Carl Jung y la Sincronicidad | Las casualidades imposibles y su significado psíquico

In 1914, a German woman took a photograph of her young son, and took the film to Strasbourg to rebel. But she was never able to fetch it because of the outbreak of World War I, so she gave it up for lost. Two years later, in 1916, the woman bought a new film in Frankfurt this time to photograph her newborn daughter.

Once revealed, they discovered something fascinating; The photograph showed a double exposure. And the image below was the same photograph she had taken of her son in 1914. The old film was never revealed, and somehow it had been re-circulated as if it were new, until it was returned to the hands of its owner.

The writer, Wilhelm von Scholz, compiled this story and many others, in which lost or stolen objects returned to their owners in the strangest ways. And he came to the conclusion that these events are arranged as if they were "the dream of a greater and more complete consciousness. Which is unknowable.

" Carl Jung was fascinated by such extraordinary coincidences, which cannot be mere coincidences. Since his youth, when he began to study the phenomena of the collective unconscious, he found surprising connections or juxtapositions that scientific rationality could not adequately explain. "What I found were coincidences that were so significantly connected that their coincidental concurrence would represent such a degree of improbability that it would have to be expressed by an astronomical number.

" Curiously, it was Albert Einstein who helped him to delve into the scientific study of these fortuitous events, whose meaning points to something mysterious and transcendental. And he began to use the term synchronicity to refer to them. "Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions when we dined together.

In those days, Einstein was developing his theory of relativity, and it was he who first made me think of a possible relativity of time and space. And his psychic conditionality. " For years, Jung did not dare to speak openly about synchronicity, because he knew that the scientific community said that these phenomena were mere coincidences and that all those who tried to study them were fantasists and superstitious.

Once he overcame this fear, he began to talk about the synchronicity factors in some conferences. And finally he wrote a monograph that was originally published in Volume 8 of his complete works and later also published under the name Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Which has served as the basis for the elaboration of this video.

For Jung, events that seem to be the result of chance, but which contain a deep meaning for the one who experiences them, are susceptible of some causal explanation, and we should study them seriously. "The psychology of all the sciences cannot afford to overlook such experiences in the long run. These things are too important to the understanding of the unconscious apart from their philosophical implications.

" His research included not only the empirical and statistical, but also the study of the relationships of meaning shared by different philosophical, mythological, religious, and esoteric traditions. He was struck by the work of Hippocrates, who spoke of a universal principle that is present even in the smallest particle. And the ideas of Philo of Alexandria, who in the first century wrote the following: "God, willing to unite in intimate and loving communion the beginning and the end of created things, made heaven at the beginning and man at the end.

One, the most perfect of all imperishable objects. The other, the noblest of earthly and perishable things. Being, in truth, a heaven in miniature.

" "It bears within itself, as sacred images, gifts of nature that correspond to the constellations. " This principle that situates man as a microcosm containing the whole, and where the great creative principle is reflected in us, he also found it in the I Ching, The Book of Changes. To which he came thanks to his friend Richard Wilhelm.

"The I Ching, which we may call the experimental basis of classical Chinese philosophy, is one of the oldest known methods of understanding a situation as a whole and thus placing the details against a cosmic background. The interaction of Yin and Yang. " The I Ching is an oracular book where we ask a definite question.

Through psychic intention, the observer imposes his conditions on the natural laws of cause and effect. And thus forces nature to give an answer to a question devised by man. After that, we throw some coins and receive an answer expressed in binary code.

Odd or even. Which then leads to one of the 64 exagrams that formulate an oracular message. In fact this binary code of the I Ching is the same one that the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, took to articulate his new arithmetic and the one that today is used in almost all modern computers.

In the I Ching, the coins fall as it suits them, but force nature to respond in statistical terms with odd and even numbers that act as representatives of Yin and Yang. Two principles that are found both in the unconscious of the observer and in objective nature. And therefore they unite the psychic interior and the physical exterior world.

In this way, the I Ching allows us to intentionally cause synchronicity to happen. The following personal experience of Jung helps us to better understand how this principle operates. "A young woman I was treating had at a critical moment a dream in which she was given a golden beetle.

While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the window which was closed. Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me. Like a soft knocking sound I turned around and saw a flying bug hitting the window pane from outside.

I opened the window and caught the creature in midair as it flew. It was the closest analogy to a golden beetle that one finds in our latitudes. A Cetonia aurata Beetle.

That contrary to his natural habits, he had evidently felt the need to enter a dark room, at that particular moment. " In this experience on the one hand we have an unconscious image that comes to the consciousness of the patient through a dream. And on the other hand, an objective situation, where a beetle appears unusually at the same moment she relates her dream.

That is to say, at the very moment when Jung and his patient try to decipher the meaning of a symbol that appears in her mind, such a symbol also manifests itself in material reality. And since the scarab has an archetypal meaning, Jung can then decode what this synchronicity is trying to show and help his patient move forward in her therapeutic process. This is why Jung argued that the two defining factors of synchronicity are always an unconscious image or symbol that comes to consciousness.

Either directly through an everyday experience or indirectly in the form of a dream, idea or premonition. And an objective situation that coincides with that content. If these two facets are not present, we are not facing a synchronicity but a mere synchronism.

A coincidence without relevance because it has no deep symbolic meaning and therefore does not help in any way to develop the consciousness. In the I Ching, it is we who, by asking, provide a clear picture. That would be the first factor.

And the answer in binary code connects our consciousness with an exagram of the book which has a parallel symbolic meaning. Revealing the second factor. The method of the I Ching is based on a connective principle of synchronicity that the Western mind finds it difficult to understand and accept.

But we must remember that the rationalistic attitude of the West is not the only one possible, and that it acts in many ways as a prejudice and a bias that maybe should be corrected. Although we may not understand their cause, synchronicity events are linked by a deep meaning. And Jung believed that to find a scientific explanation we should begin with a critique of our concepts of space and time.

"As such, space and time are concepts of essentially psychic origin. Created by the intellectual needs of the observer. Their relativization by psychic conditions, then, is no longer a cause for wonder, but lies within the limits of possibility.

" For him, synchronicity is a kind of fourth axis, which should be added to the triad of space, time, and causality. Thus becoming a tetrad. A quaternion that he represented in this way: Space.

Time. Causality. And synchronicity.

And from this quaternion the following is derived: Above, in the place of space, we have the indestructible energy. Below, the space-time continuum. On the left, the constant connection of causality where the cause-effect relationship is clearly observed.

And on the right, in the place of synchronicity, we have the changing connection through contingency, equivalence, or meaning. "If so, then we must ask whether the relation of soul and body can be considered from this angle. That is, whether the coordination of psychic and physical processes in a living organism can be understood as a phenomenon of synchronicity.

" A revolutionary idea, no doubt, to affirm that man himself is a synchronous phenomenon. In any case, Jung, aware that synchronicity can be abstract and unrepresentable, stated the following at the end of his work: "I do not consider these statements as a final proof of my views but simply as a conclusion of empirical premises which I would like to submit to the consideration of my reader. " Thus, it is subject to your consideration whether you should endow these synchronous phenomenons with meaning.

Whose explanation seems to escape understanding. Or if on the contrary, you choose to believe that chance is just chance, coincidences are just coincidences, and everything is meaningless. The choice is yours.