137 - Arthur I. Miller [90]
In 1953 Pauli had a particularly memorable dream about spectral lines. In it, he and Franca were observing an experiment whose results appeared as spectral lines on a photographic plate. One of the lines had a fine structure. He described it thus: the dream “contains a favorable indication—namely, the fine structure of the second line.” His interpretation was: “What this does is to indicate the beginning of an assimilation of an unconscious content into consciousness.” In the dream, he added, “My wife says that she finds this very interesting.” In other words, he took the dream to mean that his unconscious was emerging in the conscious. Perhaps by this he meant that his interpretation of the dream was that he was developing some characteristics of Franca’s psychological types. Unlike him, Franca was outgoing and in touch with the world.
He noticed that the doublets were like the alternating dark and light stripes on wasps (a great source of fear for him) and tigers. This was, he knew, an archetype. It occurred in Western alchemy and also in India, where he had seen the pattern on Indian temples when he was there with Franca earlier that year. It was an expression of two opposite forces, light and dark, endlessly repeating. In psychological terms it symbolized the tendency of a psychic situation to repeat.
This opposition between light and dark was further clarified by Bohr’s complementarity concept, which stated that quantum phenomena could be fathomed in terms of the opposition between complementary pairs—such as wave and particle. Bohr had been sure that complementarity went beyond physics and was basic to all of life, where the complementary pairs of life/death, love/hate, and yin/yang played a key role. All this, said Pauli, “seems to point to a deeper archetypal correspondence of the complementary pairs of opposites.” And it was symbolized by the splitting of spectral lines into two, a separation defined by 137. This reinforced his belief that 137 was an archetypal number.
It also reminded him of the patterns of lines that form the basis of the Chinese Book of Changes—the I Ching.
I Ching
The I Ching, a Chinese oracle, was written four thousand years ago. It was translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, a Sinologist and a close friend of Jung’s. Jung considered that it revealed insights into chance occurrences that cannot be understood using the Western concept of causality.
The basic structure of the I Ching consists of sixty-four combinations of six broken and unbroken lines, laid out one above the other: the hexagram. The broken line represents yin, the feminine principle, the unbroken one, yang. To consult the oracle, one builds up a hexagram by casting three Chinese coins six times. The inscribed side of the coin counts as yin and has a value of two, the other side as yang with a value of three. One then looks up that hexagram in the I Ching. What the oracle has to offer for any one hexagram is extremely gnomic and requires careful interpretation.
The prediction relates to many factors, foremost that the world about us emerges from a struggle of opposites—yin and yang—signifying good/evil, light/darkness, love/hate, man/woman, and other dualities, quite foreign to the rationalism of Western thought. Jung often emphasized that to the Western mind the whole process seems like nonsense. But Western science also has little light to shed on the psyche. Thus other ways of knowing have to be considered. Jung believed that the message of a hexagram—written thousands of years ago—can illuminate the hidden qualities of the present moment, a coincidence in time that cannot be explained by Western physics.
Pauli, too, consulted the I Ching for advice “when interpreting dream situations.” He noted that to consult the oracle one has to “draw” three times “whereas the result of the draw depends on the divisibility of