Jung expressly emphasized, however, that the principle of synchronicity should be applied only when a causal explanation is unthinkable. “For, whenever a cause is even remotely thinkable, synchronicity becomes an exceedingly doubtful proposition .. ” ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.
In the last essay he wrote before he died, Jung recapitulated the salient points in a dream series of an eight-year-old girl. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 20.
it was a momentous event when he became acquainted with Wilhelm in 1928. Their first meeting, which soon developed into a friendship, took place when Wilhelm, with the help of his learned friend Lau Nai Suan in China, had after ten years of work just completed a new translation of the I Ching, along with a commentary on the oracles. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 26.
The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 31.
He [Jung] pointed out that the proton radiation from the sun is influenced to such a degree by the conjunctions, oppositions, and quartile aspects of the planets that the occurrence of electromagnetic storms ( sunspot periods) can be predicted with a fair amount of probability. The astronomical positions of the stars are merely quantities named by man for measuring and determining time but do not tell us anything about its qualities. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.
“Astrology seems to require differing hypotheses, and I am unable to opt for an either-or. We shall probably have to resort to a mixed explanation, for nature does not give a fig for the sanitary neatness of our intellectual categories of thought.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 32.
“I incline. in fact to the view that synchronicity in the narrower sense is only a special instance of general acausal orderedness that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes.” ~Carl Jung, Jung’s Last Years, Page 42.
Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the “kingdom of the second Fish” -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33
In reality the archetype must be regarded as the “arranger” of synchronistic phenomena. It is their condition, not their cause. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 37.
Even in apparently banal synchronistic events it is possible in most cases to uncover the organizing archetype. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 38.
Jung’s method of research was pre-eminently historical. It consisted essentially in comparing his ideas and intuitions, and the insights he had gained from the empirical material provided by his patients, with the historical evidence. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 46.
He would let the contents rise up from the unknown psychic depths, not only carefully observing them but treating. them as realities to be lived with, felt, and experienced through active participation. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.
This experimental phase began at the end of 1912 and lasted till about 1919. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.
The study of Gnostic traditions nevertheless left him unsatisfied. For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years old and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them. For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 47.
Soon afterwards he acquired the first alchemical work for his library from a bookseller in Munich. It was the two volumes of Artis Auriferae, a compilation of some thirty Latin treatises, published in Basel in 1593. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 53.
In the course of his psychological interpretation of alchemical texts, which were then not understood at all, Jung came to realize the truth of the alchemical saying “liber librum aperit” (one book opens another). ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 54.
In his old age Gerhard Dorn, a learned natural philosopher, doctor, and Paracelcist from Frankfurt-am-Main, who lived in the sixteenth century, came to mean more to Jung than most other alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 55.
The Book of Krates (ninth century) presents the whole alchemical doctrine in the form of a dream. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 58.
From the numerical standpoint they differ in that the alchemical conception is characterized by the quaternity-in keeping with the Gnostic saying “In the Four is God” whereas the Christian conception found its most differentiated expression in the Holy Trinity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 63.
Elsewhere Jung contrasted the transformation in the Mass with an analogous transformation process described in the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist of the third century, and compared the Christian ideas of redemption with those of the alchemists. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.
His [Jung’s] observations on the religious aspect of evil start from the ancient numerical dilemma that runs through alchemy-the opposition and interplay of the trinity and the quaternity, where the “fourth” takes over the role of evil. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 66.
Behind the bond between the sexes stands the self, the archetype of wholeness, which contains and at the same time unites the opposites in human nature. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 67.
The dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950, contains several allusions to the “heavenly marriage,” thus proving how the unconscious world of images reasserts its timeless significance as a dark counterpart to the spiritual world of Christianity. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 68.
He described it as “psychoid,” that is, not purely psychic but to a certain extent physical and organic. One might say that it too is utriusque capax. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 69.
Reverting to this idea of a transcendental unitary reality. In his memoirs, Jung admitted that he had reached the bounds of scientific understanding, for which reason he called Mysterium Coniunctionis the culmination of his work. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 70.