“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain” (CG Jung)

Visual Journaling musings:

 SYNCHRONICITY AND THE END OF THE RED BOOK

Friday February 20th

The experience of synchronicity gives us the sense of being

 on the receiving end or downstream side of a much greater process…

Combs & Holland,

“Synchroncity:Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster” p. 39

           

   Synchronicity can be thought of as a moment of correspondence between an outer event and inner meaning, accompanied by a feeling of numinosity (a felt experience of the cosmic or divine, often accompanied by a sense of awe or even fear, with a sense of purpose and wonder). Most importantly Jung understood this phenomena to be acausal, that is, standing outside time and space.

             

   Jungian analyst Joseph Cambray has written about Jung’s Red Book that “elaborating the scientific understanding of synchronicity is so directly and intimately tied to the end of his work on The Red Book.” (p. 50, “Entrances and Exits”). What is he saying here? 

                (Here we will prepare our heads for some mind bending. Stand and shake and rattle)

“The end of prophecy, as a personal calling or event in this narrative, is concomitant with the awareness that the conscious mind is not the true author of our visions/dreams/imaginings but that the personal sense of self rests upon the archetypal. [note the small “s”]. Such awareness is probably most readily grasped in contemporary idiom by embracing a view of the self as an emergent phenomenon…” (Cambray, p. 51)

Emergence  is the study of the formation of new life, in a nutshell. Complexity theory shows that new systems emerge when there is just the right amount of imbalance; an asymmetry or a weak link (the material we worked with in The Rupture of the Mandala). It is in this break, or weakness that new patterns, behaviors, molecules, emerge.

The importance of weak links in stabilizing complex systems is that flexibility is provided. The synchronistic event is a kind of disruption of our usual habitual consciousness that provides the fertile ground for a new way of being, new way of thinking, a new perspective.

Synchronicity can be seen as the intersect of the material and psychic worlds. The event affects both the matter and psyche. 

What have been synchronistic events in your life? What was the ego's response?  

Dr. Joseph Cambray essay “Entrances and Exits” in the 2014 publication The Red Book: Reflections on CG Jung’s Liber Novus (Kirsch & Hogenson, eds.)