Reader at the foot of the Tower

From page 56.

 

The science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which—hitherto unnamed because not familiar to us—I have called the synchronistic principle. My researches into the psychology of unconscious processes long ago compelled me to look around for another principle of explanation, since the causality principle seemed to me insufficient to explain certain remarkable manifestations of the unconscious. I found that there are psychic parallelisms which simply cannot be related to each other causally, but must be connected by another kind of principle altogether. This connection seemed to lie essentially in the relative simultaneity of the events, hence the term "synchronistic." It seems as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum, which possesses qualities or basic conditions capable of manifesting themselves simultaneously in different places by means of acausal parallelisms, such as we find, for instance, in the simultaneous occurrence of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic states. Another example, pointed out by Wilhelm, would be the coincidence of Chinese and European periods of style, which cannot have been causally related to one another. Astrology would be an example of synchronicity on a grand scale if only there were enough thoroughly tested findings to support it. But at least we have at our disposal a number of well-tested and statistically verifiable facts which make the problem of astrology seem worthy of scientific investigation. Its value is obvious enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all psychological knowledge of antiquity.

                                     

Jung. C. G. (1966) The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Photo sequence: © Lin Holland, February 1984.  Solomon's Temple, Grin Low, Buxton, Derbyshire, UK.