"Vocatus atque non vocatus... deus aderit"
Called or not called , GOD will be present

Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr Carl G Jung ,
Kusnacht Switzerland

Professor Dr Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Anniversary of passing to Spirit World 2nd July .

Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. He received an M.D. in 1902 from the University of Zurich. He began work as an Assistant Staff Physician at the Burgholzli Mental Clinic in Zurich in 1902. He served as a Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Zurich and worked closely with Sigmund Freud until their break in 1913. He became on of the most influential Psychiatrists of the 20th century. His ground breaking work introduced the concepts of introversion, extroversion, Anima and Animus, the collective unconscious among others into our culture.
He is buried in a family grave at the Protestant Church Graveyard in Kusnacht. The gravestone is rectangular about five feet in height, bearing the arms of the Jung family, and beneath this the names of father, mother, sister Gertrud, wife Emma Jung-Rauschenbach, and C.G. Jung. The top and bottom borders repeat in Latin the motto he choose for his house "Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit" (Called or not called, God will be present). The right and left sides contain a passage in Latin from St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:47): "Primus homo de terra terrenus. ÊSecundus homo de caelo caelestis." (The first man is of the earth and is earthly. The second man is of heaven and is heavenly.)

 

Synchronicity & the collective unconscious

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and colleague of Freud's who broke away from Freudian psychoanalysis over the issue of the unconscious mind as a reservoir of repressed sexual trauma which causes all neuroses. Jung founded his own school of analytical psychology.

Jung believed in astrology, spiritualism, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance and ESP.  In addition to believing in a number of occult  and paranormal notions, Jung contributed two new ones in his attempt to establish a psychology rooted in occult and pseudoscientific beliefs: synchronicity and the collective unconscious.

Synchronicity is an explanatory principle; it explains "meaningful coincidences" such as a beetle flying into his room while a patient was describing a dream about a scarab. The scarab is an Egyptian symbol of rebirth, he noted. Therefore, the propitious moment of the flying beetle indicated that the transcendental meaning of both the scarab in the dream and the insect in the room was that the patient needed to be liberated from her excessive rationalism. His notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception.

What evidence is there for synchronicity? None. Jung's defense is so inane I hesitate to repeat it. He argues that "acausal phenomena must exist...since statistics are only possible anyway if there are also exceptions" (1973, Letters, 2:426). He asserts that "...improbable facts exist--otherwise there would be no statistical mean..."  (ibid.: 2:374). Finally, he claims that "the premise of probability simultaneously postulates the existence of the improbable" (ibid. : 2:540). However, if you think of all the pairs of things that can happen in a person's lifetime, and add to that our very versatile ability of finding meaningful connections between things, it then seems likely that most of us will experience many meaningful coincidences. The coincidences are predictable but we are the ones who give them meaning.

Even if there were a synchronicity between the mind and the world such that certain coincidences resonate with transcendental truth, there would still be the problem of figuring out those truths. What guide could one possibly use to determine the correctness of an interpretation? There is none except intuition and insight, the same guides that led Jung's teacher, Sigmund Freud, in his interpretation of dreams. The concept of synchronicity is but an expression of apophenia.

According to psychiatrist and author, Anthony Storr, Jung went through a period of mental illness during which he thought he was a prophet with "special insight." Jung referred to his "creative illness" (between 1913-1917) as  a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious. His great "insight" was that he thought all his patients over 35 suffered from "loss of religion" and he had just the thing to fill up their empty, aimless, senseless lives: his own metaphysical system of archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Synchronicity provides access to the archetypes, which are located in the collective unconscious and are characterized by being universal mental predispositions not grounded in experience. Like Plato's Forms (eidos), the archetypes do not originate in the world of the senses, but exist independently of that world and are known directly by the mind. Unlike Plato, however, Jung believed that the archetypes arise spontaneously in the mind, especially in times of crisis. Just as there are meaningful coincidences, such as the beetle and the scarab dream, which open the door to transcendent truths, so too a crisis opens the door of the collective unconscious and lets out an archetype to reveal some deep truth hidden from ordinary consciousness.

Mythology, Jung claimed, bases its stories on the archetypes. Mythology is the reservoir of deep, hidden wondrous truths. Dreams and psychological crises, fevers and derangement, chance encounters resonating with "meaningful coincidences," all are gateways to the collective unconscious, whichis ready to restore the individual psyche to health with its insights. Jung maintained that these metaphysical notions are scientifically grounded, but they are not empirically testable in any meaningful way. In short, they are not scientific at all, but pseudoscientific.

 

Photo taken in 1909 , Prof Carl G Jung on the right at the front .

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Amid all the talk about the "Collective Unconscious", most readers are likely to miss the fact that C.G. Jung was a good Kantian. His famous theory of Synchronicity, "every incident has a specific moment in which it happens in accordance with a Divine plan", the concept that there is no such thing as an "accident", and that everything that happens in our lives has a specific reason to happen and at a specific time.

"The acausal connecting principle," is based on Kant's distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves and on Kant's theory that causality will not operate among thing-in-themselves the way it does in phenomena. Thus, Kant could allow for free will (unconditioned causes) among things-in-themselves, as Jung allows for synchronicity ("meaningful coincidences"). Next to Kant, Jung is close to Schopenhauer, praising him as the first philosopher he had read, "who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe" [Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 69]. Jung was probably unaware of the Friesian background of Otto's term "numinosity" when he began to use it for his Archetypes, but it is unlikely that he would object to the way in which Otto's theory, through Fries, fits into Kantian epistemology and metaphysics.

Jung's place in the Kant-Friesian tradition is on a side that would have been distasteful to Kant, Fries, and Nelson, whose systems were basically rationalistic. Thus Kant saw religion as properly a rational expression of morality, and Fries and Nelson, although allowing an aesthetic content to religion diferent from morality, nevertheless did not expect religion to embody much more than good morality and good art. Schopenhauer, Otto, and Jung all represent an awareness that more exists to religion and to human psychological life than this. The terrifying, uncanny, and fascinating elements of religion and ordinary life are beneath the notice of Kant, Fries, and Nelson, while they are indisputable and irreducible elements of life, for which there must be an account, with Schopenhauer, Otto, and Jung. As Jung again said of Schopenhauer: "He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil -- all those things which the others hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility" [ibid. p. 69]. It is an awareness of this aspect of the world that renders the religious ideas of "salvation" meaningful; yet "salvation" as such is always missing from moralistic or aesthetic renderings of religion. Only Jung could have written his Answer to Job.

Jung's great Answer to Job,( based on the lessons and spiritual meaning of the afflictions and pain of Job in the "Book of Job" - IYOV from the Old testament - TORAH ) indeed, represents an approach to religion that is all but unique. Placing God in the Unconscious might strike most people as reducing him to a mere psychological object; but that is to overlook Jung's Kantianism. The Unconscious, and especially the Collective Unconscious, belongs to Kantian things-in-themselves, or to the transcendent Will of Schopenhauer. Jung was often at pains not to complicate his theory of the Archetypes by committing himself to a metaphysical theory -- he wanted the theory to work whether he was talking about the brain or about the Transcendent -- but that was merely a concession to the materialistic bias of contemporary science. He had no materialistic commitment himself and, when it came down to it, was not going to accept such naive reductionism. Instead, he was willing to rethink how the Transcendent might operate. Thus, he says about Schopenhauer:

The Problem of Evil, which for so many people simply denuminizes religion, and which Schopenhauer used to reject the value of the world, became a challenge for Jung in the psychoanalysis of God. The God of the Bible is indeed a personality, and seemingly not always the same one. God as a morally evolving personality is the extraordinary conception of Answer to Job. What Otto saw as the evolution of human moral consciousness, Jung turns right around on the basis of the principle that the human unconscious, expressed spontaneously in religious practice and literature, transcends mere human subjectivity. But the transcendent reality in the unconscious is different in kind from consciousness. As Jung said in Memories, Dreams, Reflections again:

In other words, a "meaningful coincidence." Jung also says,

However, Jung has missed something there. If consciousness is "the light in the darkness of mere being," consciousness alone cannot be the "sole purpose of human existence," since consciousness as such could appear as just a place of "mere being" and so would easily become an empty, absurd, and meaningless Existentialist existence. Instead, consciousness allows for the meaningful instantiation of existence, both through Jung's process of Individuation, by which the Archetypes are given unique expression in a specific human life, and from the historic process that Jung examines in Answer to Job, by which interaction with the unconscious alters in turn the Archetypes that come to be instantiated. While Otto could understand Job's reaction to God, as the incomprehensible Numen, Jung thinks of God's reaction to Job, as an innocent and righteous man jerked around by God's unconsciousness. Jung's idea that the Incarnation then is the means by which God redeems Himself from His morally false position in Job is an extraordinary reversal (I hesitate to say "deconstruction") of the consciously expressed dogma that the Incarnation is to redeem humanity.

It is not too difficult to see this turn in other religions. The compassion of the Buddhas in Mahâyâna Buddhism, especially when the Buddha Shakyamuni comes to be seen as the expression of a cosmic and eternal Dharma Body, is a hand of salvation stretched out from the Transcendent, without, however, the complication that the Buddha is ever thought responsible for the nature of the world and its evils as their Creator. That complication, however, does occur with Hindu views of the divine Incarnations of Vishnu. Closer to a Jungian synthesis, on the other hand, is the Bahá'í theory that divine contact is though "Manifestations," which are neither wholly human nor wholly divine: merely human in relation to God, but entirely divine in relation to other humans. Such a theory must appear Christianizing in comparison to Islam, but it avoids the uniqueness of Christ as the only Incarnation in Christianity itself. This is conformable to the Jungian proposition that the unconscious is both a side of the human mind and a door into the Transcendent. When that door opens, the expression of the Transcendent is then conditioned by the person through which it is expressed, possessing that person, but it is also genuinely Transcendent and reflecting the ongoing interaction that the person historically embodies. The possible "mere being" even of consciousness then becomes the place of meaning and value.

Whether "psychoanalysis" as practiced by Freud or Jung is to be taken seriously anymore is a good question; but both men will survive as philosophers long after their claims to science or medicine may be discounted. Jung's Kantianism enables him to avoid the materialism and reductionism of Freud ("all of civilization is a substitute for incest") and, with a great breadth of learning, employs principles from Kant, Schopenhauer, and Otto that are easily conformable to the Kant-Friesian tradition. The Answer to Job, indeed, represents a considerable advance beyond Otto, into the real paradoxes that are the only way we can conceive transcendent reality.

Principles of Transference

It was Carl Jung , who clearly understood the principles of transference, especially the concept of transference of physical and spiritual thought energy .

As Jung's intrinsic argument with Freud was indeed deeply spiritual. Jung remained adament that healing an inner soul / spirit was intrinsically important in the diagnosis of any mental health problems and all physical problems as the physical body simply reflects the energy and state of mind of the inner soul. Whereas Freud could not accept the concept that a persons soul governed the way the physical body reacted to situations in life.

The following explanation is taken from the spiritually written book "Sefer Shinuyim" - Book of Changes on the concept of Transference.

Transference

In Physical and Spiritual laws there is a principle called "transference" - "קנין חליפין". Please see our full page on "transference" .

In simple terms, when you go into a shop and buy an apple you give the money in one hand and receive an apple. You have made a transfer, exchanging your money energy for the shops physical item "apple". Which when you eat the apple, its energy will make you feel good, alive and happy with yourself and the world. You may then meet someone and because you feel happy, will also make them feel happy and take away some of their sad feeling. The whole of society and mankind is continually acting in a web of transference and interaction of energy.

Have you ever, suddenly, found your mood change from being all loving and peaceful, and out-of-character you become angry? The explanation is simple, by "transference", someone you have just connected with, (it could even be the car infront or behind you in a traffic jam, or someone in the street who has so much inner frustration, anger or depression etc), has swapped, dumped and transfered their negative energy in an act of "transference" - exchange, for your loving, energising and positive energy.

Spiritual and Physical Transference חליפין

"An exchange of thought energy"

On the page of "transference" we explain the spiritual laws of "transference" and how to prevent a "LOSS of ones souls energy by transference". Please also see our "RESCUE work" page for more on the concepts of TRANSFERENCE

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Photo taken in 1960 , Prof Carl G Jung in his Study

Photo taken in 1960 , Prof Carl G Jung

Photo taken in 1955, Prof Carl G Jung with his wife

Photo of handwritten letter from 1913 of Prof Carl G Jung

all photos and articles reproduced here

with permission and thanks to Maurice Shifrin

Anthony Storr and Harpercollins

Please also see the Jung Institute in Zurich Website

especially informative in the GERMAN section .

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We hope that during Summer of 2008 to have uploaded to this website important pages of Prof C G Jung works, especially "Answer to Job", "Synchronicity", and many articles relating to mental health and the important subjects of "Transference" and belief in a soul controlling the mind & body . So please come back soon !

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