I suggest reading the earliest posts first

What is the relationship of the experience of synchronicities?

What is the relationship of the experience of synchronicities to the 'rational'? That question has been answered:

"Accompanying the more profound occurrences of synchronicity (is) a dawning intuition, sometimes described as having the character of a spiritual awakening, that the individual herself or himself not only is embedded in a larger ground of meaning and purpose, but also in some sense (is) a focus of it."
Richard Tarnas Cosmos and Psyche

The above quotation is embedded in 492 pages + 50 pages of endnotes, etc, little bitty print, not many pictures in the book.

"There is another world, but it is 'in' this one." Paul Eluard, Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World"

"Here again the dialectic that runs through the whole development of the mythical-religious consciousness stands out with particular sharpness....It is a fundmantal trait in mythical thinking that where ever it posits a definite relation between two members it transforms this relation into an identity. An attempted synthesis leads here necessarily to a coincidence, an immediate concrescence of the elements that were to be linked. " Ernst Cassirer, page 250, The Philosophy of symbolic Forms, Vol 2.

Concrescence is a term coined by Alfred North Whitehead
to show the process of jointly forming an actual entity that was without form, but about to manifest itself ...


"I saw not with the eye of the body, but the eye of the soul." Goethe; Theodore Reik's Fragment of a Great Confession

In discovering the other world, the hidden world, a very strange kind of conversation can be experienced but it's not the typical 'voice' that speaks in that other world. It's created artificially! It uses whatever is available to the individual, the specific individual.

This quotation is from War In Heaven by Charles Williams.

"When Mr. Batesby had spoken that morning it had seemed as if two streams of things: actual events and his own meditations had flowed gently together; as if not he but Life were solving the problem in the natural process of the world. He reminded himself now that such a simplicity was unlikely; explanations did not lucidly arise from mere accidents and present themselves as all but an ordered whole."
Read only the words in Bold-red. and that's the best example I can give of the process of 'abstraction' from embeddedness. This is an excellent description of synchronization as a life process. One's own meditations and actual events flow together and a new 'voice' speaks through this natural process.

Its an individualizing experience in every day life that has been named various names throughout history. C. G. Jung named it individuation, Emanuel Swedenborg had accurately identifed it as regeneration, a process that includes a life review.
An individuation process is not commonly recognized because its such a unique personalized life experience of one's own body and mind. You may be as surprised as I was to have to learn that the 'irrational' is what can't be scientifically validated because it's unique, ultra personal experiences that happen over a life span and science requires repeatability.
So the irrational is what ever isn't rational because science excludes personal analysis, the process requires repeatability. In fact the irrational is a wholeness of experience in that it includes the rational when the individuation process operates in a life or in lives. An individuation process is not commonly understood yet but I became aware of the process and the pattern without knowing about it myself!
How it creates a 'voice' and a conversation is the most personalizing life experience that can be experienced if it's recognized, because the form of its 'speech' is difficult to be discerned. Order emerges from chaos, literally over a span of time that may be decades in a life. It's speech is created artificially, the 'voice' aspect is created by a process of abstractions from every day life content. The bibliography at the end of a technical non-fictional book is in my opinion the result of that process of abstractions, its basically invisible to the author.
When quantum physics was 'discovered' that was a message that 'said': "The physical world is derived from another world" and: " there are no causes in the physical world, only effects." (Emanuel Swedenborg had already written that fact and other important details about the process of life, regeneration was his name for it, that he believed prepared a person for life after death.) One attribute of its speech is symbolic but literalness is also part of how the' voice' is created by a process literally of 'abstractions' , highlighted by the mind from every day life content, by a special function of mind that creates a 'second under lying context' automatically, with an extra 'sense'. The term 'second underlying context' was my own definition but a local Jungian psycyhiatrist told me it was an excellent term. Swedenborg's term, 'double thought' is appropriate too.

Only last year I saw an old movie (Blade Runner) and the process of 'abstraction' caused me to hear a remark made in it about 'tears lost in rain' with that 'extra meaningful sense' that I've noticed myself in my mind. It has helped me describe the undescribable invisibility of such events that occur, embedded in every day life until the 'extra sense' abstracts and highlights them. The 'jokes' that cause you to laugh most heartily are the simplest example I can give now. Television situation comedies in our time are popular from this mechanism's operations but that's just one of 'its' attributes.

There is a kind of rational logic inherent to the process, not Aristolean, or linear, because 'it' uses personal memories and experiences as the content of the process. But that's a fact that had to be recognized over a span of time when 'it' created in my life a consistent synchronization between inner content that was new to me, certain memories from my past and everything, every thing, outside my body.
The process itself was almost overwhelming for a few years until it was a new kind of 'normal', but not yet invisible. What's new eventually becomes normal but whatever is normal gets to be invisible eventually, its ever presence has made it invisible.

The process as I had to figure out myself, operates 'in' every day events. I believe it is a special sense that unites (synchronizes is the best word to use) the body and brain with what's outside the body, history and Time itself with the flow of what I believe is the 'ongoing endeavor of Time'. It may be a function of the unconsciousness itself to create the process of individuation, from the depths of mind but I'm not sure about that. But let me emphasize that I had to discover all, every 'bit of information' myself and notice how it was created from mechanisms of mind that alter 'thought' and the direction of attention. The most difficult to discover was that there is a kind of 'prompter within'. It created a new relationship with every day life events gradually.'

" The medium is the message." The extension in Time of an idea can be 'like' a signal, in my opinion.

The process of individuation is virtually unknown but I have experienced that the 'transcendental function' is in charge, it's building a future event: The Future. Sometimes long strings of events have to happen, widely spaced in time so that the personal 'meaning and context' can in some situations only be given decades later. I've had several events, separated by even decades happen, then a 'closing event ' completes the string and then an inner display retrieves them and assembles them in a flash of a second as 'insight'. Only then suddenly, it's obvious that part of me in the past somehow 'knew' the future.

I wouldn't abandon 'string theory' which F. David Peat wrote is an 'interactive force'. He did not write about or mention a process of individuation. I will have to describe in detail why I believe Sigmund Freud's 'discovery' of psychoanalysis was his experience of this individuation process and Carl G. Jung's much deeper experience was the result of recognizing the effects of the same pattern.

What ever "it" is that energizes my body in that 'kind' of event, which often happens as an ordinary situation, it's not always 'numinous' (feelable at the moment) or even unusual. It's 'feelable' when a creative 'function' of the unconscious mind that is not unconscious its self., 'highlights' the event or the memory of an event. I know it never sleeps, I've had more than acceptable evidence of that fact. That's where its possible to see evidence of foresight, when I see what happened when I was 'moved' by that function in certain specific events and finally realized I'd been alone when many of them happened.

The depths of mind is where an unsleeping part of me (and probably everyone else) is at work. Nothing materially changes but 'associations and understanding'. Its nearly impossible to detect that there's a vast space between upper regions of mind and the most remote regions of mind that produces content that is thankfully strangely visible. It uses symbols that the individual 'knows' or can recognize.

My main symbol is the moebius band in all it's forms. An impulse caused me to make my first one in 1941 when I was 9 years old. The same impulse caused me to discover its 'secret', it's hidden forms that day after I'd made the band with a 180 degree turn. "Cut around it lengthwise." was a thought and I cut it once lengthwise, surprised at the result. The thought words repeated : "Cut around it lengthwise." so I obeyed again. The result was two bands separated but joined in a knot that didn't look like it could be undone. The two bands were joined but separated. The impulse has caused me to look over my shoulder at just the right moment, in the right location and what it brings to my attention is ALWAYS a surprise, sometimes its a real shock, perfectly timed.

It's connected to a part of 'me' that knows where I am, what's in front of me, where I've been and 'it' knows my most private thought. That part evidently knows the future, it has foresight and 'it' or whatever it's connected to uses a different language than our words. But it's within me, looking through my eyes, and I'm not unusual.

The four world balloon was created from an impulse to do something irrational.

About the image of 4 balloons?

I had an impulse to create my own image to represent (re-present) of the four worlds that William Blake's Tree of Life allegory had brought to my mind. I described what I wanted to a young man in a craft store and he thought it was impossible to do what I had in mind. Yet he did it without too much trouble then he made one for himself.


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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The invisibility of the ever present Presence

From page 238 of Jung’s Red Book, the newly published edition:

"The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with fire, ice and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths as he is full of horror.

The spirit of the depths was so alien to me that it took me 25 nights to comprehend him and even then he was still so alien that I could neither see nor ask. He had to come to me as a stranger, from far away and from an unheard of side. He had to call me. I could not address him, knowing his nature. He announced himself with a loud voice as in a war-like turmoil with the manifold clamoring of the voices of this time."

Jung realized that he had encountered the voices (thoughts) from the depths of mind. This period in his life was about 1912-1917, when he was at a break point with Freud's ideas. (He became aware years later that centuries before he lived, the gnostics and alchemists had already discovered that what they were doing physically produced thought and mental content that was symbolically meaningful.) That realization emerged over a span of time that was at least 7 turmil filled years in duration in his life.
I became aware in a different way that every day activities can produce that kind of material, it's a kind of 'voice' (thoughts, inner imagery) that 're-uses' thought produced by some activity. Knowing nothing about alchemy or gnostics I made the same discovery, i.e., that the mind produces it's own 'thought' and creates symbolic content from every day situations. I became aware of a kind of 'alien' inner content, the way he did over a span of years while I struggled to learn challenge level square dancing. It actually began when I had to learn to 'visualize' my positions as I moved through different formations. It was like opening a door into another world, literally. But other aspects of every day life enfolded into having to learn to 'track' my body mentally, every aspect of my life was involved. The very 'form' and language of advanced and challenge levels of square dancing became a material, similar to what the alchemists used. One extremely difficult concept required learning to dance with phantoms, i.e., non-material people whose positions changed with every step the 8 real people in the set took. In addition to tracking my body, it was necessary to track 'them' as though they were real people.

During that period I began to experience a kind of 'thought' that was not really words at first, just barely sensed as words. The first that I remember was a fragment about 'subracting my self from what I see'. It was not an easy task, noticing that my mind produced content of it's own 'will', but as events accumulated and repetitions made this more distinct, I realized this was 'new' kind of thought. It became obvious to me that intents other than mine began to influence me and that in a very real way the non-self generated material was like a 'voice' speaking to me.

Everything changed but no thing was really different. What could change everything but not change any thing? What changed everything was the agent of change itself and 'it' was invisible itself except through a subtle difference that 'it' could create. As time passed and events happened, I could see the change was within my mind; "it" was transparent and it was between me and what was outside of my body.

A combination of 'Seeing/hearing/thinking/feeling my body/ and even seeing my own normal understanding' created something 'like' an object. My inner content had begun to become an object to look at and a great curiosity was part of that object I have reason to believe, it's a pattern itself.

Mechanisms of mind that I didn't know existed created 'self reference' and 'significance'. That was a condition that created the 'conversational tone', the sense of being the recipient of attention from some 'invisible other'. It's a condition that may be normal and thus invisible to males like Jung and Freud because the 'western paradigm' was already installed, it was their 'normal'. Jung became more aware of 'eastern influences', but Freud did not.

There was a time when my personal life seemed to be causing me to feel I had to try to prove I wasn't imagining things, but that changed after 1989.

I became aware that there is a mystery in Time itself and the originators of psychoanalysis may have felt the same need need to understand their own life. Their past may have motivated both men in different ways. Freud kept secrets and when Jung realized that, he lost faith in Freud's 'techniques'. But Jung had a different past, and if you read Memories, Dreams and Reflections there are incidents in his past that prepare him for a different future. He had visions in addition to dreams, which Freud didn't seem to write about. It's likely that they in particular experienced "it", this invisible presence in their relationships with females primarily but through interactions with others also. Overall it seems to be a gender based relationship because the real female and the real male have different 'memories' and history has no female input.

Theodore Reik's The Creation of Woman is detective work, the kind that psychoanalysis initiated. He described an event that happened when he was 9 years old that led him to write The Creation of Woman when he was past middle age. He'd overheard his grandfather and Jewish elders discuss the two contradictory stories in Genesis of Eve's birth. He heard himself suddenly blurt out that 'Perhaps the thing is turned around backwards." which meant the second story wasn't about Eve, it was about Adam. I became aware of native rituals later, where the boy leaves the world of women, in a carefully guarded rite of passage and that as well as other information made sense, the second birth described as taking a bone from his rib was Adam's entry into the world of men. There's a lot that can be written about why Reik's idea is acceptable.

In challenge level square dancing all gender positions are eliminated. That's not where I began to feel invisible as a real female, it was in a place where I lived without knowing it, the life of the stereotyped female, the patterns of the past. That's a fact that hasn't really changed but the situation is different now in 2010, than it was in 1984.

I've been a female and their experiences were not as a female. It's likely the females in their life were 'mirrors', in the Echo/Narcissus pattern/form. Narcissus could not 'see' his own inner reflections when they became exteriorized, when they seemed outside of his body. That's where I lived what I learned, literally: The beginning of psychoanalysis was the past. What is ever present is invisible eventually. One thought that was produced was what I just wrote, that 'what is ever present becomes invisible' but also there was a sense that I was seeing what those words meant because they grew from being 'sensed' into real words over a span of time. That became a pattern.

As a female I became aware I was invisible in several surprising and painful real world situations where I was a kind of mirror, a 'reflection' literally. That was not a fact I became aware of by reading about it in a book. I don't believe gender roles have been understood until about 25 years ago when a great change began in the two square dance groups we belonged to. It's global now. The two groups began to learn higher levels of square dancing that removed all gender roles. That situation was a living model, just a model for where the change that was coming could be experienced to some degree. Observation of that kind of experience was where my 'agent of change' was turned on, my attention was fixed on some thing that was not material.

Jung's life was different, he was struggling with Freud's assumptions as well as living with content emerging from the 'spirit from the depths'.

I remember a thought that I observed as it 'grew' into words in my mind over a span of time that caused me to feel that something invisible had to have some way to become visible. The thought was that 'what is everpresent becomes invisible'. I understood that what is 'normal' was once not normal and then it was distinct for some span of time before it became 'familiar' and vanished from any kind of visibility.

Ideas do not remain intact as they move through Time, they are altered; that's particularly true in psychiatric history. If one idea moves through time intact basically, it can be thought of as functioning 'like' a signal. The idea is carried forwards as a kind of 'signal' even though the content changes through generations that do not have a connection to the origin or to each other but what can make 'it' visible?

Yeats wrote a poem that began:

"Turning and turning in the ever widening gyre, the falcon no longer hears the falconer. Everything falls apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The individuation process, a process that was communicated in Jung's life from what he believed was a 'wise old man' in his depths began to function in a real world location when two groups of individuals began to leave the mainstream level and enter the challenging world of dancing without gender roles.

I didn't know where that thought about came from for several years but when I read certain books that Jung had read in his Time, about alchemy and the gnostics and had learned about symbolic representation from my own inner content, I realized this was an ancient form of conveying information , it was the process in Time itself, functioning as a 'constant feature' in Time itself, that was evident because so many precisely timed events happened that the word 'coincidence' could not possibly account for them. The word 'synchronization' was a good description. Jung also read several books by Emanuel Swedenborg who wrote about a process that prepared a person for life after death, he named it 'regeneration'. The word 're-generation' is what an 'echo' is.

The 'alchemical process' i.e, which I believe can be thought of as the 'constant feature' or the pattern itself ,went to work with the materials in my life, when a small group of individuals began to leave the mainstream level and learn advanced and Challenge levels. In those two groups a real world situation existed that manifested attributes and characteristics of a concept that links the cosmos to the minute. As it is in small things, so it is in large things.

I had the 'sense' of being informed that this 'invisible thing' was able to become visible in subtle ways, (by creating 'differences, absurdities, and even silliness) over a span of several years during which time the 'subtle ways' happened in my life.

The 'subtle ways' were, to give an idea of what I mean: Thought that I know I didn't 'will' myself; retrieval of memories from my past when they were in some way symbolically similar to what I was doing 'now' and more importantly: there was overall a reference to memories that had re-occurred throughout my life when I was very young. And alone. It became obvious those were the most 'telling' events because they had happened when I was alone. Nobody knew about those memories but me, and the Presence itself. Some happened when I was very young.

The 'Presence' that Jung detected and identified as a wise old man knew the past and the future collective, not just his past and his future but the collective.

I had no 'wise old man' within, there were real ones in every day real world life. The Presence that I detected after evidence made it as visible as it can be knew my past, my location on the planet and the most private, unspoken content in my mind. That was made obvious not by actual words but though events in every day life that were perfectly timed, thousands of them that I recognized. Billions that were only in some way 'memorable' as a sense of familiarity that may be experienced as 'deja vu' a sense that I've been here before'. Mirror neutrons, outer reflects what's inner content? When meaning emerged spontaneously from those events, it was not my own will that produced it.

I intended to write about these two paragraphs, but I felt it necessary to present something of my context and why his words pointed towards a loss of personal will in his life. The depths of mind that C. G. Jung experienced in his 'crisis' years may have been more common to males than females like me who knew nothing about anything when my own 'depths of mind' content began to become more accessible to me. It was visible only because it was new, I'd never had that kind of ongoing inner content in my mind. I was curious but I needed to know what was real then, for several reasons. I watched from my own depths without realizing those depths cannot 'speak' words we use in every day life. But the words can be abstracted from every day life and used to create information! The formation of a conversation that came in bits and pieces after 1984 was visible because it was new to me.

That means I could 'see' mental content that was new to me, and eventually I became curious about this 'new thought'. I wondered if "I" was thinking it. Now I wonder if the curiosity was mine. I experienced it as 'me' until I realized there's a 'not me' within me.

Jung wrote that he realized his mind produced content that he didn't 'will'. I've mentioned already that was a comfort to me when I read it. I had no knowledge comparable to what a well educated European man like Jung had, I had an 'empty head' and I mean literally I was basically 'thought' less until about age 52.

The 'horror' of the depths is in my opinion a collective past and the way it's experienced, Carl Sagan described it to some degree in his book The Demon Haunted World. The past is prologue, some have said.

The ideas and patterns that are 'believed by individuals collectively united' need to be understood as 'ruling authorities' (patterns) within that don't go away, perhaps until that content is literally re-viewed. I mean 'looked at again' and understood in a new way with completely different mindsets that don't automatically see the way Gurdjieff described as 'mechanical'. That can't happen to someone that's already familiar with the past as it's been defined. Jung described but not very well, a process of 'individuation' and a 'transcendent function' that operates 'like' a mathematical function. Who but a mathematician knows that?

(Computer language has made many difficult concepts 'like' functions, attributes, characteristics, objects a part of every day life, thank Heavens.)

Freud described a somewhat similar idea which I will quote verbatim because it's important: "Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"

Freud did not name this function as the 'transcendental function' which Jung did describe as being a function similar to a mathematical function, but I believe this is an accurate description of the transcendental function: "capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea 'like' an electric charge over the surface of the body...that's an encyclopedia of implication. That function sorts out, creates significance, importance and relationship in the process of self observation, and life re-view, it brought my central idea to my attention over a span of decades, sorting it out from millions of books, trillions of words.

There are authors whose books describe much better than I can hope to do, the life process and it's stages and states of mind. I lean towards Ira Progoff's The Symbolic and the Real; The Dynamics of Hope but I recommend every individual to read widely about the history of psychiatry itself. That's the surprise, that's where the 'art' of interpretation became fixed on the hidden side of every day life. It's birth introduced a new kind of 'art', i.e, interpreting life events that the individual often didn't realize had 'meaning' and that there is a 'psychologically sensed' level of life.

I named it the 'Larger Domain' when I realized it was really, really real, the real reality itself.

C. G. Jung's main contribution to my understanding was that he recognized a 'world within' and the process itself. He named it but it had already been discovered and written about by Emanuel Swedenborg, a man whose visions are classified as 'insanity'. He used different words, like 'regeneration' but Jung 'devoured' Swedenborg and never mentioned that he learned about the 'literal sense' and the 'symbolic sense' from Swedenborg's writings. There were proofs of many of Swedenborg's visions which made him credible enough to some. I found evidence of an 'ongoing endeavor in Time' from both men, and many other authors. The effects of that 'ongoing endeavor' on an uneducated (like me) individual seems to lead many into feeling there's a conspiracy not in the negative sense, but a more positive sense.

Too many indiduals get lost because such specificity as I've experienced is not scientifically verifiable except at the pattern level. Patterns are 'forms' that can have any content. Form + Content + a witness can create a new way to bring a new idea about reality; that may be what Einsteins' equation means, it means wholeness of experience. His idea that God does not play dice may be utterly wrong. I believe that whatever 'it' is, that spoke from the 'spirit of the depths', 'it' tries to get connected to 'us' collectively and individually.

"What is on one side of the equals sign is the same as what is on the other side but the arrangement is different." Both sides of the 'equals' sign unite matter and non-matter. What is 'non-matter'? What Jung mentioned was the 'spirit of the depths' would be non-matter, human thought, motives and memories would be non-matter,