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With many thanks to Gregory Sova, Ph.D. (LA, CA) for translation assistance

Some Thoughts about the Relationship of Carl Jung’s Depth Psychology to Quantum Physics and to Archetypal Psychosomatics  

Lecture in Rome, Italy for the Presentation of my Book I Cercatori di Dio [The Quest for God], October 14th, 1994

(Part 1)

Motto:

"There is no God,

and Paul Dirac is his prophet“

(Wolfgang Pauli)  

Remark for the revised English translation:

Since my lecture in Rome, Italy in the year 1994 my insights about the relationship of Carl Jung’s depth psychology, quantum physics and archetypal psychosomatics and psychophysics have developed further. Therefore I share here some sort of a work in progress, i.e., I have entered new information which show my progress in dealing with the subject between the years 1994 and 2003.

Contents:

Part 1:

1. Some of the most important contents of my book I Cercatori di Dio [The Quest for God]

1.1 The God-image of mysticism and the synchronistic consciousness

Part 2:

1.2 The projection of the Eros consciousness into the accelerator

1.3 The renewed God-image appears in the bubble chamber

Part 3:

2. The Kappa synchronicity, Paul Dirac’s antimatter and the negative energy

2.1 The first event of the Kappa synchronicity

2.2 The second event of the Kappa synchronicity

3. Archetypal psychosomatics

Some Thoughts about the Relationship of Carl Jung’s Depth Psychology to Quantum Physics and to Archetypal Psychosomatics

(Part 1)  

1. Some of the most important contents of my book I Cercatori di Dio [The Quest for God]  

Ladies and Gentlemen

I thank you for your readiness to listen to my remarks about my book I Cercatori di Dio [German original: Die Gottsucher; suggested English title: The Quest for God]. In the first part [section 1] I will talk about some of the most important ideas of my book.

Subsequently [section 2], I would like to show you through a living example, how I apply the new ideas deduced therein to me and to my creative activity. I will thus tell and interpret for you a synchronicity from my own life. You will see in such a manner, how the preconscious knowledge of the objective psyche (the collective unconscious of C.G. Jung) led me onto the track of these new personal breath-taking discoveries. Concerning these, they are described in my just published new book Hat AIDS einen Sinn? (Does AIDS Have Meaning?), on which I will report in the third part [section 3] of my lecture.

1.1 The God-image of mysticism and the synchronistic consciousness

My book Die Gottsucher (The Quest for God), which is published today in its Italian translation I Cercatori di Dio begins with the ideas and actions of a power-possessed Christian dogmatism, which condemned the creative ideas of the Gnostics and mystics. The climax of this destructive development was the burning of their writings organized by the bishop Irenaeus of Lyon in the year 170 AD. But as the unfolding of history shows, these ideas established themselves nevertheless in the underground of occult practices as found for example in ancient Alchemy. These ideas began to blossom again in the alchemy of the Middle Ages, and also today, at the end of the Christian eon. Namely, they came back anew during the 20^th century in Carl G. Jung’s depth psychology as well as in a very astonishing way in quantum physics, thus embedded in a historical synchronicity.

But let us start at the beginning: The official representatives of Christianity, the popes and church fathers, had definitively formulated toward the end of the fourth century the idea of the Trinity. In their concept God is composed therein of a three-fold unity, built up by the three persons of: God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. The most important aspect of such a three-fold unity is the fact, that in it the three persons are identical in character. Expressed in the terms of today’s science this means the implicate recognition of the fact that the God-image must be formulated as an energetic principle [see also The New Mysticism…, section 8.5].

Seen from a qualitative point of view, a third principle can only develop from the union of the opposites - of the one and the other. The compelling conclusion from this fact is the paradoxical statement that the Trinity must also be an ambivalent twoness. This necessary qualitative step the church fathers could not fathom. On the contrary, they resisted with all available instruments of power against the acknowledgment of the ambivalence of the God-image. Their third principle, the Holy Spirit, became therefore a purely spiritual reflection of the masculine principle; its dark shadow which reflects the feminine principle was repressed.  

[January 2004: The expression "dark" does of course not mean "evil". As Wolfgang Pauli has clearly shown in his letters (see f.i. Carl Jung's Quaternity, Neoplatonic Philosophy..., part 4), after the birth of natural science in the 17th century, "dark" was more and more identified with "acausal", "indeterministic". For the novel scientific consciousness, which was governed by the idea of the power over nature, i.e., a control over it with the help of the causal mathematical laws of Newton, acausality, the principle of the Medieval Word Soul, became more and more the principle of Evil per se.] 

Such a definition of the Trinity of God by the Church Fathers stands however in stark contrast to the original, preconscious predisposition of the God-image in man. The archetypal background of the Trinity consists therefore in a definition, in which also the qualitative aspect, i.e., the ambivalent twoness, is enclosed.

This inability of the church fathers to accept the Gnostic definition of the God-image as an ambivalent twoness caused the historical fact that the archetypal background of the Trinity, the ambivalent twoness, was only able to establish itself unconsciously, as some sort of a shadow of the Holy Spirit. The first climax of this development we see in Hermetic alchemy [see also Hermetic alchemy], whose central symbol, the spirit Mercury, exists as a downright ambivalent twoness: Mercury is bright and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter – briefly: a union of the opposites (Jung, CG, CW 13, §§ 239).

Since the Church Fathers had already differentiated the Christian God-image into a Trinity, it was now no longer possible to imagine the divinity, as the early Christian Gnostic perceived it, as an ambivalent father/mother. The post-Trinitarian God-image must therefore consider both, the structure of the Trinity as well as the ambivalent twoness of the Divine. The logical consequence of such a union of the qualitative and the quantitative aspect of the Trinity is therefore a God-image that corresponds to the structural principle of a double Trinity – the Seal of Solomon or Star of David.

[Remark of January 2004: When I wrote The Quest for God in the years 1981 to 1986, I did not yet know the fact that the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli was persecuted in his dreams and visions by this double-triadic God-image. When I began to read his Wissenschaftliche Briefwechsel (The Scientific Correspondence), I realized that at least after the year 1948 he should have become conscious about the fact that the preconscious knowledge of the collective unconscious wanted to show him with these dreams and visions that the archetypal background of the energy term is ambivalent.

The necessary conclusion of this archetypal fact is the definition of a modern energy term, which follows the bipolarity of the Taoist yang/yin. In physical terms this means that besides the positive energy - corresponding to the Taoist yang or masculine principle -, we must include the concept of negative energy, i.e., yin or feminine energy, too, though such energy behaves, as physics tells us and we will see later, absolutely non-physically. This conclusion means, too, that Paul A. Dirac, when defining antimatter as a replacement of the negative energy, did not follow the archetypal pattern that constitutes the preconscious background of the energy term (further explanations see also below).]

According to the Jewish myth researcher Gershom Scholem, the Seal of Solomon is not originally Jewish. It entered the Judaism relatively late, i.e., only in the early Middle Ages[i]. However, the double-triadic image of God emerges also in the Christian mysticism. More than 500 years ago, at the beginning of the renaissance, the Swiss Saint Nicholas von Flue transformed his frightening vision of God’s face into his today famous Radbild, the image of the wheel [see The Wheel Image… and The New Mysticism…; see figure on the right] the double-triadic and therefore absolutely non-orthodox structure is obvious.

A little later we find it in the alchemy of Paracelsus [see figure above left], who however thought of it as of a Jewish origin. In a very special version we see it in the Mandala  of the German Mystic Jakob Boehme [see figure on the right (or in Jung, GW 9/I, p. 317)]. Further, we encounter it in the Jewish Kabbalah [see image on the left], in Sufism, i.e., in the Islamic mysticism, and also in the Buddhist and Hindu mysticism, the Tantrism [see image right below]. In all these five world religions the Seal of Solomon symbolizes the “unifying symbol” (Carl G. Jung), and it is without any exception assigned to the human heart, the place where the mystical relationship of man with God takes place.

In Christian mysticism the Seal of Solomon compensates the purely masculine or spiritually dogmatized God-image, the latter totally detached from matter. In the Seal of Solomon spirit and matter are however unified in what Carl Jung called the objective psyche or the collective unconscious. Further it is a symbol of its center, the Self (C.G. Jung), which itself corresponds to the preconscious God-image naturally included in the human soul. Therefore it symbolized also the lapis (the stone), the goal of the alchemical Opus (work).

[Remark of January, 2004: Since I wrote these phrases in the year 1994, I have seen that behind Carl Jung’s Self – I call it the Logos Self – there must exist another realm, the Eros unconscious with its center, the Eros Self. This differentiation is insofar important as Carl Jung’s objective  psyche is a masculine principle, as is the (Logos-) Self defined by him. The necessity of a bipolar structure of the collective  unconscious comes from the fact that – as mentioned above – the archetypal background of the energy term is bipolar. Therefore, also the term “psychic energy” must have this bipolar aspect. The best realization of this archetypally and preconsciously prefigured energy concept is the yang/yin bipolarity of Taoism {see also The Seal of Solomon…}. ]

As I showed in The Quest for God, the qualitative view of the third and thus the Seal of Solomon resolves also the famous alchemical axiom of Maria Prophetissa: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth” (see for example Jung, CG, CW 13, § 187, note 81). If we include the ambivalence, or better, the bipolarity of the third, the fourth is not anymore equal to number 4, but to the Seal of Solomon, to 2x3 or to number 6.

This fourth, the Seal of Solomon, establishes the union of the spiritual and the material Triad (or Trinity) of the God-image. As a consequence of the empirically observable synchronicity principle, Carl G. Jung recognized in his latter years that behind our artificial split into matter and spirit there must be a unified world. For its characterization he used the term unus mundus by the Medieval alchemist and student of Paracelsus, Gerardus Dorneus. Alchemy imagined this unus mundus as a potential reality before the Genesis, out of which a new creation is possible at any time (the so-called creatio continua).

[Remark of January 2004: Carl Jung began to deal with the unus mundus as a symbol of the Self, stated by him as the center of the collective unconscious, because of the empirical fact that synchronicities exist, which seem – at least for a short moment of time - to unify matter and spirit in the soul of the individual. As Wolfgang Pauli first discovered, the revolutionary pioneer of depth psychology created by this an opposition between two different epistemological models. On the one hand, his theory of the archetypes is causal or deterministic – best exemplified in his book AION (CW 9/II), in which he shows the causal development of the Self archetype during the Christian eon -, on the other acausal or indeterministic like his synchronicity theory. Metaphorically seen, we can therefore compare this inconsistency with a mixture of Newtonian and quantum physics – an epistemological deficiency which is desperate to be eliminated in the near future. ]

Carl Jung was convinced that the Mandala symbolizes the depth-psychological and therefore empirically observable equivalent of the unus mundus, as well as the lapis and the Microcosm are its alchemical equivalent (CW 14, § 661).

[Remark of January, 2004: Carl Jung accepted however only the quaternarian Mandala as a symbol of the Self. Therefore there exists a conflict between his definition of the God-Image as a quaternity, and the definition of the God-image as the Seal of Solomon. As I show in Neoplatonic and Hermetic Alchemy… , this difference is based on the fact that also alchemy was – as Wolfgang Pauli has first seen - split in two different branches: One with Neoplatonic roots, experienced especially by theologians and priests, and the other one with Hermetic roots, exercised especially by the alchemical physicians (with Paracelsus, Dorneus, Robert Fludd as the most important of them). The Neoplatonic Mandala was the quaternity, the Hermetic however the Seal of Solomon.]

The depth psychologist postulated further that the synchronistic experience is the empirically observable parapsychological aspect of the unus mundus. The possibility of the observation of synchronicities exists however only when we accept a change of our consciousness. We must first complete the standpoint of extraverted observation by the introverted. In this way also the consciousness gets an ambivalent aspect: It sees and hears at the same time outward and inward.

The empirical expression of the introverted completion is the observation of our dreams. A human that has made this habit to their inner process, will see that after experiencing a dream more and more events in the outside occur that correspond in their content and meaning to it. Extracting the meaning of such synchronicities liberates the potential spiritual creation hidden in the unus mundus. Like this, by the effort of the human consciousness, a new potential creation has been realized. Such a conscious realization changes the attitude of the consciousness and sometimes also of the collective. In the latter case, a so-called exchange of the paradigma has happened.

Such a renewed consciousness I call a synchronistic one. It is already constellated for at least 500 years, i.e., since Nicholas von Flue, where it is symbolized in his Radbild [the image of the wheel; see also The Wheel Image…].

The historical development ran however in another direction: Towards the middle of the 17^th century, René Descartes introduced the sharp separation of spirit and matter, from res cogitans and res extensa, from the inside and outside, whose catastrophic effects we realize more and more clearly today. Natural science, too, followed this development and concluded that for the scientific behavior the observation of the outside is sufficient, and it did not require help from the inner condition of the observer, of his soul, anymore. Its point of view is therefore purely extraverted; introversion and introspection have therein no place.  

go to part 2