137 - Arthur I. Miller [97]
The other example of synchronicity concerned the wife of one of Jung’s patients. She told Jung that when her mother and grandmother died, on each occasion a flock of birds had gathered outside the window of the room. Some time later, Jung noticed that her husband had symptoms of an impending heart problem and recommended that he see a specialist. The specialist, however, could find no problem. On his way back the man collapsed in the street. Shortly after he had set off to see the specialist a large flock of birds had alighted on the house. His wife immediately recognized this as a sign of her husband’s impending death.
Jung noted that in the Babylonian Hades the soul is adorned with feathers and in ancient Egypt the soul was considered to be a bird. It was an example of a psychic state coinciding with a corresponding, not yet existent, future event.
In Rhine’s experiments it was the subjects’ determination to achieve the impossible—to show that ESP existed—that caused them to tap into their unconscious. Dunne’s dreams showed that the psychic state can coincide with an event (like the volcanic eruption) when the subject is asleep. In both cases quieting or closing down the conscious mind enabled the subject or dreamer to open the unconscious to the external world and to allow archetypes to emerge. Divinatory procedures, such as consulting the I Ching, required this same mental condition. In each instance of synchronicity that Jung observed, an archetype appeared—the scarabs, the birds. “The effective (numinous) agents in the unconscious are the archetypes. By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype,” Jung wrote.
Pauli was still doubtful about Jung’s use of the term “synchronistic” to mean “at the same time.” Surely this held only for experiences in the first category (an external event coinciding with a psychic state, as in the case of the scarab). While he was mulling over this problem, Pauli had a dream. It was October 1949.
The stranger/Merlin appears
The dream concerns a “stranger” who appeared in earlier dreams as the “blond” man.
In Jungian terms he is the voice of the collective unconscious, the background archetypes given shape—constellated—by twentieth-century scientific concepts, and represents authority. He often comments that modern physics is inadequate and incomplete and is able to move back and forth between the physical and the psychic, the conscious and the unconscious. He is an intermediary, like Hermes in alchemy, a “psychopomp,” who moves between the dark and light worlds.
While working on Kepler, Pauli read Romans de la Table Ronde (Stories of the Round Table), containing the legends of the Holy Grail. He was struck by the similarity between the “stranger” and the wizard, Merlin. Emma, Jung’s wife, was also interested in the Grail. Pauli wrote to her:
[The stranger] is a spiritual light figure with superior knowledge, and on the other hand, he is a chthonic [dark] natural spirit. But his knowledge repeatedly takes him back to nature, and his chthonic origins are also the source of his knowledge, so that ultimately both aspects turn out to be facets of the same “personality.” He is the one who prepares the way for the quaternity, which is always pursuing him…. He is not an “Antichrist,” but in a certain sense an “Anti-scientist,” “science” here meaning especially the scientific approach, particularly as it is taught in universities today…. My branch of science, physics, has become somewhat bogged down. The same thing can be said in a different way: When rational methods in science reach a dead end, a new lease on life is given to those contents that were pushed out of time consciousness in the 17th century and sank into the unconscious. [The stranger] happily uses the terminology of modern science (radioactivity, spin) and mathematics (prime numbers) but does so in an unconventional manner. Inasmuch as he ultimately wishes to be understood