137 - Arthur I. Miller [93]
Reflecting further, Pauli suggests that the successive splittings of the eggs are analogous to the splitting of spectral lines. When one examines the fine structure of a spectral line, the spectroscope shows that what appears to be a single line is actually two and that the spacing between the two lines is defined by the number 137. In that case, could it be, he wondered, that two was the primal number in physics, not four? In both physics and psychology there were complementary opposites suggesting that two was the predominant number in the psyche as well. But four—the quaternity—had appeared in his dreams, signifying the wholeness of the material world and our conscious knowledge of it as well as the unconscious. Pauli’s discovery of the fourth quantum number indicated precisely the need for this wholeness and therefore, although it was surprising at first, it should have been expected all along, given that four was the archetype of completeness.
i, the square root of –1, which unifies the various elements in Pauli’s dream, also appears in Schrödinger’s wave function (the solution to Schrödinger’s equation). Schrödinger’s wave function depends on i and unifies the wave and particle properties of matter as well as being the essential ingredient in making measurements in quantum physics.
This dream reinforced Pauli’s conviction that quantum physics ought somehow to form part of a more comprehensive, bigger world picture. It referred only to phenomena that could be described by mathematics and focused its attention on what could be measured in the laboratory, and did not take into account notions such as consciousness. It dealt only with the realm of inanimate matter and thus the anima had been excluded. This excluding of the anima was exactly what Kepler had done when he set about developing modern physics and why Pauli eventually came to side with Fludd.
Parallels and coincidences
Any discussion of dreams, physics, and psychology, Jung believed, required examining the notion of time, and in particular “synchronicity,” a concept which he had been exploring since his early fascination with parapsychological phenomena as a medical student.
In the following years Jung had read deeply in mythology and alchemy where he developed the notion of “one world”—the unus mundus. If there were one world, he reasoned, surely there should also be one mind, which he identified as the collective unconscious of humankind.
When he consulted the I Ching, the advice appeared to be called forth by the moment. If he asked the same question a second time—at a different moment—the advice might be quite different. If the I Ching’s answers had any meaning at all, then how did “the connection between the psychic and physical sequence of events come about?” he wondered.
In the 1920s Jung began to look seriously into parallels between out-of-body occurrences and mental states. One notable example occurred in 1928, when Jung drew a mandala that looked to him very Chinese and on the exact same day received in the mail Richard Wilhelm’s manuscript of his translation of the Secret of the Golden Flower. To Jung, that was what synchronicity was all about. In the Western world, we usually assume that events develop sequentially, one after the other, by a process of cause and effect. But Jung was convinced that as well as a vertical connection, events might also have a horizontal connection—that all the events occurring all over the world at any one moment were linked in a kind of grand network. Thus when one threw the coins to consult the I Ching, the throwing of the coins coincided with one’s feelings at that precise moment and the answer reflected the truth of that moment.
The turn-of-the-century adventurer John William Dunne reported experiences that were not explicable within the usual sequential