapsychology is real science they used a tool which is absolutely
inept and inadequate for the purpose. That is my personal view.
Let us now first ask why that mania of believing in the law of great
numbers has possessed the Western mind? After all, those who believe in
it are, in the main, the most developed and intelligent people in our
civilization. They are not fools. Now why do they believe in it? If
somebody believes, as a kind of holy conviction, something which after
one has woken up about it proves to be a very partial and partly an
erroneous viewpoint, then the psychological suspicion always exists that
these people are under the secret influence of an archetype. That is
what makes people believe things which are not true.
If one looks at the history of science one sees that all the errors
in science, or what we now call errors, have been due to the fact that
people in the past were fascinated by an archetypal idea which prevented
them from observing facts further. That archetypal concept satisfied
them, it gave them a subjective feeling of “this is it” and therefore
they gave up looking for further explanations. Only when a scientist
came along and said, “Now I am not so sure of that,” and brought new
facts did they wake up and ask: ”Why on earth did we believe that other
story before, it appears now to be erroneous!” Generally one sees that
one was under the spell, the emotional, fascinating spell of an
archetypal idea.
We have therefore to ask what archetypal idea is behind the spell
which now grips the minds of modern scientists? Who is the lord of great
numbers, seen from a mythological standpoint? If one studies the
history of religion and comparative mythology the only beings who ever
were able to manipulate great numbers were gods, or the godhead. God,
even in the Old Testament, counted the hairs of our head. We cannot do
that, but He can. Moreover, the Jews refused to be counted because only
God was allowed to know the number of His people and to count the
population was sacrilege only the Divinity could count.
Most primitive societies that still live in the aboriginal state of
the collector and hunter type, for instance the Australian aborigines,
all have a binary system. They count to two and then they count on in
couples. They have no word beyond two, they count one, two; two, one,
two; two, two, one, one, two, and so on. In most primitive civilizations
they can either count to two, or to three, or to four. There are
different types and beyond a certain number they say “many,” and where
many begins there begins the irrational, the godhead.
There one sees how man, in learning to count, took away a little bit
of territory from that all-counting god, just a little bit, the one and
the two; that is what he can manage, the rest still belongs to the
all-counting god. In counting to three and then four and then five, he
slowly gains territory, but there always comes the moment when he says
“many,” and there he gives up counting; there “the other” counts, namely
the unconscious (or the archetype, or the godhead), which can count
infinitely, and can out-count every computer.
That is the fascination and I will go on from there next time.
http://www.tuks.nl/pdf/Reference_Material/Aetherforce_Libary/Other/%5BMarie-Louise_von_Franz%5D_On_Divination_and_Synchronicity.pdf
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