The Scarab and the Fox: How Jung Navigated by Synchronicity

Jung’s life practice of paying attention to coincidence and symbolic popups in the world around us is a model of how to navigate by synchronicity.

 

    In his work with patients, he paid close attention to the interplay of dreams and signs from the world. He was encouraged to do this by his celebrated breakthrough work with a female patient who had been seriously blocked until she dreamed of a scarab, the dung beetle of the Nile Valley. Despite its lowly origins, the scarab was one of the most important Egyptian symbols of rebirth and transformation; it had been deified as Khepri and was placed over the heart of the soul traveler to guide journeys beyond the body and beyond death. 

    As the woman discussed her dream with Jung, a flying beetle known as a rose chafer appeared at the window. It was the nearest match for the Egyptian scarab you could hope to find in Europe, and as the patient’s eyes widened in recognition, she experienced a sense of confirmation of her dream and the work she was doing with Jung that carried her to deep healing.

 

     When he saw patients in his house at Küsnacht, on Lake Zurich,, he liked to sit so that they both faced the garden, the poplars at the edge of the lake, and the water beyond, noticing what the world was saying.  He found significance in every shift in the environment — a sudden wind whipping up the lake water, the shape of a cloud, the cry of a bird.

     He was especially intrigued by how animals or birds sometimes seemed to participate in a human exchange.  On one occasion, he walked in his garden with a woman patient. As they wandered beyond the garden into light woods, she was talking about the first dream of her life that had major impact on her; she said it made an “everlasting” impression. “I am in my childhood home,” she recalled, “and a spectral fox is coming down the stairs.” She paused and put her hand on Jung’s arm, because at this moment a real fox trotted out of the trees, less than forty yards in front of them. The fox padded softly along the path in front of them for several minutes.  Jung noted that "the animal behaved as if it were a partner in the human situation.”

 

     Jung’s willingness to trust an unexpected incident — and accept it immediately as guidance for action — was evident in a meeting he had with Henry Fierz, who visited him in hopes of persuading him to support the publication of a manuscript by a recently deceased scientist. Jung had reservations about the book and opposed publication. The conversation became increasingly strained, and Jung looked at his watch, evidently getting ready to tell his guest he was out of time. Jung frowned when he saw the time.

 

     “What time did you come?” he demanded of his visitor.

 

     “At five o’clock, as agreed.”

 

     Jung’s frown deepened. He explained that his watch had just been repaired, and should be keeping impeccable time. But it showed 5:05, and surely Fierz had been with him for much longer. “What time do you have?”

 

    “Five thirty-five,” his visitor told him.

 

    “Since you have the right time and I have the wrong time,” Jung allowed, “I must think again.”

 

     He then changed his mind and supported publication of the book.

On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance Studies in Jungian Psychology

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 :

Catching the Bug of Synchronicity

via awakeninthedream

Synchronicities are those moments of “meaningful coincidence” when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. At the synchronistic moment, just like a dream, our internal, subjective state appears, as if materialized in, as and through the outside world. Touching the heart of our being, synchronicities are moments in time in which there is a fissure in the fabric of what we have taken for reality and there is a bleed through from a higher dimension outside of time. Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality, as they are moments in time when the timeless, dreamlike nature of the universe shines forth its radiance and openly reveals itself to us, offering us an open doorway to lucidity.

Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”

To illustrate what he meant by the word synchronicity, Jung brings up an experience he shared with a patient of his. This particular patient was very caught in her head, and the analysis was seemingly going nowhere. She was stuck, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. Jung realized there was nothing he could do. In Jung’s words, “I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort in which she had sealed herself.” She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone offered her a golden scarab – a valuable piece of jewelry. At the moment she was telling Jung the dream, there was a tapping on the office window. Jung opened up the window and a scarabaeid beetle, whose gold-green color closely resembles that of a golden scarab, flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle in his hand, handed it to her and said “Here is your scarab.”

The shock of recognition in the synchronistic moment, in which Jung’s patient realized her dream of the previous night was being both literally and symbolically enacted in her waking life, pierced through her resistance and cracked her defensive shell wide open. At the moment of synchronistic transmission, a fundamental shift in perception took place within her which inwardly transformed her and made her receptive in a new way. From that point on, Jung commented, “The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

There was no conventional, linear causal link between the patient’s dream and the beetle tapping on the window the next day. But there was clearly an equivalence and meaningful connection between the two co-related events which was not based on linear causality In addition, the patient, as an active, egoic agent in space and time, didn’t cause or create the synchronicity, which was acausal and happened of its own accord. And yet, in some mysterious way, the beetle tapping on the window was intimately related to her.

To quote Jung, “Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” This quote by Jung has an interesting footnote which adds the following, “Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.”

Synchronicities are cystallizations in linear time of a nonlinear, acausal, atemporal process, windows into the realm outside of time and space, a world in which we ourselves are active participants in and of “the one creative act.” Synchronicities are both timeless and temporal, which is to say they are possessed of a double nature with regard to time. Synchronicities can be deeply religious and mystical experiences, expanding our sense of who we imagine we are and transforming our intimate relationship with ourselves.

Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality – like with Jung’s patient, our night dreams can manifest in our waking life, but also in the sense that, just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape to through the seemingly outer world. In a night dream, the seemingly outer dreamscape is synchronistically reflecting the internal psyche of the dreamer, as the dream is not separate from the inner world but is nothing other than the psyche within apparently externalized. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.

Being unmediated manifestations of the dreamlike nature of reality, we can interpret synchronicities just like we would interpret a dream. Mythologically speaking, a scarab is an archetypal symbol which represents, as in ancient Egypt, death/rebirth and transformation. Gold symbolically represents the highest value. Being offered a golden scarab in both her night and waking dreams was a form of synchronistic notarization by the archetype, highlighting its arrival on the scene. The synchronicity was an expression of – as well as the doorway through which – Jung’s patient was personally enacting an archetypal process of the renewal of consciousness. The synchronicity bore the stamp of the excited archetype, revealing to her and making real in time that she was actually taking part in a timeless, mythic drama of death and rebirth. Catapulting her out of the limited frame of reference of the conceptual mind, the synchronistic moment helped her access a deeper part of herself, as well as re-connecting her to the universe at large in which she lived.

Synchronicities are both the vehicle through which and an expression of the fact that we are waking up to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Being genuine wake up calls from the awakened part of ourselves, synchronicities are emanations of the part of ourselves that is waking up projected into time.

What I call the “deeper, dreaming Self,” is the part of us that is the dreamer of both our night and waking dreams. Being “nonlocal,” which is to say not bound by the conventional laws of space and time, as well as being multi-dimensional, the deeper, dreaming Self can simultaneously express itself through inner experiences such as inspirations and dreams as well as by attracting events in the seemingly outer world so as to coagulate itself in embodied form.

The deeper, dreaming Self was simultaneously the dreamer of the golden scarab in the patient’s night dream, the inspiration for her to tell Jung the dream in their session, the source of the beetle which was tapping on the window at exactly the right moment, the impulse which animated Jung to open the window, catch the beetle, offer it to his patient and say what he said, as well as the patient’s inner, revelatory experience of transformation which was the result. Being multi-faceted and multi-channeled, the deeper, dreaming Self nonlocally arranged all these dimensions enfolded within the field into a singular psycho-physical experiential gestalt in which the oneness of spirit and matter became visible.

Interestingly, the synchronicity with Jung and his patient was an experience in which Jung himself played an active, participatory role. As the synchronistic moment was irrupting into time, he found himself dreamed up by his patient to pick up and play out a role in her dreaming process. At the moment of synchronicity, Jung went from passively sitting in the audience hearing about her process to being drafted into the act and stepping into a scene in the play of his patient’s mind. Not merely witnessing his patient’s synchronicity, he found himself spontaneously enacting it with her, playing his part and saying his lines perfectly, as if sent by central casting. In offering her the precious jewel of a golden scarab symbolizing death and rebirth, Jung spontaneously found himself being an open instrument for the synchronistic universe to manifest itself through him into materialized form and express itself in our world.

Jung and his patient were reciprocally collaborating in dreaming up their shared synchronistic event together. They became “quantum entangled,” interdependently and inseparably merged in the co-creation of each other’s synchronicity. The synchronicity was not monopolized by Jung’s patient, as it didn’t solely belong just to her. Participating in his patient’s synchronicity, Jung was at the same time just as much having a living experience in and of his own synchronicity. Even though the synchronicity was a reflection of his patient’s inner landscape, it was simultaneously a synchronistic reflection of a deeper process taking place within Jung, too. For Jung to be hearing a patient’s dream of a golden scarab and to have a golden scarab fly into his office was an externalized, synchronistic reflection of the archetypal process of death and rebirth which was happening inside of him. It is noteworthy that a synchronistic event can collectively reflect and be mutually shared by more than one person in both similar and singularly unique ways.

To experience a synchronistic event is to necessarily be changed at our core. No one could have convinced Jung’s patient that her synchronistic experience should be dismissed as a mere coincidence, as she had an inner knowing of its meaningfulness due to how it transformed her. She no longer lived in a dis-enchanted universe.

Synchronicities by their very nature demand our active participation, as they are not something we can just passively watch and remain unaffected by. Imbued with a deeper fragrance of meaning, a synchronistic event is a revelation which contains within it a potency to insinuate itself into our very being and alter us from within. Synchronicities can transform us on a cellular level, as they are crystallizations into and out of the space of consciousness itself that have form-ulated themselves into our dimension as an expression of the part of us that is already awakened. Synchronicities inherent revelatory nature is ultimately offering us the realization that we are playing an active, participatory and hence, co-creative role in the unfoldment of the universe.

Registering the revelation embedded in the synchronistic moment is to necessarily have an expansion of consciousness, as the lens through which we view, interpret and place meaning on the nature of our experience has broadened by and through the very synchronicity itself. Because it is rich in the nutrient of meaning, a synchronistic event affects and deepens our state of awareness and perception, which is another way of saying that synchronicities are expressions of consciousness itself. Just like symbols in a dream, synchronicities do not exist objectively, separate from our own mind.

Synchronistic moments feel like grace, as they induce in us the feeling that we are right where we are supposed to be. Being numinous, synchronicities have a strong feeling component and emotional charge, which is both an expression of while simultaneously flowing into, influencing and altering the surrounding field of consciousness. A manifestation of the field as a whole, synchronicities are a field phenomenon, and to receive their full blessing we need to relate to them as such. Synchronicities are a reflection of the deeper, underlying nonlocal field of consciousness waking up to itself through us. The gift of synchronicity cannot be realized from the point of view which imagines we exist as a separate person who is “other” than the field in which we are arising. Jung and his patient’s shared synchronistic event was a living experience of being connected to something greater than themselves. Synchronicities are acute outbreaks of the archetypal, collective mind-field crystallized into our personal sphere through the third-dimensional medium of time and space.

Synchronicities are glimpses of transcendental unity, what in Latin is called the “unus mundus,” the one world. The unus mundus is the unitary and unifying realm which underlies, pervades and contains all dimensions of our experience. The unus mundus, just like the deeper, dreaming Self, is a psycho-physical reality, a universe beyond time and outside of space in which psyche and matter are inseparably co-joined as interconnected parts of a deeper, unified field. The unus mundus is a world in which we have already woken up. It is a realm beyond duality, beyond the opposites, beyond even the concept of beyond. In the unus mundus, opposites like matter and psyche form the outer and inner aspects of the same transcendental reality. Revealing its designs through events in the outer world as well as the psychic landscape within, the unus mundus is actualizing itself in time as we divine our wholeness through the synchronistic clues encoded within the fabric of experience itself.

Paradoxically, synchronicities are a living, unmediated materialization of our unconscious, while simultaneously being a nonlocalized manifestation of the part of us that’s waking up into a more expanded consciousness. Like a genuine symbol, synchronicities are utterances of the soul, as they contain, are an expression of and unite the opposites. Synchronicities are soul-making in action.

ARCHETYPES

Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. If we are absorbed in and identified with the person-alistic perspective, we person-alize our experience, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from the space around us. We thus become entranced into a particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop, a true “self” fulfilling prophecy. To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency and hinders our compassion. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our situation, however, we step out of a person-alistic and reductive viewpoint based on linear causality (i.e., the perspective of the illusory skin-encapsulated ego) into a more archetypal perspective in which we find ourselves playing roles in an eternal, mythic and divine drama of incarnation.

The synchronicity with Jung’s patient was revealing something not just about her inner, personal process, but was a revelation of a deep, archetypal process which exists within the collective unconscious itself. The synchronicity was simultaneously revealing a dynamic which is both personal and collective – it is at the moment of being truly deadlocked that a deeper archetypal dynamic within the psyche becomes activated and nonlocally expresses itself synchronistically in and through the canvas of the seemingly outer world, as well as within ourselves. To quote Jung, “The patient with the scarab found herself in an ‘impossible’ situation because the treatment had got stuck and there seemed to be no way out of the impasse…It is this kind of situation that constellates the archetype with the greatest regularity.” What is true individually is also true collectively – when we, as a species, find ourselves in an “impossible” situation with no exit plan, it is this very kind of dilemma which constellates the healing and revelatory archetypal realm to become synchronistically activated.

Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an “archetype” is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Jung calls archetypes “typical modes of apprehension.” An archetype is like the underlying grid-line or blue print which in-forms and structures how we perceive, interpret and respond to our experience.

The personal dimension literalizes our experiences, while the archetypal dimension symbolizes, mythologizes and dreams into our experiences with the utmost creative imagination. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.

When an archetype gets activated within us, it nonlocally constellates itself outwardly in the surrounding field. Conversely, when an archetype is activated in the seemingly outer field, it simultaneously constellates and is a synchronistic reflection of the same activated archetype within ourselves. An activated archetype’s magnetic field-of-force orders and organizes the entire field to synchronistically re-arrange itself so as to embody the archetype “in form.” The archetype is thus pure inform-ation. Archetypes nonlocally exert their in-forming influence through the frictionless and super-fluid medium of the collective unconscious itself. The archetypal, synchronistic realm vaporizes illusory boundaries – revealing spirit – and builds bridges which mediate and connect the inner and the outer, the conscious and the unconscious, and dreaming and waking.

Synchronicities occur at times of deep archetypal excitation in the field, which is to say moments of crisis, transition, creative tension and dynamic intensity. The archetype that gets activated by the field precipitates itself into the field as a synchronistic expression of the very field which activated it. Periods of disturbance in our world are both a manifestation of and trigger for a corresponding archetype in the collective unconscious of humanity to draw to itself everything it needs to synchronistically render itself visible in form. Times of distress, both individually and collectively, catalyze a deeper, self-regulating and healing archetypal process to awaken within the human psyche which simultaneously expresses itself throughout the whole universe.

There is a profound and intimate synchronistic correlation between what is happening deep within the collective unconscious of humanity and what is playing out collectively on the world stage. Just like a dream, whatever we are unconscious of gets dreamed up and out-pictured in and as our waking dreamscape. What plays out in one person’s night dream is a reflection of their inner process; similarly what is getting dreamed up by all six and a half billion of us on the world stage is a reflection of a process going on deep inside of the collective unconscious of humanity.

When a formless archetype of the collective unconscious is at the point of becoming conscious and incarnating, it has an energetic charge that will seize people, get them in its grip and compel them to act itself out so as to give shape and form to itself. What we are unconscious of and don’t remember, we act out in the outside world.

Like the underlying, invisible axial system is the skeleton of an emerging crystal, the archetypes of the collective unconscious in-form, pattern and structure our unconscious itself. The inner archetypal dimension is revealing itself by influencing and animating our unconscious, causing us to act out and give shape to the archetypal realm in the world theater. This is happening both individually and collectively on the world stage.

Archetypes can possess individuals or whole nations. Archetypes bedazzle consciousness in such a way that it becomes blind to its own assumed standpoint. When an archetype takes over a person, group or nation, they can be said to be the incarnation or the revelation of the formless, transpersonal archetype in human form, as they synchronistically em-body and mirror back to us this archetypal dynamic which exists deep inside of all of us. When the archetypal realm incarnates, something of the eternal, imperishable dimension synchronistically reveals itself to us as it enters the realm of time and embodiment. Synchronicities are revelations in the nick of time. As our present moment in time indicates, whether we continue to destroy ourselves or wake ourselves up depends upon whether or not we recognize what is synchronistically being revealed to us.

What we don’t remember, we aren’t associated with. Our dis-memberment from our experience and dis-association from a part of ourselves polarizes and empowers our split-off part to project itself outside of ourselves and express itself by acting itself out in the outside world. We will either become possessed by our split-off part and unconsciously act it out in the world, or we will project it out so that we dream up the seemingly outer universe to act it out for us. This is another way of saying that our waking universe is a function of our consciousness, or lack thereof.

When an archetype synchronistically manifests itself in full-bodied form in the outside world, its full blown localized revelation in time is necessarily correlated to – and an unmediated manifestation of – a more fundamental, nonlocal condition which simultaneously exists both outside of time and inside the timeless part of ourselves. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the of being inwardly realized. The outer, synchronistic materialization of the inner, archetypal process is itself the vehicle through which the archetypal process both actualizes itself in space and time and is inwardly realized.

The spirit that animates synchronicities, if we can speak of such immaterial matters, is the same spirit which inspires our dreams at night. This spirit, the aforementioned “unus mundus” or “deeper, dreaming Self,” is dreaming our dreams at night, our life during the day, as well as ourselves. The unus mundus/deeper, dreaming Self arranges situations in our life, both micro and macrocosmically as a way of synchronizing itself, which propels us into greater alignment with the implicate field of open possibility, as we refine and re-find ourselves in each moment anew. To the extent we realize the dreamlike nature of reality, the universe becomes a continually unfolding oracle as we become a revelation to ourselves.

In a synchronicity, the conjunction of two cosmic principles, namely psyche and matter, takes place, and in the process a real exchange of attributes occurs as well. In such situations the psyche behaves as if it were material and matter behaves as if it were an expression of the psyche. Synchronicities are emanations of the sacred marriage in alchemy, where the opposites of spirit and matter reciprocally inform each other as they unite in a timeless embrace.

Instead of orienting ourselves one-sidedly just to the spiritual to the exclusion of matter, or material matters disconnected from spirit, Jung felt that the psychological/spiritual task of our unique time in history is to live and incarnate the realization of the unity of spirit and matter which synchronistic events are revealing to us. Instead of, or in addition to the spirit coming down from the heavens above, spirit’s guidance is emerging and rising up from within matter itself and is waiting to be recognized.

Subjectively, synchronistic phenomena evoke in us the feeling that we are not alone, that there is a silent partner that we share our lives with who is dreaming with us. It is as if there is an autonomous factor deep within us arranging our experiences so as to help us to wake up. Part and parcel of a synchronistic event’s numinosity is its sense of meeting the “wholly other,” whether it be within ourselves or through the medium of the outside world. Paradoxically, through synchronicities we connect with ourselves by becoming introduced to the part of ourselves which is other than who we imagine ourselves to be.

Recognizing the synchronistic matrix which patterns our experience empowers us to be creative, co-operative and active partners in our own awakening process. The more we are open for synchronicities to happen, the more they happen, for synchronicities, just like symbols in a dream, are not separate from the dreamer, which in this case is us. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our waking universe is the degree to which our life is experienced as synchronistic. Once we become lucid in our waking dream and recognize that we live in a synchronistic universe by our very nature, the universe has no choice but to shape-shift and reflect back our realization by materializing itself synchronistically.

Being initiatory rites of passage, synchronicities empower us to view life synchronistically. Seeing through synchronistic eyes has nothing to do with overlaying a fabricated interpretation upon events to make them appear as if they are synchronistic. Seeing synchronistically simply involves recognizing the underlying synchronistic web which is always weaving itself through our experience. This is analogous to how being inside of a night dream and viewing the dream as if it were a dream would have the instantaneous effect of allowing the dream to more profoundly manifest its dreamlike nature. Changing our perspective within the dream didn’t cause the dream to become a dream; the dream had always been a dream, we just hadn’t recognized it before. Similarly, we live in a synchronistic universe, and by recognizing this, we allow the universe to manifest itself more synchronistically.

Synchronicities are like “cultures” from another dimension which create and enrich culture in ours. Like a bug in the system, synchronicities are cultures which virally propagate themselves through the field of consciousness, which means that synchronistic awareness is contagious. Synchronistic awareness, the consciousness that recognizes the synchronistic nature of the universe and has become lucid in the dream of life, is something we can turn each other onto and catch from one another. Synchronistic awareness is the invocation and revelation of the “eternal presence of the one creative act” in which we are all continually sharing, partaking and participating. Synchronistic awareness activates and reproduces itself in and through the field, as it is self-generating in nature, which is to say it is birthing itself through our consciousness into the world.

Just like Jung, we can help each other catch the “bug” of synchronicity. We can co-operatively cultivate a net-work of allies who creatively collaborate in bringing forth the precious jewel of synchronicity. The archetypal field becomes greatly potentiated for synchronicities when we get “in sync” with other people who are also waking up to the synchronistic universe. A field which is lubricated for stimulating and stabilizing lucidity gets conjured up when we get in phase with each other through the shared, open heart of synchronistic awareness. Co-operatively engaged, synchronistic awareness activates our collective genius and creates true culture in that it effortlessly, endlessly, nonlocally and virally transmits and fractally reiterates itself throughout time and space. Shared synchronistic awareness magnetically draws and attracts the universe into itself, materializing itself in, as and through life itself, creating a revelatory universe in the process.

The Enlightened Madness of Philip K Dick

via awakeninthedream

There is something terribly wrong in our world. The Native American people have a term—wetiko—that can really help us to contextualize and get more of a handle on the ever-unfolding catastrophe playing out all over our planet. As my research deepens, I am continually amazed that so many different spiritual wisdom traditions, as well as creative artists, are each in their own unique ways, pointing out wetiko. Wetiko—which can be likened to a virus of the mind—works through our unconscious blind spots, which is to say that it depends upon our unawareness of its covert operations within our own minds to keep itself in business. There is no one definitive model that fully delineates the elusive workings of wetiko disease, but when all of these unique articulations are seen together, a deeper picture begins to get in focus that can help us to see it. Seeing how wetiko works—both out in the world and within our own minds—is its worst nightmare, for once we see how it is playing us, its gig is up.

Recently, I have been delighted to learn that the science fiction author Philip K. Dick (henceforth PKD) was, in his own completely unique and “Philip K. Dickian” way describing wetiko—the psycho-spiritual disease that afflicts our species—to a T. Considered to be one of the pre-eminent sci-fi writers of his—or any—time, PKD had one of the most unique, creative, unusual and original minds I have ever come across. Way ahead of his time, he was a true visionary and seer, possibly even a prophet. To say that PKD had an unfettered imagination is an understatement of epic proportions—it is hard to imagine an imagination more unrestrained. Continually questioning everything, he was actually a very subtle thinker whose prime concern was the question “What is reality?”

Though mainly a writer of fiction, PKD didn’t consider himself a novelist, but rather, a “fictionalizing philosopher,” by which he meant that his stories—what have been called “his wacky cauldron of science fiction and metaphysics”[1]—were employed as the medium for him to formulate his perceptions. In other words, his fiction was the way he was trying to figure out what was going on in this crazy world of ours, as well as within his own mind. As the boundary dissolved between what was real and what wasn’t, he even wondered whether he had become a character in one of his own novels (in his own words, “I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books”). Through his writing, PKD tapped into the shamanic powers of language to shape, bend and alter consciousness, thereby changing our view and experience of reality itself.

From all accounts, it is clear that PKD’s life involved deep suffering; his process included bungled suicide attempts, self-described psychotic episodes, psychiatric hospitalizations and abuse of drugs (he was a “speed writer,” in that most of his writing was fueled by speed—amphetamines). We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, however, and use these facts to invalidate his insights or dismiss the profundity of his work. Though much of what he wrote came out of whatever extreme state he was in at the moment, he was definitely (in my opinion) plugged into something profound. PKD was a true creative artist who, in wrestling with his demons, left us a testament that can help us illumine our own struggles.

In 1974 Dick had—at least from his point of view—an overwhelming mystical experience, which he spent the rest of his life trying to understand and integrate. He was thrown into a “crisis of revelation,” feeling an inner demand to understand what had been revealed to him. I love that he didn’t have a fixed point of view in his inquiry, but, depending on the day, wondered whether he had become, in his words, a saint or schizophrenic. He continually came up with new theories and viewpoints, depending upon who knows what. There is no psychiatric category yet devised that could do justice to the combination of genius and high weirdness that characterized PKD’s process. It is clear from his philosophical writings, letters and personal journal (his “Exegesis”) that whatever it was he experienced in 1974 radically changed his whole perception of the universe and his—and our—place in it.

PKD confesses in his letters that the world has always seemed “dreamlike” to him. To quote PKD, “The universe could turn into a dream because in point of fact our universe is a dream.”[2] We are asleep—in a dream state—and mistakenly think we are awake. PKD writes in his journal, “We are forgetful cosmocrators [i.e., rulers], trapped in a universe of our own making without our knowing it.”[3] It is as if we are living inside of a dreamlike universe, but in our state of amnesia we have forgotten that we are the dream’s creators—the dreamers of the dream—and hence, have become trapped inside of a world that is our own creation. As PKD points out, “one of the fundamental aspects of the ontological category of ignorance is ignorance of this very ignorance; he not only does not know, he does not know that he does not know.”[4] We ignore—and remain ignorant of—what PKD is pointing at to our own peril.

I imagine that if PKD were here today he would be most pleased to learn that his mind-blowing revelations were helping us to wrap our minds around the over-the-top craziness that is getting acted out in every corner of our world. Not only precisely mapping the covert operations of the destructive aspects of wetiko, PKD offers psycho-activating insights into how to deal with its insidious workings that are novel beyond belief, insights that can therefore add to the ever-growing corpus of studies on wetiko. Like a modern-day shaman, PKD descended into the darkness of the underworld of the unconscious and took on—and into himself—the existential madness that afflicts humanity, and in his creative articulations of his experience, is offering gifts for all the rest of us. For this we should be most grateful.

THE BLACK IRON PRISON

We are trapped in a dream of our own making. PKD writes, “We are in a kind of prison but do not know it.”[5] Becoming aware of our imprisonment, however, is the first, crucial step in becoming free of it. One of the main terms PKD coined to describe wetiko is the “Black Iron Prison” [henceforth BIP]. PKD writes, “The BIP is a vast complex life form (organism) which protects itself by inducing a negative hallucination of it.”[6] By negative hallucination, PKD means that instead of seeing what is not there, we cannot see what is there. In PKD’s words, “The criminal virus controls by occluding (putting us in a sort of half sleep)…. The occlusion is self-perpetuating; it makes us unaware of it.”[7] Being self-perpetuating, this occlusion in our consciousness will not go away of its own accord; it acts as a feedback loop (in PKD’s words, “a positive feedback on itself”) that perpetually self-generates until we manage to break its spell. PKD writes, “the very occlusion itself prevents us from assessing, overcoming or ever being aware of the occlusion.”[8]

An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of wetiko/BIP is that it is incarnating in and through the very psyche which itself is the means of our inquiry. Speaking about the difficulty of seeing wetiko/BIP, PKD writes, “we alter it by perceiving it, since we are not outside it. As our views shift, it shifts. In a sense it is not there at all.”[9] Similar to how an image in a dream doesn’t exist separate from the mind of the dreamer, wetiko/BIP does not objectively exist, independent from the mind that is perceiving it. In our encounter with wetiko, we find ourselves in a situation where we are confronted—practically face-to-face—with the unconscious, both its light and darker halves.

There is another problem with seeing wetiko/BIP. Because it is invisible to most people, seeing it can be an isolating experience. When we see wetiko/BIP, we are, in PKD’s words, “seeing what is there—but no one else does, hence no semantic sign exists to depict the entity and therefore the organism cannot continue an empathic relationship with the members of his society. And this breakdown of empathy is double; they can’t empathize his ‘world,’ and he can’t theirs.”[10] This points to the important role language plays in human life—it is the cardinal instrument through which individual worldviews are linked so that a shared, agreed-upon, and for all intents and purposes common reality is constructed. Hence, creating language and finding the name—be it wetiko, the Black Iron Prison or whatever we call it—is crucial for getting a handle on this elusive mind-virus.

It is as if our species is suffering from a thought-disorder. PKD writes, “There is some kind of ubiquitous thinking dysfunction which goes unnoticed especially by the persons themselves, and this is the horrifying part of it: somehow the self-monitoring circuit in the person is fooled by the very dysfunction it is supposed to monitor.”[11] When we have fallen under the spell of the wetiko virus, we aren’t aware of our affliction; from our point of view we are normal, oftentimes never feeling more ourselves (while the exact opposite is actually true; i.e., we have been taken over by something alien to ourselves). Working through the projective tendencies of the mind, wetiko distracts us by exploiting our unconscious habitual tendency to see the source of our problems outside of ourselves.

Speaking of the BIP, PKD writes, “We are supposed to combat it phagocyte-wise, but the very valence of the (BIP) stasis warps us into micro-extensions of itself; this is precisely why it is so dangerous. This is the dread thing it does: extending its android thinking (uniformity) more and more extensively. It exerts a dreadful and subtle power, and more and more people fall into its field (power), by means of which it grows.”[12] “Android thinking,” i.e., robotic, machine-like group-thinking (with no creativity programmed in), is one of the qualities of a mind taken over by wetiko/BIP. Just as someone bit by a vampire becomes a vampire themselves, if we don’t see how wetiko/BIP works through our unconscious blind spots, it “warps us into micro-extensions of itself” such that we unwittingly become its purveyors, which is how it propagates itself in the field.

Masses are breeding grounds for this nefarious mind virus to flourish. Wetiko/BIP is not just something that afflicts individuals—it is a collective psychosis that can only work the full power of its black magic through groups of people. In his book The Divine Invasion, PKD has one of his characters say, “Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell…. We are asleep or in a trance.” Along similar lines, in his Exegesis, PKD writes, “We got entangled in enchantment, a gingerbread cottage that beguiled us into enslavement and ruin…we are not merely enslaved, we are trapped.”[13] As if living within a mythic or fairy tale-like reality, our species is under a bewitchment—a seeming curse—of massive proportions. Contemplating “the basic condition of life,” PKD writes that each one of us will “be required to violate your own identity…this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.”[14] This curse that feeds on life is another name for wetiko/BIP. Thankfully, in his writings PKD gives us clues regarding how to break out of this curse.

We can’t break out of the curse, however, without first shedding light on the nature of the darkness we have fallen into that is informing the curse. Giving a precise description of how wetiko/BIP works, PKD writes, “This is a sinister life form indeed. First it takes power over us, reducing us to slaves, and then it causes us to forget our former state, and be unable to see or to think straight, and not to know we can’t see or think straight, and finally it becomes invisible to us by reason of what it has done to us. We cannot even monitor our own deformity, our own impairment.”[15] A complex and seemingly malevolent life form, wetiko/BIP works through the cover of the unconscious, rendering itself invisible to our conscious awareness. It feeds off of and into our unawareness of it.

Further elaborating the BIP, PKD writes, “It can not only affect our percept systems directly but can alter our memories.”[16] We become convinced that our—i.e., “its”—memories are objectively real, therefore feeding into the self-limiting and self-defeating narrative the virus wants us to believe about ourselves. We then tell stories—both to others as well as ourselves—about who we are and what happened to us in the past to make us this way in a manner that reifies us into a solidified identity. In The Divine Invasion, PKD has a character say, “something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think.” Are these the ravings of a paranoid madman, or insights of someone who is seeing through the illusion, snapping out of the spell and waking up?

PKD writes, “It is as if the immune system has failed to detect an invader, a pathogen (shades of William Burroughs: a criminal virus!). Yes, the human brain has been invaded, and once invaded, is occluded to the invasion and the damage resulting from the invasion; it has now become an instrument for the pathogen: it winds up serving as its slave, and thus the ‘heavy metal speck’ [i.e., the BIP] is replicated (spread through linear and lateral time, and through space).”[17] The mind invaded becomes an unwitting channel for the pathogen to further propagate and spread itself in and through the field.

To quote PKD, “We may not be what we seem even to ourselves.”[18] Wetiko/BIP is a shape-shifting bug; it cloaks itself in and assumes our form, impersonating us such that we then identify with its limited and impoverished version of who we are while we simultaneously dissociate from—and forget—who we actually are. Wetiko/BIP is in competition with us for a share of our own mind; it literally does everything it can to think in our place, sit in our seat and occupy—and possess—our very selves. Speaking of this very situation, PKD writes, “A usurper is on the throne.”[19]

Having no creativity on its own, once wetiko “puts us on,” i.e., fools us into buying into its version of who we are, it can then piggyback onto and plug into our intrinsic creativity, co-opting our creative imagination to serve its malevolent agenda. PKD writes, “Being without psyche of its own it slays the authentic psyches of those creatures locked into it, and replaces them with a spurious microform of its own dead psyche.”[20] Sometimes using the phrase the “Black Iron Prison Police State” (which is mirrored externally in the ever-increasing “police state” of the world), PKD also describes this state as one where the person so afflicted becomes “frozen” (as in trauma), in a “corpse-state” (i.e., spiritually dead).

Wetiko/BIP can be conceived of as a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its sinister agenda. Speaking of the part of the psyche that has been captured by the BIP, PKD comments, “This section died. It became fossilized, and merely repeats itself. This is scary; it is like mental illness: ‘one day nothing new ever entered his mind—and the last thought just recirculated endlessly.’ Thus death rules here…The BIP is the form of this death, its embodiment—of what is wrong, here.”[21] Like a vampire, wetiko/BIP is—and turns us into—one of the undead; it is death taking on living human form so as to take life. Wetiko/BIP, like a virus, is “dead” matter, it is only in a living creature that viruses acquire a “quasi-life.” When we fall under wetiko’s spell, our life-force and God-given creativity become vampirically drained, as we are bled dry of what really counts.

Commenting on the BIP, PKD continues, “To see it is to see the ailment, the complex which warps all other thoughts to it.”[22] To see the BIP is to begin to heal it; there is no healing it without first seeing it. Once wetiko/BIP entrenches itself within a psyche, however, the personality then becomes one-sided, self-organizing an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace a person—or a group of people—who become its puppet and marionette. To quote PKD, “We’re a fucking goddam “Biosphere” ruled by an entity who—like a hypnotist—can make us not only quack like a duck on cue, but imagine, to boot, that we wanted (decided) to quack.”[23]

PKD comments that when “we begin to see what formerly was concealed to us, or from us, and the shock is great, since we have, all our lives, been trading (doing business) with evil.”[24] This is one of the reasons it is so hard to see wetiko/BIP—there is a counterincentive built into seeing it, as we have to be strong enough to bear the trauma of seeing our own collusion with darkness. If we choose to look away from how the BIP occludes us and become resistant to bringing awareness to the nature of our situation, we are then being unconsciously complicit in our own imprisonment. To quote PKD, “So there was a base collusion between us and the BIP: it was a kind of pact!”[25] He conjectures, “we’re sources of psychic/psychological energy to it: we help power it.”[26]

As if we are in a double-bind with no exit, PKD points out that “the enslaved people cannot be rescued by departing the Empire [the BIP] because the Empire is worldwide.”[27] Existing within the collective unconscious itself, wetiko/BIP/Empire is ubiquitous; being nonlocal it can’t be located within the third-dimensional space-time matrix, and yet, there is no place where it is not. Its very root—as well as the medium through which it operates—is the psyche, which is somehow able to inform, extend itself and give shape to events in our world. To think that the ultimate source of the horrors that are playing out in our world is to be found somewhere other than within the human psyche is to be truly dis-oriented, i.e., looking in the wrong direction.

PKD writes, “The very doctrine of combating the ‘hostile world and its power’ has to a large extent been ossified by and put at the service of the Empire.”[28] In fighting the seeming demonic power of wetiko/BIP/Empire, we are playing its game and have already lost, as it feeds off of polarization. PKD warns that “the BIP warps every new effort at freedom into the mold of further tyranny.”[29] Even our thoughts regarding how to solve the BIP only “fuel” the seeming reality of the BIP. The Empire/BIP/wetiko will subvert every attempt at shedding light on its darkness in such a way as to feed the very darkness we are trying to illumine. And yet, if we don’t fight it, then we have no chance. What are we to do?

PKD opines, “The idea is to break the BIP’s power by revealing more and more about it.”[30] Just as a vampire loses its power in the light of day, wetiko/BIP has no power in the light of conscious awareness. To quote PKD, “The Empire is only a phantasm, lingering because we have gone to sleep.”[31] It is as if the Empire/BIP/wetiko is an after-image that we have mistaken for being real; PKD refers to it as a “deceitful corpse” that apes life. The idea is to shed light on darkness—what good is seeing the light if our vision doesn’t illumine the darkness? The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says, “So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…. It is powerful because we have not recognized it.” (II, 3, 83.5-30.)

FAKE FAKES

Wetiko/BIP can be likened to an “anti-information” virus—not only does it block the reception of information, but it substitutes false information for the real thing. PKD writes, “the bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly [in his words ‘spurious humans’].”[32] PKD writes of the BIP, “it has grown vine-like into our information media; it is an information life form.”[33] It is an info life form (composed of and creating living dis-information) that lies to us—PKD compares this to the figure of Satan, who is “the liar.” Wetiko/BIP has co-opted the mainstream, corporatized media to be its propaganda organ, which becomes its instrument for creating—and delivering into our minds—fictitious realities. These institutions have, to quote PKD “an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes.”[34]

PKD was intensely interested in what makes an authentic human being. He continues, “Fake realities will produce fake humans. Or, fake humans will produce fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.”[35] An authentic human being, on the other hand, to quote PKD, “cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”[36] He elaborates, “The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings.”[37]

Wetiko/BIP has no creativity on its own, but is a master of imitation—it apes, mimes and impersonates both our world and ourselves, such that, if we identify with its version of the way things are, we have then given ourselves away. Succinctly stating the problem, PKD writes, “The problem is that a mock creation has filtered in, which must be transubstantiated into the real.”[38] Our universe is a collectively shared dream or hallucination that appears real; in PKD’s words, “our reality is a cunning counterfeit, mutually shared.”[39] To imbue our world with an intrinsic, objective reality that exists separate from the mind that is observing it would be, in PKD’s words, “a dreadful intellectual error.”

Pointing directly at wetiko/BIP, PKD writes that “there is a vast life form here, that has invaded this world and is camouflaged.”[40] He marvels at how it camouflages itself; in PKD’s words, it “simulated normal objects and their processes so as to copy them and in such an artful way as to make himself [the BIP] invisible within them.”[41] Through its mimicry of real phenomenal objects, the BIP, in PKD’s words, “steadily, stealthily replaces them and mimics—assumes their form.”[42] Though PKD’s writings appear “out there,” and can easily sound crazy, paranoid and conspiratorial, it should be pointed out that what he is pointing at is exactly what an apocryphal text of the Bible is referring to when it speaks of a “counterfeiting spirit.”[43]

PKD has articulated wetiko’s/BIP’s counterfeiting ability—and how the universe responds—in a way that only he can. He has realized that the very ground of being itself—PKD refers to it by various names—Christ, God, the Savior, the Urgrund (a German term used by both Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme to describe ultimate reality)—is responding to wetiko/BIP in a very unique and revelatory way. As the BIP mimes reality so as to create a counterfeit of the real thing, the ground of reality, in PKD’s words, “counterfeits the counterfeit.” In PKD’s words, “So originally the bogus info mimicked the actual successfully enough to fool us, and now we have a situation in which the actual has returned in a form mimicking the bogus.”[44]

Wetiko/BIP has created an illusory, fake world, and the ground of being itself, in a radically new ontological category that PKD calls a “fake fake,” has imitated the imitation. Delighted by this new idea, PKD asks the question, “Is a fake fake more fake than just a fake, or null-fake?”[45] In other words, if a fake fake is not more fake than a fake, is it the real thing? PDK’s idea of a fake fake is cognate to the indeterminacy between originals and simulacra that is the hallmark of the world of virtual reality. To quote PKD, “A fake fake = something real. The demiurge [the false God in Gnosticism] unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one.”[46] In other words, God/the ground of being is assimilating our seemingly counterfeit universe into and as itself.

Writing about the Savior, PKD writes that “it doesn’t want its adversary to know it’s here, so it must disguise (randomize) its presence, including by giving out self discrediting information; as if mimicking a hoax.”[47] Just like the BIP tricks us into identifying with its world, the true ground of being tricks the BIP by surreptitiously imitating and becoming it; i.e., taking it on (and into itself). It doesn’t want to let the BIP know it is doing this, which would defeat the purpose of its counter-ploy; the Savior does its mimicry on the sly. PKD comments, “The Urgrund does not advertise to the artifact [i.e., wetiko/BIP] that it is here.”[48] Just as the BIP works through our blind spots, the ground of being works through the BIP’s blind spots. PKD comments, “the artifact is as occluded as to the nature and existence of the Urgrund as we are to the artifact.”[49] Like an underground resistance movement, the Urgrund’s activities, in PKD’s words, “resemble the covert advance of a secret, determined revolution against a powerful tyranny.”[50]

Speaking of Christ as another reference for the ground of being, Dick writes, “Through him the properly functioning (living and growing) total brain replicated itself here in microform (seed-like) thereafter branching out farther and farther like a vine, a viable life form taking up residence within a dead, deranged and rigid one [BIP]. It is the nature of the rigid region to seek to detect and ensnare him, but his discorporate plasmatic nature ensures his escape from the intended imprisonment.”[51] In other words, the spirit can’t be pinned down; in PKD’s words, “He is everywhere and nowhere.”[52]

Describing this deeper process of how the ground of being potentially saves us—and itself—from wetiko/BIP, PKD comments, “a criminal entity [BIP] has been invaded by life giving cells [Christ, God, the Urgrund] which it can’t detect, and so it accepts them into itself, replacing the ‘iron’ ones.”[53] PKD is describing transubstantiation in the flesh. Speaking of the savior, PKD writes, “like a gas (plasma) he begins invisibly to expand and fill up the whole of BIP.”[54]

What I so appreciate about PKD’s vision is that he’s not just describing the life-destroying workings of wetiko/BIP, but he’s also articulating the other half of this process, which is the response from the living intelligence of the universe as a whole. To quote PKD, “The key to everything lies in understanding this mimicking living stuff.”[55] PKD equates this “form-mimicker” with the Deus Absconditus, the dark and hidden God. The idea is that God reveals Itself through its darker half.

This makes me think how the unconscious responds to a one-sided situation in our psychic lives by sending compensatory forms—like symbols in a dream—so as to bring us back into balance. To quote PKD, “If the universe is a brain the BIP is a rigid ossified complex, and Zebra [another of PKD’s names for the savior] is metabolic toxin (living info) designed to melt it out of existence by restoring elasticity to it, which means to cause it to cease recirculating the same thought over and over again.”[56]Seen psychologically, the BIP is a rigidified complex which has developed an autonomy and has gone rogue, seemingly having an independent life and a will of its own that is antithetical to and at odds with our own. In psychological-speak, until this “autonomous complex” (what indigenous people refer to as a “demon”) is dissolved and rejoins the wholeness of the psyche, “the organism,” to quote PKD, “is stuck in its cycle, in cybernetic terms; it won’t kick over—which fits with my idea that we are memory coils which won’t kick over and discharge their contents.”[57] We are like malfunctioning memory coils in a quasi-dream state; in PKD’s words, “we are an impaired section of the megamind.”[58]

These contemplations helped PKD to contextualize, and hopefully integrate his overwhelming spiritual experience of 1974. He writes that his experience is “an achievement by the Urgrund in reaching its objective of reflecting itself back to itself, using me as a point of reflection.”[59] In other words, PKD realized that we are all potentially reflecting mirrors for the divine ground of being to wake up to itself. This is to say that we play a crucial role in the deeper archetypal process of the Incarnation of the deity. PKD writes in his journal, “Perhaps the transformation of and in me in 3-74 [i.e., March, 1974] was when this mimicking ‘plasma’ reached me and replaced me—although I appeared outwardly the same (i.e., my essence changed—a new self replaced the old)…my ‘me’ was covertly replaced by a greater other ‘me’ I’d never seen or known before.”[60] This greater self that replaced PKD’s ego goes by many names: the greater personality, the Self, our true nature, Buddha nature and Christ, to name but a few.

PKD writes, “A human can evolve into Christ if Christ ignites his own self in the human and takes the human over[61]…it is at the moment of when the ultimate blow (of pain, murderous injury, humiliation and death) is struck, it is Christ who is there, replacing the victim and taking the blow himself. This is what happened to me in 3-74.”[62] He continues, “So flight from suffering inexorably involves a flight from life (reality)…. But the secret, mysterious opposite from this is a full facing of suffering—a non-flinching—that can lead to a magic alchemy: suddenly it is you/suddenly it is Christ/so you must equal (be) Christ.”[63] In psychological speak, the “genuine suffering” (to use Jung’s words) that PKD went through enabled him to withdraw his unconscious projections from an outward historical or metaphysical figure and wake up the Christ within himself. In other words, he was able to introject this sacred figure, i.e., realize that Christ (i.e., the Self) lived in him and was not an external figure separate and different from himself.[64]

DREAMLIKE COSMOLOGY

According to PKD’s cosmology, it is as if God the creator has allowed himself to become captured, enslaved by and hostage to his own creation. PKD writes, “He, the living, is at the mercy of the mechanical. The servant has become the master, and the master the servant.”[65] PKD’s words have a particular ring of truth in this technological age of ours, where many people think that one of the greatest dangers that faces humanity is that AI (artificial intelligence) can potentially enslave its human creators. PKD continues, “But the artifact is teaching him, painfully, by degrees, over thousands of years, to remember—who he is and what he is. The servant-become-master is attempting to restore the master’s lost memories and hence his true identity.”[66]

PKD’s contemplations shed light on what might be the hidden purpose of the emergence of wetiko/BIP in our world. PKD comments, “The artifact enslaves us, but on the other hand it is attempting to teach us to throw off its enslavement.”[67] Wetiko/BIP tests us so as to make sure that we will make optimal use of our divine endowment. As PKD points out, the fundamental dialectic at work is liberation vs. enslavement. Here’s what I wrote in Dispelling Wetiko, “Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else!”[68] In a sense wetiko/BIP is the guardian of the threshold of our evolution.

PKD has created a parable in which a fallen and amnesiac God has fallen prey to Its own creation and is in need of redemption. Lest we think that PKD’s cosmological imaginings are the ravings of a madman, it should be pointed out that his theories are fully resonant with those found in the profound wisdom traditions of alchemy, Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Christianity. Evoking “Christ as the salvator salvandus,” PKD writes of “the savior who must be saved and who is in a certain real sense identical with those he saves.”[69]

In PKD’s words, “The creator can afford to descend into his own creation. He can afford to shed his memories (of his identity) and his supernatural powers…. The creator deliberately plants clues in his irreal creation—clues which he cunningly knows in time (eventually) will restore his memory (anamnesis) of who he is…. So he has a fail-safe system built in. No chance he won’t eventually remember. Makes himself subject to spurious space, time and world (and death, pain, loss, decay, etc.), but has these disinhibiting clues or stimuli distributed deliberately strategically in time and space. So it is he himself who sends himself the letter which restores his memory (Legend of the Pearl). No fool he!”[70]

It is as if we, or more accurately, our true identity as the Self (which is whole and connected with the whole) plants alarm clocks in the waking dream—what PKD calls “a perturbation in the reality field”—that are set to go off at just the right time, acting as a catalyst to wake us up. In PKD’s words, “The megamind is attempting to stimulate us back to being in touch with itself.”[71] Once these clues—which can be conceived of as a higher dimension of our being signaling to us—are deciphered, we can discover, as PKD suggests, that we’ve composed them ourselves. What PKD calls “disinhibiting clues” (what he also calls “Logos triggering agents,” and what I call “lucidity stimulators”) are like keys that open up the lock encasing our minds so that we can remember who we are and our life’s mission, i.e., what we are here to do. PKD writes, “Zebra is trying to find—reach—us and make us aware of it—more primarily, it seeks to free us from the BIP, to break the BIP’s power over us.”[72]

Our classical, materialist mechanistic worldview is, as PKD rightfully points out, “shabby and cracking apart and fading away.”[73] PKD writes that there is a “universe lying behind ours, concealed within—yes, actually concealed within ours!”[74] The universe we see simultaneously conceals and reveals the universe lying behind ours. It is PKD’s opinion that in order to construct a new worldview to replace the one that is cracking apart, we need to see—to re-cognize—the universe concealed within ours. “The world is not merely counterfeit,” PKD writes, “there is more: it is counterfeit, but under it lies another world, and it is this other world, this Logos world, which filters or breaks through.”[75] He continues, “But in truth, in very truth, this is a shadow universe we see, a reflection in the mirror of another universe behind it, and that other universe can be reached by an individual directly, without the help of any priest.”[76] This other universe—a universe that we are not separate from and is not separate from our consciousness—doesn’t need an external mediator to be accessed, but can be reached through direct experience.

I call this other, higher-dimensional world that underlies and is concealed within ours (borrowing a term from physics) the “nonlocal field,” which is a field that contains, pervades and expresses itself through our third-dimensional world (while at the same time not being constrained by the third-dimensional laws of space and time). The nonlocal field connects us with everything. When the nonlocal field, or in PKD’s words, the “Logos world” breaks through consensus reality and reveals itself are when we experience synchronicities—what physicist F. David Peat calls “‘flaws’ in the fabric of reality.” Synchronistic phenomena are, in Peat’s words “momentary fissures that allow us a brief glimpse of the immense and unitary order underlying all of nature.”

Just like the BIP/artifact/Empire/wetiko will co-opt and subvert any of our attempts at illumining it to feed into and serve its nefarious agenda, God/Christ/Zebra/Urgrund/Savior will use the BIP/artifact/Empire/wetiko’s attempts at imprisonment to ultimately serve our freedom. Speaking of the artifact’s agenda of “enslavement, deception and spiritual death” PKD writes, “even this is utilized by the Urgrund, which utilizes everything, [this] is a sacred secret.”[77] PKD points out that one way of expressing the fundamental dialectic is information vs. anti-information (remember: wetiko is an anti-information virus). To quote PKD, “The Empire, which by suppressing information is therefore in a sense the anti-Christ, is put to work as half of the dialectic; Christ uses everything (as was revealed to me): in its very act of suppressing information, the Empire aids in the building of the soma of the Cosmic Christ (which the Empire does not realize).”[78] This is to say that the Cosmic Christ is, in essence, generated by its antithesis (the anti-Christ).

This brings to mind Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, in which Faust asks Mephistopheles (who represents the devil) who he is, and Mephistopheles replies that he is the “part of that force which would do evil, yet forever works the good.” It is a Kabbalistic idea that, though at cross purposes to the good at its core, evil is the very condition and foundation of the highest good’s very realization.

BODHISATTVIC MADNESS

A collective psychosis, wetiko is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that pervades the collective unconscious of humanity. To quote PKD, “The only question is, which kind of madness will we choose?…. We are, then, all mad, but I, uniquely, choose to go mad while facing pain, not mad while denying pain.”[79] PKD is delineating two different ways of facing the pain of reality; in his writings he makes it clear that his (“non-flinching”) way of facing pain isn’t necessarily better, it just “hurts more.” PKD writes, “In a very real sense the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of waking up…the pressure of this pain motivates us to seek an answer; which is to say, motivates us toward greater and greater consciousness.”[80] PKD is professing a point of view that can help us to recontextualize what seems to be meaningless suffering; one of the things that’s hardest for human beings to bear are experiences bereft of meaning. “The artifact,” PKD explains, speaking of and from his own experience, “by inflicting too much pain on me it had, in a certain real sense, awakened me.”[81]

In his novel Valis, PKD writes, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” PKD writes, “My insanity, facing an insane world, is, paradoxically, a facing of reality, and this is sane; I refuse to close my eyes and ears.”[82] Paradoxically, PKD’s form of insanity is the most sane response of all. PKD wonders, “Perhaps if you know you are insane you are not insane.”[83] He elaborates, “The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.”[84]

Never one to shy away from the tough questions, PKD asks, “So, then, in what sense am I insane? I am insane in that I continue to face the truth without the ability to come up with a workable answer…. I really do not know anything in terms of the solution; I can only state the problem. No other thinker has ever stated a problem and so miserably failed to solve it in human histories; human thought is, basically, problem-solving, not problem stating.”[85]

I personally don’t think PKD is giving himself enough credit. For in fact, it is clear in his writings that he did come up with a “workable answer,” one that is universal and is common to all wisdom traditions. PKD likened our existential situation to being in a maze, what he refers to as “one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap.” The harder we try to get out, the more trapped we become; this is to say that we are not able to find our way out through ordinary means. Seemingly alive and sentient, the maze has a peculiar nature of shifting as we become aware of it. It is as if it is aware of—and responds to—our awareness of it.

One only escapes from the maze, to quote PKD, “when he decides voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the maze) for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never leave alone, to leave you must elect to take the others out…the ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back in (into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva.”[86] We would only voluntarily return to help others if we recognized that they are not separate from ourselves, which is to realize that we are all interdependent and interconnected—which is the very realization that simultaneously enlivens compassion and dissolves wetiko.

PKD writes, “when you think you are out of the maze—i.e., saved—you are in fact still in it.”[87] This brings to mind the insight that if we think we are free of wetiko and it is only “others” that are afflicted with it, this very perspective is, paradoxically, a symptom of having fallen under the spell of wetiko. To quote PKD, “If there is to be happiness it must come in a voluntary relinquishing of self in exchange for aware participation in the destiny of the total one.”[88]

In a very real sense, PKD did find the solution to humanity’s existential dilemma. He writes, “compassion’s highest power is the only power capable of solving the maze.”[89] As PKD points out, “The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”[90] In other words, the true measure of who we are is how much we are able to love.

PKD concludes, “If the final paradox of the maze is that the only way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in.”[91] In other words, perhaps we have chosen to incarnate at this very moment in time, i.e., our voluntary return to the maze has already happened (evidenced by the simple fact of our incarnation), which is to say that we have already solved the maze and simply have to recognize this fact. This is true anamnesis—a loss of forgetfulness—which is a remembering, a recollection of our dissociated members, as we re-member our rightful place as part of a greater whole, connected with all that is. “Anamnesis,” to quote PKD from a 1976 interview, “was the loss of amnesia. You remembered your origins, and they were from beyond the stars.”[92]

[1] A phrase used by Richard Doyle to describe PKD’s writings, from the Afterword to PKD’s Exegesis, p. 899.

[2] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 553.

[3] Ibid., 778.

[4] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 267.

[5] Ibid., 96.

[6] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 404.

[7] Ibid., 294.

[8] Ibid., 403.

[9] Ibid., 517.

[10] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 173.

[11] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 146.

[12] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 473.

[13] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 310.

[14] From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

[15] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 405.

[16] Ibid., 357.

[17] Ibid., 405.

[18] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 310.

[19] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 828.

[20] Ibid., 319.

[21] Ibid., 391.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 291.

[24] Ibid., 178.

[25] Ibid., 402.

[26] Ibid., 328.

[27] Ibid., 608.

[28] Ibid., 473.

[29] Ibid., 346.

[30] Ibid., 323.

[31] Ibid., 414.

[32] Ibid., 263.

[33] Ibid., 596.

[34] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 262.

[35] Ibid., 263-4.

[36] Ibid., 279.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 554.

[39] Ibid., 289.

[40] Ibid., 596.

[41] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 251.

[42] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 222.

[43] Referred to as the antimimon pneuma in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17),

[44] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 327.

[45] Ibid., 419.

[46] Ibid., 277.

[47] Ibid., 316.

[48] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 308.

[49] Ibid., 285.

[50] Ibid., 309.

[51] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 391.

[52] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 295.

[53] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 332.

[54] Ibid., 315.

[55] Ibid., 222.

[56] Ibid., 332.

[57] Ibid., 414.

[58] Ibid., 278.

[59] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 296.

[60] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 222.

[61] Ibid., 290.

[62] Ibid., 294.

[63] Ibid., 317.

[64] This brings to mind the quote from the Bible, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians: 2:20).

[65] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. xxiii.

[66] Ibid., 294.

[67] Ibid., 291.

[68] Levy, Paul, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2013), pp. 261-2.

[69] Herron, Don, The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1980-1982 (Nevada City, California: Underwood Books, 2009), p. 79.

[70] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 413.

[71] Ibid., 278.

[72] Ibid., 404.

[73] Ibid., 75.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid., 272.

[76] Ibid., 76.

[77] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 289.

[78] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 612.

[79] Ibid., 692.

[80] Sutin, Lawrence, ed., The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), pp. 309-310.

[81] Ibid., 296.

[82] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 692.

[83] From The Man in the High Castle, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=4

[84] From Valis, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=2

[85] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp. 692-3.

[86] Ibid., 877-878.

[87] Ibid., 878.

[88] Ibid., 296.

[89] Ibid., 877.

[90] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4764.Philip_K_Dick?page=1

[91] Jackson, Pamela and Lethem, Jonathan, eds., The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp. 878.

[92] DePrez, Daniel, An Interview with Philip K. Dick, Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3, August (1976).

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father (Awaken in the Dream Publishing, 2015), Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (Authorhouse, 2006). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. He is the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.