One stares at a chaotic pattern and then gets a fantasy, and the complete disorder in the pattern confuses one’s conscious mind.
The unconscious knows things; it knows the past and future, it knows things about other people.
We all from time to time have dreams which inform us about something which happens to another person.
Most of you who analyse will know that prognostic and telepathic dreams occur quite frequently to practically everybody, and this knowledge of the unconscious Jung calls absolute knowledge.
A medium is a person who has a closer relationship, one might say a gift, by which to relate to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, generally by having a relatively low level of consciousness.
This explains why mediums are very often very queer and often even morally odd people not always, but often or they are slightly criminal, or take to drink, and so on.
They are generally very endangered personalities because they have that low threshold and are so near to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.
Almost all non-number divination techniques are based on some kind of chaotic pattern, which actually is exactly like the Rorschach test.
One stares at a chaotic pattern and then gets a fantasy, and the complete disorder in the pattern confuses one’s conscious mind.
We could all be mediums, and all have absolute knowledge, if the bright light of our ego consciousness would not dim it.
That is why the medium needs an abaissement du niveau mental and has to go into a trance, a sleep-like state, to pull up his or her knowledge.
I have myself observed that in states of extreme fatigue, when I am really dangerously physically exhausted, I suddenly get absolute knowledge; I am much closer to it then, but as soon as I have slept well for a few nights then this wonderful gift is gone again.
Why?
Absolute knowledge is like candlelight, and if the electric light of ego consciousness is burning, then one cannot see the candlelight.
If one looks at a chaotic pattern, one gets befuddled, one cannot make head nor tail of it.
If one looks for a moment at a Rorschach card with its accumulation of dots, that blots out the functioning of the conscious mind, and then an unconscious fantasy comes up “Oh, that looks like an elephant,” or something like that.
So one can get information from the unconscious by looking at a pattern.
Now the diviner, the sorcerer, is generally a mediumistically gifted personality and he may use tea leaves, or coffee grounds, or look into a crystal.
Different lights flicker if one looks in a crystal; it has a chaotic pattern as well as an order, but the light effects are chaotic.
Primitive societies very frequently look into a bowl of water, or like the people in Uri whom I mentioned, they look at the cracks in a mud path, or any such random pattern.
That blots out one’s conscious thoughts.
One cannot make head nor tail of a chaotic pattern; one is bewildered and that moment of bewilderment brings up the intuition from the unconscious. That is what the palmist pulled out.
His confession when I squeezed him made clear to me why so many, many divination techniques all over the world use a chaotic or half-ordered pattern to get information.
That, to my mind, is a primitive divination technique and it has been rediscovered, for example, in the Rorschach test. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity, Page 39-40
