Paranormal research is more than narrating the cases an investigator comes across. Also important is the idea that the cases can be analysed in order to provide theory for what is going on. As data leads to theory in science, so too with the world of mystery.
The problem with this approach, however, is that few theorists have achieved the audience they deserve. However, some stand out above the throng. Perhaps the greatest of those was psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung.
YOUNG JUNG
Arthur C Clarke once commented that not only did the paranormal not have its Einstein, it was still awaiting its Aristotle. I disagree with this statement. Jung fits the bill more than adequately, rationalizing the paranormal like no other researcher.
Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a very spiritual family. As an adult he became vain and obsessive and had many affairs, having almost a sex addiction. However, he was very much a genius, trapped between the academic and the more esoteric.
This was apparent to him from the age of three when he began to have mystical dreams and was convinced another person lived inside him. He named this person Philemon and saw him as age old wisdom.
THE PSYCHOLOGIST
If Jung hadn’t become an academic, he would have become a great medium, already exhibiting elements of other personalities inside him. However, he trained medically in Basel before moving to a Zurich psychiatric clinic in 1900, eventually becoming a student of Freud.
Vital to this period was his identification of two states of mind – introversion and extroversion. The mentally healthy person formed a balance between these two extremes, finding himself and realising who he is through a process Jung was to call Individuation.
Most people only discovered their true self following what Jung termed a ‘midlife crisis’, when material values failed to satisfy, requiring an understanding of the more esoteric.
THE MYSTIC
This was very much self-reflection on Jung’s part. Following a break with Freud, Jung had a severe mid life crisis, descending into six years of mental illness, which Jung called a ‘creative illness’. He began communicating with spirits in himself.
Devising a form of self-analysis he called ‘active imagination,’ he produced hallucinatory images. But these images fascinated him to the point that he intuited a totally radical view of mind.
Turning his studies to Hermetic philosophy, he realised that much of the imagery he discovered was common to all, and often appeared in dreams, myth and folklore. It was here that Jung came up with his idea of a shared influence he called the ‘collective unconscious.’
PARANORMAL MIND
Images, which he called ‘archetypes’, rise from this shared mind to guide the personal mind. By his death in June 1961, he hadn’t placed a ‘mechanism’ on this process. But he had identified a process whereby infiltration of the personal mind occurred, due to some communal process.
Jung’s collective unconscious became a model for channelling paranormal experiences. Soon, researchers were allying the process with the quantum field where similar paranormal events seem to occur, with spontaneous action independent of distance.
Without doubt, Jung’s theorizing on the ‘collective unconscious’ revolutionized our understanding of the mind, showing a link between the individual and community at a psychological level. And equally without doubt, this relationship has led to an opening up of rational understanding of a possible paranormal mind.
THE ALCHEMIST
At one stage, Carl Jung decided to study alchemy, the search for the Philosopher’s Stone that transmutes lead into gold. But to Jung, alchemy was not aimed at the transmutation of metals, but at the transmutation of the soul.
Noting the mystical nature of the practice, alchemy was, to him, nothing more than the age old process of transcending normal consciousness and achieving an altered state. This began an interest in other areas of mysticism.
Typically, he studied Gnosticism and the symbolism of the ‘mandala’, his works on the subjects going on to revitalize interest in mysticism – a process that was fundamental to the New Age revival of the 1960s.
PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE
Jung experienced paranormal phenomena throughout his life. A student of Freud, they eventually argued, with Freud becoming convinced Jung had put a death wish on him. He twice fainted in Jung’s presence.
In 1944 Jung had a near death experience after a heart attack. From the Himalayas and the Mediterranean, he left Earth and visited a Hindu in a temple. A nurse observed that he was surrounded by a halo of bright light.
At one point he became immersed in the world of the dead, and later wrote that the spirits were the ‘voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved and Unredeemed.’ He went on to fear for mankind, arguing we could only be saved by becoming more conscious.
SYNCHRONICITY
Jung’s research on the collective unconscious led to many coincidences he could not understand. Influenced by physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he went on to develop his theory of ‘synchronicty.’
He explained the process as a unifying principle behind ‘meaningful coincidences’, arguing there was such a thing as ‘an acausal connecting principle’ behind them, seeming to connect unrelated and unconnected events.
Many have since argued that synchronicity could be a process whereby the mind is active in the world. In other words, our thoughts can have an active role in organizing the world and our lives. Combined with the collective unconscious, synchronicity, if proved, could go a long way to explaining a great deal of paranormal phenomena.
IN CONCLUSION
An academic who was eventually shunned by his peers for daring to go where they dare not, Carl Jung was a man caught between the rational and the mystical. For this reason, he is not given the important place in the history of knowledge he deserves.
Sometimes his own behaviour could be responsible. For instance, after his wife died in 1955, he began building a stone castle, complete with mystical symbols, and saw it as an expression of the symbolic role of his life.
This greatest thinker in the history of the paranormal died on 6 June 1961, three days after a dream in which he symbolically saw his death as a ‘completion’, symbolized by tree roots interlaced with gold. According to the myth, at the moment he died, a storm broke out and lightning struck his favourite tree.
© Anthony North, July 2007
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