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

Having given you an overview of the main contents of my book The Quest for God, I would like to now show you, how an expression of the preconscious knowledge of this new God-image, i.e. a synchronicity I experienced, led me further on my researcher’s path.

In my I Cercatori di Dio a question had remained open. I was not yet capable of interpreting the concept of quantum physical antimatter, which is derived from the so-called negative energy, in a depth psychological or even psychophysical language. As physicists tell us [i], the negative energy possesses very strange physical characteristics. For example, it would slow down the velocity of a particle in motion when supplied to it – physically seen an absolutely absurd idea. Or it must be defined as the quality of particles that move faster than light. Already these statements show us the impossibility of describing the concept of negative energy within the boundaries of physics.

It was my fate to investigate the depth psychological and psychophysical background and the nature of negative energy more deeply. This breathtaking adventure began with a synchronicity I will describe now. It will show us what the physical term “negative energy” means on the archetypal background of the unified psychophysical reality, Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli looked for.

 

2.1 The first event of the Kappa synchronicity

Approximately two years after the completion of my manuscript in April 1986, I experienced a very impressive synchronicity. The first event was a dream on 7 March 1988, and the second an external event that took place 2 months and 10 days later, on 17 May 1988.

Since more and more humans looked for my assistance, who were marginalized socially, economically and occupationally, i.e., the unemployed, the poor, the physically sick people and drug addicts, I decided in the year 1986 to work also in a social institution, in order to have the possibility to study more exactly the depth psychological background of this phenomenon. The intensive occupation with these people, which was also an extremely extraverted work, exhausted me very much. After hardly one and a half years I was at the end of my physical stamina and found hardly any energy for a creative activity.

In this situation I dreamt the following dream:

"I am looking for a new job. My problem with my present occupation seems to be that my small horse has ran away. It joined a herd of wild horses, which was threatened by lions. Thus a very dangerous situation for my "helpful animal" developed. By calling its name, I am looking for my horse in this wild herd. To my great astonishment it is called 'Kappa' (the Greek letter K)".

As an association it occurred to me that "Kappa" - I mean with it the Greek letter K, which is in German, in opposition to the Italian, differentiated from K ("Ka"; English “Kei”) –, as much as I knew, is the only letter of the Greek alphabet, which is not used for the description of quantum physical elementary particles. It is true that the letter K is used for higher energetical mesons, i.e., the Kaons, however the Greek letter K ("Kappa") I never found in my physical literature I studied for my manuscript before.

In the first moment I was very disappointed about this fact, because in the years before I had derived some important “physical-symbolic statements” (W. Pauli) about some physical elementary particles, especially about the Kaons, which as I showed before [above], seemed to be describable in the context of Carl Jung’s psychophysical synchronicity concept. Therefore I hoped to find further properties of elementary particles, which can be used to describe the common archetypal or psychophysical background of the physical as well as of the depth psychological phenomena.

My amplification about the letter Kappa resulted in the following: Kappa is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, has the numerical value 20 and comes from the Phoenician expression for "." (point). Number 11 I knew further as the symbol of the union of yin and yang, i.e., the Tao, in Taoism.

The symbolism of the point occupied me already as an approximately thirteen-years old boy. Already then, I was very fascinated of an idea our geometry teacher explained us: The point does not have an expansion. Therefore the teacher never drew points at the blackboard, but small circles, whose centers marked these massless, spaceless and timeless points.

Many years later I read in the writings of Marie-Louise of Franz that the circle around the empty center represents in general the most original God-image we know. Already before this conscious insight, in the year 1974, I drew some mandalas which culminated in the one called “Herr Roth hat Frau Weiss geheiratet” (“Mr. Red has married Mrs. White”; see image on the right). It possesses also an empty center, and it was obviously the expression of my at that time yet unconscious fascination with this God-image of my youth, which was activated out of the collective unconscious during my great life-crises of that time.

With these amplifications we can interpret my deeply archetypal dream: My helpful horse, Kappa, seems thus connected on the one hand with a massless, spaceless and timeless world and on the other hand with the original image of God, preconsciously constellated in me [and, as I have seen in the meantime, in Western mankind in general; January 2004].

It was however exactly this God-image, I began to describe in my manuscript I Cercatori di Dio, finished in the year 1986. But due to my too extraverted work, I had finally lost the contact to this natural God-image and its synchronistic manifestations, whereby obviously a very dangerous situation had developed, because in the fairy tales the hero may never lose the helpful animal, otherwise he dies.

Due to the association and amplification, I understood the dream rather well, but did however not know wherein this loss of the God-image could have lain. Besides the question remained open: why should my helpful animal just be called Kappa, since this letter is not used in quantum physics for the description of an elementary particle, which had occupied me so much in the previous seven years?

 

2.2 The second event of the Kappa synchronicity

The day before the second, the outer event of the synchronicity happened, I occupied myself dutifully with the phenomenon of the so-called negative energy in connection with a very enigmatic dream of the "blessing of time". In physics, the terms “energy” and “time” are so-called conjugated variables, thus negative energy and negative time belong together.

It was Paul A. Dirac, a co-founder of quantum physics, who dealt in the late twenties of the 20th century with this problem. He tried as the first to combine Einstein’s special relativity theory with quantum physical concepts. By this he found an equation named today after him, the relativistic Dirac equation for the description of the electron, which he published in the year 1928. This Dirac equation is quadratic, therefore it possesses like every quadratic equation two solutions, a positive and a negative one. The positive solution fitted exactly on the characteristics of the electron.

In classical physics one would have simply neglected the second, the negative solution as "nonphysical" and/or postulated that the mathematical formalism is too rich. In quantum physics, however, this reduction does not work any longer, because the energy term is not continuous. Thus, also quantum leaps which jump over the zero-point, and because of this the transformation of positive into negative energy is possible.

The quantization of energy in quantum physics, one of the great differences to the continuous energy term of classical physics, is thus the reason why one had to find a physical equivalent also for the Dirac equation’s solution with negative energy.

Dirac therefore postulated that also the second solution must describe a physical elementary particle and called it the positron. It corresponds to the electron, but possesses however a positive electrical charge. Therefore it cannot be a usual elementary particle. Thus Dirac invented the concept of antimatter, a special kind of matter, which is produced particularly in the accelerators and bubble chambers. In our universe it can survive only very briefly because when it gets in touch with normal matter it is, together with the material particle, immediately destroyed, i.e., converted into photons or pure energy.

It is a very strange coincidence of fate that a very short time after Dirac’s postulate his collogue, Carl David Anderson, discovered in fact such a positron in cosmic radiation. Since then, many further particles of the antimatter were found. Further, the physicists soon were able to create in their accelerators and bubble chambers even elementary particles which are a combination of matter and antimatter, for example the above mentioned Pions and Kaons, the carrier of the nuclear force or the strong interaction.

The concept of antimatter has however a very heavy club foot: In order to be able to explain the creation of antimatter, Dirac had to postulate a hypothesis, which for a physicist is more than adventurous: These particles of antimatter, the positrons, are created out of an infinite "sea" of electrons with negative energy, which are however physically unobservable. Further, because they are transformed into positrons, they leave behind a hole (!) in this “sea” of unobservable electrons with negative energy.

Since the particles with negative energy are defined as physically unobservable, i.e., metaphysical, such a paradigm represents purest metaphysics. Of course even more metaphysical is the hypothesis that in such a metaphysical “sea” there should exist also holes.

The quantum physical hypothesis of antimatter is therefore based on a deeply metaphysical axiom, the principle of negative energy, which is itself defined with the help of the properties of physical unobservability and the concept of “invisible holes” in an infinite continuum. Infinity and unobservability are however specific characteristics of many archaic God-images and the invisible hole is as I mentioned above, even the attribute of the most archaic one.

Since the professed atheist Dirac departed with this metaphysical definition light years from the empiricism of the physical science, and because of the impossibility of a physical explanation he entered the religios/psychological speculation, Wolfgang Pauli, in a discussion with him, created spontaneously the bonmot: “There is no God, and Paul [Dirac] is his prophet!”

[Remark of May 2002: When I gave my lecture in Rome in the year 1994, I did not yet know that Wolfgang Pauli had some decades after Dirac's antimatter axiom stated the hypothesis of the unified psychophysical reality, which he defined as “an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects”. I am sure that it was his Einstein dream from 1934, described in Wolfgang Pauli and Parapsychology, part 1, which led him to this hypothesis. This realm is of course exactly the world Paul Dirac talked of when he was defining the physically unobservable, infinite “sea” of negative energy with its holes.  

With the help of archetypal dreams, synchronicities, visions and deep inner psychophysical experiences during the last 10 years I began to realize that this creative realm, the unus mundus, is in fact not observable with the means of the physical or scientific experiment, but only in a deep meditative state, in which the spontaneous creation, i.e., the incarnation out of the “always/everywhere” (see A New Melody, A New Genesis), out of the psychophysical reality, is observed.  

The necessary condition for such an inner observation is however the insight that the archetypal background of the energy principle is an ambivalent twoness, i.e., that the general energy term must be defined as a bipolarity, and not as unipolar as in physics – as well as in depth psychology.]

Over this phenomenon of the negative energy of physics and its strange metaphysical background I mused thus on 17 May 1988 in the tramway on the way to my daily work. It surprised me that physics transforms the negative energy with the help of a metaphysical hypothesis into antimatter. I asked myself, whether it would not be better staying with the negative energy and the associated negative time, a phenomenon which seems after Carl Jung however to be a characteristic of the Anima.

[Remark of January 2004: During the last two years I began to realize that – in contrast to Carl Jung’s statement - the negative time or the reversal of time has less to do with the Anima but much more with a principle equivalent in worth to the (Logos-)Self, the World Soul or Eros Self. The union of these two principles is described in Hermetic alchemy as the coniunctio, the sexual union of the masculine with the feminine deity.]

Just when I thought the term "negative energy", my eyes fell unconsciously on a man on the road outside. He carried a jogging suit, and on its trouser legs two times, from above downward, as largely as possible the word Kappa stood written [the clothing of this company were not well known at this time in Switzerland, therefore I did not know that this is the name of an Italian sport’s wear company].

I was immediately reminded of the dream about the Kappa horse I had lost and needed to find again, and at the same time I remembered that I had not found a good association, except that the Greek letter Kappa is not used in quantum physics.

Suddenly like a bolt from the blue an idea flashed through my head: "That is it, the perfect solution! Kappa is a symbol of the negative energy, and it has nothing to do with physics, it transcends it". The negative energy we must see in a depth psychological/psychosomatic way, therefore the “Kappa” appeared on the body of the sportsman. It corresponds therefore to the objective psychic energy, postulated by Carl Jung, however on a psychosomatic level. [January 2004: About the revision of this term see below].

 

3. Archetypal psychosomatics

With this enlightenment I had extracted the meaning of the Kappa synchronicity, or better: the preconscious knowledge of the collective unconscious had solved its immanent enigma. With the help of this “inner quantum leap” I was now able to deal with the depth psychological/psychosomatic interpretation of the so-called negative energy of quantum physics. I began to understand that the metaphysical explanation of the negative energy by Paul A. Dirac was in some way very useful, if one allowed oneself to transcend physics: The psychosomatic aspect of Carl Jung’s objective-psychic energy is that facet of energy which is real but not observable by the means of physics and natural science, therefore a metaphysical concept and a part of its unconscious God-image. But there is perhaps a possibility of an observability with the help of a newly interpreted concept of psychophysics or psychosomatics. Observability is however the criterion for transforming a metaphysical belief into an empirical knowledge. Like this, the old discrepancy between belief and knowledge could perhaps been overcome.

In my practical work with sick people I developed therefore the method of Body Centered Imagination, which in the case of a disease I call Symptom Symbol Transformation (see also Neotantrism and Body Centered Visualization). This technique corresponds to an enhancement of Carl Jung’s active imagination with the help of concepts of the Medieval physicians Paracelsus and Gerardus Dorneus. However, as I have shown before [above], it corresponds also to the symbolism of elementary particle physics and its epistemological tools, the accelerator and the bubble chamber. By drawing back the projection into the external world, one accepts that the Logos consciousness must be emptied and like this become some sort of an “inner accelerator" with its vacuum. In this way one becomes able to see, that this void is not at all an emptiness, but a fullness, i.e., a different sort of consciousness. I call it the (introverted) Eros consciousness. Buddhist mysticism speaks of "the fullness of emptiness."  

Such a “void,” i.e., an altered consciousness, which is concentrated on the three functions of introverted feeling, intuition and sensation and represses thinking consciously during the act of observation, is able to experience a very different reality than the one observed by the (extraverted) Logos consciousness with its extraverted sensation and thinking functions. With the help of the two functions introverted feeling and intuition, which are completed by the introverted sensation, this “void ego” observes the events which happen in the “gut brain.” Like this the belly becomes some sort of a bubble chamber – it is a matter of fact that as an effect of switching into this altered consciousness, mostly the belly begins indeed to “bubble” - in which images or sequences of pictures are freed.

The necessary condition for the experience of what I call archetypal psychosomatics [or archetypal psychophysics] is therefore the drawing back of the projection of the accelerator and the bubble chamber into the physical outer world. As an effect of the associated transformation of the extraverted Logos consciousness into the introverted Eros ego, the observation of symbolic images becomes possible, which seem to be the expression of the psychophysical aspect of the collective unconscious.

[Remark of January 2004: Meanwhile I have seen that these images come out of an even deeper layer behind or even beyond Carl Jung’s collective unconscious; see below.

In the terms of Carl Jung's experience in the years 1913 to 1918 (see MDR, p. 205-6) we could say in a symbolic language that we should have much more a relationship with Salome, instead with Elijah (or Philemon). She is blind (!), i.e., does not use extraverted sensation, and is in possession of a snake. Carl Jung "stuck close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of the three, and to have a clear intelligence. Of Salome I was distinctly suspicious." Salome seems however to symbolize the absence of extraverted sensation and thinking, i.e., the "void consciousness" as defined above! (See also my thoughts about the altered consciousness of the Swiss Saint Nicolas von Flue in http://www.psychovision.ch/rfr/radbilde.htm)]  

[Remark of August 2004: According to notes of Carl Jung's seminar given in 1925 (see C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, ed. W. McGuire, Princeton, 1989, p. 95-99; see also: Richard Noll, The Arian Christ, pp. 122-125) this vision was continued by an as yet unknown second one, in which Jung was in a ring of boulders, a Druidic sacred place. There Elijah shrinked and he noticed a tiny woman, Salome with her snake.

Jung was descending into the underworld, and now Salome became interested in him and wanted him to cure her blindness because she thought that he was Jesus Christ.

Then the snake approached him, encircled him and pressed him in her coils, which reached up to his heart. Salome rose and could see. And Jung, by the pression of the snake became AION, the lion-headed god, the deified eternal being. 

In Jung's own words:

The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus (lion-headed god) of the Mithraic mysteries. It is the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of the lion. This statue has only been found in mystery grottoes (the underground churches, the last remnants of the catacombs).

I can imagine that Jung did not talk about this part of his initial vision, because he was conscious about the fact that it was dealing with a future task he was not yet able to fulfil. This task of the 21st century has indeed to do with the snake, i.e., whith a novel interpretation of the Kundalini process on the background of our Jewish/Christian roots. It will lead into what I call the Eros consciousness (the emphasis of the heart!), concentrated on the "inner aspect of bodily matter", as e.g. touched upon in Neotantrism and Body Centered Visualization and A Body Centered Visualization for Arrhythmias of the Heart ] 

Carl Jung as well as Sigmund Freud believed in the theory that the intellectual understanding of the spontaneous products of the unconscious, especially of the dreams, is the necessary condition for the healing of a psychic disease. My experience with the Symptom Symbol Transformation shows however the fact that already the observation and emotional experience of these inner images is the sufficient condition for the cure of the corresponding disease.

[Remark of January 2004: This experience, too, suggests the existence of a different part of the collective unconscious, a deeper one, which is much more connected with the Eros principle than with the Logos. However, this deeper realm is only observable by the altered consciousness I call Eros ego.]

The spontaneous illumination that interpreted my Kappa synchronicity led me back to my analytical work, now however with an emphasis on the archetypal psychosomatic aspect of healing. With the help of the Symptom Symbol Transformation I began to cure people infected with the HIV virus. This work showed me that my concept of the psychophysically interpreted negative energy could lead to a radically new view of the related disease. My first conclusions I have formulated in my recently [1994] published German book with the title Hat AIDS einen Sinn? – Behandlungsmöglichkeiten der HIV-Infektion auf der Grundlage tiefenpsychologischer Imaginationsmethode (Does AIDS Have Meaning? HIV Treatment Possibilities on the Basis of Imaginal Methods in Depth Psychology).

With the demonstration of the contents of my book I Cercatori di Dio [The Quest for God] and of my further results I hope that I was able to illustrate to you the possibility of the observance and comprehension of the synchronicity principle in the scientific research. As Marie-Louise von Franz, my admired teacher always stressed, the inclusion of the synchronicity principle is the necessary condition for what she and Carl Jung called the exploration of the unconscious out of itself. Only a research which follows these "hints of the Tao" gives us the warranty that the consciousness becomes able to eliminate its prejudices and like this can observe the real contents and processes that happen in the collective unconscious [January 2004: and/or in the layer behind it, the Eros realm], purified of our unconscious projections.

[Remark of January 2004: My further research led me in the meantime to the view that the negative energy of quantum physics represents a still deeper principle than Carl G. Jung’s objective-psychic energy. While the latter in a symbolic language can be called "inner yang" that completes the "outer yang", i.e. the physical energy, in a complementary way, we must regard the principle of the negative energy as "yin".

The “yin” principle applies beyond the distinction of inside and outside, of depth psychology and physics, of object and subject, and goes therefore beyond the scope of physical space and time. It corresponds to the energetic principle the alchemy of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance called the anima mundi, the World Soul. Further, it seems that the archetypal background of the concerning energetical processes is the unified psychophysical reality or unus mundus, Carl G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli looked for in the early fifties of the 20th century.]

I thank you for your attention.

Horgen, Switzerland, August 1994

 

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