Mantic Procedures

The result of our experiment tallies with our experience of mantic procedures. One has the impression that these methods, and others like them, create favourable conditions for the occurrence of meaningful coincidences.

It is quite true that the verification of synchronistic phenomena is a difficult and sometimes impossible task. Rhine’s achievement in demonstrating, with the help of unexceptionable material, the coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding objective process must therefore be rated all the higher.

Despite the fact that the statistical method is in general highly unsuited to do justice to unusual events, Rhine’s experiments have nevertheless withstood the ruinous influence of statistics. Their results must therefore be taken into account in any assessment of synchronistic phenomena.

In view of the levelling influence which the statistical method has on the quantitative determination of synchronicity, we must ask how it was that Rhine succeeded in obtaining positive results. I maintain that he would never have got the results he did if he had carried out his experiments with a single subject (by which I mean a subject chosen at random, and not one with specific gifts), or only a few.

He needed a constant renewal of interest, an emotion with its characteristic abaissement mental, which tips the scales in favour of the unconscious. Only in this way can space and time be relativized to a certain extent, thereby reducing the chances of a causal process. What then happens is kind of a creatio ex nihilo, an act of creation that is not causally explicable.

The mantic procedures owe their effectiveness to this same connection with emotionality: by touching an unconscious aptitude they stimulate interest, curiosity, expectation, hope and fear, and consequently evoke a corresponding preponderance of the unconscious. The effective (numinous) potencies in the unconscious are the archetypes. By far the greatest number of synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyse can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype.

This, in itself, is an irrepresentable, psychoid factor of the collective unconscious. The latter cannot be localised, since it is either complete in principle in every individual or is found to be the same everywhere. You can never say with certainty whether what appears to be going on in the collective unconscious of a single individual is not also happening in other individuals or organisms or things or situations.

C J Jung, Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle

Ain Soph and the Sephiroth

A mystical act and a gnostic act ‘precede’ in eternity the act of creation as a magical act; this is followed by the activity of formation by the demiurge, or the demiurge hierarchies, who undertake the work of craftsmanship – work which is essentially that of executive or Hermetic-philosophical intelligence.

The classical Cabala furnishes us with a marvellous example of the peace possible between apparently rival doctrines. In its doctrine of ten Sephiroth, it teaches first the mystery of eternal mysticism – AIN-SOPH, the Unlimited. Then it expounds the gnostic doctrine of eternal emanations from the womb of the Divine, which precede – in ordine cognoscendi – the act of creation. They are the ideas of God within God, which precede the creation – the latter being a conscious act and impulsive or instinctive.

Then it speaks of pure creation or creation ex nihilo – the act of the magical projection of the ideas of the plan of creation, ie, the Sephiroth. This creative, magical act is followed – in ordine cognoscendi, always – by the activity of formation in which the beings of the spiritual hierarchies participate, including man. It is in this way that, according to the Cabbala, the world comes into being, that the world of facts or deeds known to us through experience becomes what it is.

Now, ‘olam ha’assiah, the world of facts, is preceded by ‘olam ha yetzirah‘, the world of formation or the demiurgic world; this is the product of ‘olam ha beriah‘, the world of creation or the magical world which is, in turn, the realisation of ‘olam ha atziluth‘, the world of emanations or the gnostic world, inseparate and inseparable from God, who in his true essence is the mystery of supreme mysticism – AIN-SOPH, the Unlimited.

It is therefore possible – and for us there is no doubt about it – to reconcile the diverse doctrines concerning the creation; it is only necessary to put each of them in its proper place, or to apply each to the plane which is proper to it. The Cabbala, through its doctrine of the Sephiroth, provides a wonderful proof that this is so.

Pantheism is true for the ‘world of emanations’, (olam ha atziluth), where there are only ideas – within God and inseparable from him; but theism is true when one leaves the domain of uncreated eternity to pass on to the creation, meaning the creation of the ancestors of archetypes of phenomena that we know through our experience. And demiurgism is true when we contemplate the world or plane of formation, or the evolution of beings with the aim of coming into conformity with their created prototypes.

But leaving aside the worlds or planes of formation, creation, emanation and divine-mystical essence, one can confine oneself solely to the plane of facts. Then naturalism becomes true – within the limits of this plane, taken in isolation.

Meditations on the Tarot, Unknown Author, Letter II, The High Priestess

Synchronicity

Naturally every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all the previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned!

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history. This melancholy fact will present us with the greatest difficulties as soon as we set about collecting empirical material that would throw a little light on this dark subject, for we shall we quite certain to find it where all the authorities have assured us that nothing is to be found.

Reports of remarkable isolated cases, however well authenticated, are unprofitable and lead at most to their reporter being regarded as a credulous person. Even the careful recording and verification of a large number of such cases, as in the work of Gurny, Myers, and Podmore, have made next to no impression on the scientific world. The great majority of “professional” psychologists and psychiatrists seem to be completely ignorant of their researches.

The results of ESP and PK experiments have provided a statistical basis for evaluating the phenomenon of synchronicity and have at the same time pointed out the important part played by the psychic factor. This fact prompted me to ask whether it would not be possible to find a method which would on the one hand demonstrate the existence of synchronicity and, on the other hand, disclose psychic contents which would at least give us a clue to the nature of the psychic factor involved.

I asked myself, in other words, whether there were not a method which would yield measurable results and at the same time give us an insight into the psychic background of synchronicity. That there are certain essential psychic conditions for synchronistic phenomena we have already seen from the ESP experiments, although the latter are in the nature of the case restricted to the fact of coincidence and only stress its psychic background without illuminating it any further.

C G Jung, Synchronicity