Existence of parapsychic phenomena whose reality value can only be appreciated by those who have had occasion to satisfy themselves by personal observation.
Physics and Psychology
As in the worldview of quantum physics, effects of the observer on the
observed system can no longer be ignored; the result is the infiltration of a
subjective psychic factor into the physical picture of the world, in the same
way, complementarily, there arose also in depth psychology the view that in
the description of the deepest layers of the collective unconscious, we
approach something unobservable that cannot be distinguished from
matter.
On this level, a certain latent physical energy manifests, in
correspondence to which we must also ascribe a latent psyche to matter.
It is in this intermediary realm that parapsychological events are constellated.
Jung suspected that all forms of telepathy, precognition, and the like, and also psychokinesis were based on the same principle, that is, the identity of a subjective and an objective configuration that seem to fall together in time (hence the concept of synchronicity).
Thus synchronicity phenomena go hand in hand with a strange relativization—indeed even an invalidation—of the usual space-time relationship and causal connection, because the latter after all presupposes the existence of space and time and is dependent on the observation of bodies in motion.
Causality, or the probability concept of physics, is bound up with a way of viewing the energic aspect of nature in which kinetic energy contains measurable factors
that at first seem to be incommensurable with the psychic reality.
But modern depth psychology also makes use of an energy concept, which, however, rests on more archaic foundations.
This concept is used to designate psychic intensity, which, though it is not measurable with instruments, can indeed be gauged by feeling.
While psychological data are essentially qualitative, they also have a sort of latent physical energy, since psychic phenomena exhibit a certain quantitative aspect.
Could these quantities be measured the psyche would be bound to appear as having motion in space, something to which the energy formula would be applicable.
Therefore, since mass and energy are of the same nature, mass and velocity would be adequate concepts for characterizing the psyche so far as it has any observable effects in space: in other words, it must have an aspect under which it would appear as mass in motion.
If one is unwilling to postulate a pre-established harmony of physical and psychic events, then they can only be in a state of interaction.
But the latter hypothesis requires a psyche that touches matter at some point, and, conversely, a matter with a latent psyche, a postulate not so very far removed from certain formulations of modern physics (Eddington, Jeans, and others).
In this connection I would remind the reader of the existence of parapsychic phenomena whose reality value can only be appreciated by those who have had
occasion to satisfy themselves by personal observation.
If these reflections are justified, they must have weighty consequences with regard to the nature of the psyche, since as an objective fact it would then be intimately connected not only with physiological and biological phenomena but with physical events too—and, so it would appear, most intimately of all with those that pertain to the realm of atomic physics.
As physics is a mental reconstruction of material processes, perhaps a
physical reconstruction of psychic processes is possible in nature itself.
“It presumably happens as constantly as the psyche perceives the physical
world,”
Jung writes. In a letter to John R. Smythies, Jung goes a step further in his statements on this problem, though he explicitly emphasizes that for the moment it is a matter of speculation.
Jung refers prefactorily to the relativization of space and time in parapsychological events and continues:
It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. One might assume the psyche gradually rising from a minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. . . . All this is certainly highly speculative, in fact unwarrantably adventurous.
But psi-phenomena are equally disconcerting and lay claim to an unusually high jump. Yet any hypothesis is warrantable inasmuch as it explains observable facts and is consistent with itself. In the light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or “extensions.”. . .
As in the psychic world there are no bodies moving through space, there is also no time. The archetypal world is “eternal,” i.e., outside time, and it is everywhere, as there is no space under psychic, that is archetypal conditions. Where an archetype prevails, we can expect synchronistic phenomena . . .
Elsewhere Jung stresses that “in nature, there is a background of acausality, freedom, and meaningfulness, which behave in a manner complementary to constraint, mechanicalness, and meaninglessness.”
In synchronistic events, “one and the same (transcendental) meaning might
manifest itself simultaneously in the human psyche and in the arrangement
of an external and independent event.”
The meaning connected with synchronistic phenomena never evinces its dubious character of being a chance occurrence.
If it did that, these events would not be what they are, that is, acausal, undetermined, and meaningful. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter, 194-196
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