[Carl Jung and Excerpts from Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle]
I do not regard these statements as in any way a final proof of my views, but simply as a conclusion from empirical premises which I would like to submit to the
consideration of my reader. From the material before us I can derive no other hypothesis that would adequately explain the facts (including the ESP experiments). I am only too conscious that synchronicity is a highly abstract and “irrepresentable” quantity. It ascribes to the moving body a certain psychoid property which, like space, time, and causality, forms a criterion of its behavior. We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being somehow connected with the brain, and remember instead the “meaningful” or “intelligent” behavior of the lower organisms, which are without a brain. Here we find ourselves much closer to the formal factor which, as I have said, has nothing to do with brain activity. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; an excerpt from the Conclusion
Synchronicity is not a philosophical view but an empirical concept which postulates an intellectually necessary principle. This cannot be called either materialism or metaphysics. No serious investigator would assert that the nature of what is observed to exist, and of that which observes, namely the psyche, are known and recognized quantities. If the latest conclusions of science are coming nearer and nearer to a unitary idea of being, characterized by space and time on the one hand and by causality and synchronicity on the other, that has nothing to do with materialism. Rather it seems to show that there is some possibility of getting rid of the incommensurability between the observed and the observer. The result, in that case, would be a unity of being which would have to be expressed in terms of a new conceptual language-a “neutral language,” as W. Pauli once called it. ~Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; an excerpt from the Conclusion
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that a nervous substrate like the sympathetic system, which is absolutely different from the cerebrospinal system in point of origin and function, can evidently produce thoughts and perceptions just as easily as the latter. What then are we to think of the sympathetic system in vertebrates? Can it also produce or transmit specifically psychic processes? Von Frisch’s observations prove the” existence of trans-cerebral thought and perception. One must bear this possibility in mind if we want to account for the existence of some form of consciousness during an unconscious coma. During a coma the sympathetic system is not paralyzed and could therefore be considered as a possible carrier of psychic functions. If that is so, then one must ask whether the normal state of unconsciousness in sleep, and the potentially conscious dreams it contains, can be regarded in the same light—whether, in other words, dreams are produced not so much by the activity of the sleeping cortex, as by the unsleeping sympathetic system, and are therefore of a trans-cerebral nature.~Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; an excerpt from the Conclusion