From Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
I hope it will not be construed as presumption on my part if I make uncommon demands on the open-mindedness and goodwill of the reader. Not only is he expected to plunge into regions of human experience which are dark, dubious, and hedged about with prejudice, but the intellectual difficulties are such as the treatment and elucidation of so abstract a subject must inevitably entail. As anyone can see for himself after reading a few pages, there can be no question of a complete description and explanation of these complicated phenomena, but only an attempt to broach the problem in such a way as to reveal some of its manifold aspects and connections, and to open up a very obscure field which is philosophically of the greatest importance.
Page 420
Every answer of nature is…more or less influenced by the kind of questions asked, and the result is always a hybrid product. The so-called “scientific view of the World” based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.
Page 422
Absolutely unique and ephemeral events whose existence we have no means of either denying or proving can never be the object of empirical science; rare events might very well be, provided that there was a sufficient number of reliable individual observations.
There are no “absolute” natural laws to whose authority one can appeal in support of one’s prejudices. The most that can fairly be demanded is that the number of individual observations shall be as high as possible.
Page 423
Chance grouping or series seem, at least to our present way of thinking, to be meaningless, and to fall as a general rule within the limits of probability. There are, however, incidents whose “chancefulness” seems open to doubt.
Page 426
However wide their range may be, they must be ruled out as acausal connections. It is, therefore, generally assumed that all the coincidences are lucky hits and do not require an acausal interpretation (note here). This assumption can, and indeed must, be regarded as true so long as proof is lacking that their incidence exceeds the limits of probability. Should this proof be forthcoming, however, it would prove at the same time that there are genuinely non-causal combinations of events for whose explanation we should have to postulate a factor incommensurable with causality. We should then have to assume that events in general are related to one another on the one hand as causal chains, and on the other hand by a kind of meaningful cross-connection.
Page 427
“All the events in a man’s life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams. … That both kinds of connection exist simultaneously, and the selfsame event, although a link in two totally different chains, nevertheless falls into place in both, so that the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him – this is something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre0established harmony.” [p 45]
Schopenhauer’s “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual”, which originally stood godfather to the views I am now developing.
Page 428
…he [Schopenhauer] forced concepts like prefiguration, correspondence, and pre-established harmony, which is a universal order coexisting with the causal one have always underlain man’s explanations of nature, into the causal scheme, probably because he felt – and rightly – that the scientific view of the world based on natural law, though he did not doubt its validity, nevertheless lacked something which played a considerable role in the classical and medieval view (as it does in the intuitive feelings of modern man).
Page 430
The author [Wilhelm von Scholz] comes to the understandable conclusion that everything points to the “mutual attraction of related objects”, or an “elective affinity”. He suspects that these happenings are arranged as if they were the dream of a “greater and more comprehensive consciousness, which is unknowable”.
Page 431
The fact that distance has no effect in principle [after a test carried out by J.B. Rhine, where subjects had to predict what was on a card before the card was taken from a deck..this was also tried when subjects were on the other side of the world] shows that the thing in question cannot be a phenomenon of force or energy, for otherwise the distance to be overcome and the diffusion in space would cause a diminution of the effect, and it is more than probable that the score would fall proportionately to the square of the distance. Since this is obviously not the case, we have no alternative but to assume that distance is physically variable, and may in certain circumstances be reduces to vanishing point by a psychic condition.
Page 432
If, in the spatial experiments, we were obliged to admit that energy does not decrease with distance, then the time experiments make it completely impossible for us even to think of there being any energy relationship between the perception and the future event. We must give up at the outset all explanations in terms of energy, which amounts to saying that events of this kind cannot be considered from the point of view of causality, for causality presupposes the existence of space and time in so far as all observations are ultimately based upon bodies in motion.
Lack of interest and boredom are negative factors; enthusiasm, positive expectation, hope, and belief in the possibility of ESP make for good results and seem to be the real conditions which determine whether there are going to be any results at all. In this connection it is interesting to note that the well known English medium, Mrs. Eileen J. Garret, achieved bad results in the Rhine experiments because, as she herself admits, she was unable to summon up any feeling for the “soulless” test-cards.
Page 434
Rhine’s experiments confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one, since the “transmission” exhibits none of the known properties of energy. There is therefore good reason to doubt whether this is a question of transmission at all.
It seems more likely that scientific explanation will have to begin with a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other. As I have said, it is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP, or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy.
Page 453
In my essay “On the Nature of the Psyche”, I considered Synchronicity as a physically conditioned relativity of space and time. Rhine’s experiments show that in relation to the psyche space and time are, so to speak, “elastic” and can apparently be reduced almost to vanishing point, as though they were dependant on psychic conditions and did not exist in themselves but were only “postulated” by the conscious mind. In man’s original view of the world, as we find it among primitives, space and time have a very precarious existence. They become “fixed” concepts only in the course of his mental development, thanks largely to the introduction of measurement.
In themselves, space and time consist of nothing. They are hypostatized concepts born of the discriminating activity of the conscious mind, and they form the indispensible co-ordinates for describing the behavior of bodies in motion. They are, therefore, essentially psychic in origin, which is probably the reason that impelled Kant to regard them as a priori categories. But if space and time are only apparently properties of bodies in motion and are by the intellectual needs of the observer, then their relitivization by psychic conditions is no longer a matter for astonishment but is brought within the bounds of possibility. This possibility presents itself when the psyche observes, not external bodies, but itself. That is precisely what happens in Rhine’s experiments: the subjects answer is not the results of his observing the physical cards, it is a product of pure imagination, of “chance” ideas which reveal the structure of that which produces them, namely the unconscious. Here conscious psyche, the archetypes, which constitute the stricter of the collective unconscious. The latter represents a psyche that is identical in all individuals. It cannot be directly perceived or “represented”, in contrast to the perceptible psychic phenomena, and on account of its “irrepresentable” nature I have called it “psychoid”.
The archetypes are formal factors responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes: they are “patterns of behavior”. At the same time they have a “specific charge” and develop numinous effects which express themselves as affects.
Page 436
Meaningful coincidences – which are to be distinguished from meaningless chance groupings – therefore seem to rest on an archetypal foundation.
I am … using the general concept of synchronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning…Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state – and, in certain cases, Vice versa.
Page 441
The unconscious, however, often knows more than the conscious..
Page 442
Goethe thinks of synchronistic events in the “magical” way. Thus he says, in his conversations with Eckermann: “We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike”. (Eckerman’s Conversations with Goethe).
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