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, May 4, 2010

The Transcendental Function defined:

Freud described it very well, but I didn't read his definition until a few months ago! It's about language. It creates information, it is very likely what F. David Peat described is an 'interactive force'. I have to be cautious about saying it 'is' anything specific, but it does create unique specificity in an individual life.

When I read Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter in 1989, I noticed as I read the book,  a sense of familiarity, of knowing already what he wrote about, from a non-mathematical viewpoint.  As I read I remember a thought occurred:  "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is hearts desire." When I understood  that  thought comment I realized it was statement about particles and waves  but  it includes the importance of an observer, a witness, a recorder, some body that sees and can remember.

I read the book before I knew anything about particles and waves and the importance of an observer. The thought formed as though some  alert part of my mind had  something to say to me, in a language it knew but I barely had begun to suspect existed.

 I think of myself as a recorder of some events in my past now, a selection of events that I noticed and remembered as a result of the transcendental function doing its work.

All language is not actual words, it has to become words at some point but in the beginning there are no words that convey the information that arises from so called 'coincidences' (such as reading F. David Peats book when I read it, just when that information 'resonated within me') when they are recognizable. Individual events are recognizable. Strings of related events are not.  F. David Peat wrote that book, Paul Davies wrote Other Worlds, Wilson van Dusen wrote The Presence of Other Worlds and The Natural Depths of Man, Herman Hesse wrote Steppenwolfe and after reading those books myself, there was an understanding of "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is 'hearts desire'. Hearts desire is what the transcendental function works with.

 About language P. D. Ouspensky says better than I can say it: "It must be admitted that language is a weak and inadequate vehicle even for the expression of our usual understanding of things, to say nothing of those moments when the understanding unexpectedly expands and becomes deeper, and we see revealed an entire series of facts and relations for the description of which we have neither words nor expressions. But quite aside from this, in ordinary conditions of thinking and feeling, we are frequently at a loss for words, and we use one word at different times to describe different things"

"No study of occult philosophy is possible without an acquaintance with symbolism, for if the words occultism and symbolism are correctly used, they mean almost one and the same thing. Symbolism cannot be learned as one learns to build bridges or speak a foreign language, and for the interpretation of symbols a special cast of mind is necessary; in addition to knowledge, special faculties, the power of creative thought and a developed imagination are required. One who understands the use of symbolism in the arts, knows, in a general way, what is meant by occult symbolism.

 But even then a special training of the mind is necessary, in order to comprehend the "language of the Initiates", and to express in this language the intuitions as they arise.There are many methods for developing the "sense of symbols" in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of Nature and Man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic, and one of the most interesting of these methods, is the Tarot"

(The word 'synthetic' is intended to be understood as 'synthesize' not the more modern understanding as in 'synthetic fabric'. This was a problem I had very much trouble becoming aware of, using both definitions is a necessity. pimoebius) .

It's my opinion that ancient symbols and their meaning do not convey the kind of information we in our modern age need to learn from the transcendental function. What is physically present is where meaning is hidden but it's not in every moment's content.  I think of a lighthouse with it's beacon always moving but the beam can be fixed, held captive in an obsessive, compulsive activity. Theodore Reik was obsessed with reading everything he could find that Goethe had written when he was 18 years old but he was embarrassed to reveal his 'obsession'!  When he was middle aged he wrote Fragment of A Great Confession, which he believed was about Goethe's life when he wrote it. Later he recognized details of his own life had been the foundation for the story of Goethe's relationship to a young Fredericke.

There's a scene in a movie, Little Buddha in which the starving Siddartha overhears two men passing in a canoe say: "If the string is too tight it will break, if it is too loose it will not play." They're talking about a musical instrument but the words detach from their context and Siddartha slowly rises, hearing them in a new way that is literally a statement to him, useful and necessary. 

That is a 'function' of the transcendental function.

He  goes to the river,  and repeats the words to a bullock in the river, joyfully but with understanding: "If the string is too tight it will break; if it is too loose it will not play." The 'middle way' was revealed in that incident. I'm not certain that's exactly how Siddartha became aware of the necessity for balance because extremes can be deadly and destructive. But that kind of event has happened to me often enough to use it as an example.

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I remember reading an article in Seventeen Magazine when I was about that age (1949) about intelligence, and how intelligent individuals have certain characteristics. They had erect posture, bright eyes, eagerness to learn new things  and curiosity.  A sentence in the article remained with me afterwards, occurring into my mind often enough that I noticed it and remembered where I'd read it: "Intelligence is the ability to identify isolated but related facts and to form them into theories that explain the universe." The sentence was one of a very few 're-occurring memories' of events that happened only once but for some reason was regenerated afterwards often enough that I noticed them and had a minor degree of curiosity about them.

The first paragraph in the introduction of A New Model Of The Universe by P. D. Ouspensky is about certain re-occuring memories that were marked by a certain 'singular sensation peculiar to them' and that those  memories were essentials in his life.  I believe   my re-occurring memories were critical moments in my earliest years.

What is the 'transcendental function' if it's not an 'effect' added to every day real world events...., that operates in life....., on particular events for some purpose that has it's origin in what I think of now that I've experienced it myself,  as the 'ongoing endeavor in Time'. That is probably what has been recognized centuries ago as 'perennial philosphy' at work, moving 'like' a signal, through Time as we experience Time. There's lots of variety in Time, I've experienced that myself. More about that later.
If that long paragraph doesn't make sense consider this example that illustrates the concept: Laying nearby me is a book published in 1895 A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew White. It  has 78 pages in the index of names the author mentions and quotes from. There are 50 names approximately on each page, so  there were 50 x 78 = 3900 sources for the ideas that Andrew White compressed into his book.


The process of abstraction of relevant material occurred through the operation of the transcendental function, that seems  reasonable to me now. I have witnessed in my self, that there's some part of 'me' that is always alert, awake and waiting until the right situation.  I am an observer to it, it is not me.  It is abstract itself, it's not tangible itself and it abstracts relevant information holding it in some mental storage area until it's complete or close to making sense. Mr. White  wrote a large book about a topic that's as much at the center of  life on this planet in 2010 as it was in 1895. Having abstracted here and there information that caught his attention, fragments from 3900 authors are cached in this book. Some modern authors have a bibliography that's  more than a 100 pages long.

The process of 'abstracting relevant information' from so many sources is difficult to discern and identify, it happens because attention is not usually focussed on what's going on in our 'head'. It's likely the transcendental function has functioned as it is supposed to do but  perhaps the 'next level' requires becoming detached from the body, and becoming an observer to it and that information generating function.

Until an individual knows as much as possible about history, philosophy, the origins of psychiatry itself, it may be difficult or impossible to learn to get new meaning when it emerges in the mind, until a change occurs that creates distance between 'me' and my thought, so that I observe it, the way I observe what's outside of my body. 

What if Siddartha had heard the boatmen in the same way he had obviously heard everything until that 'extra sense' caused him to hear differently? 
Knowing more about the history and evolution of psychiatric ideas is critical.  Theodore Reik mentioned that Greek milkmaids knew already what Freud wrote down as psychiatry.

More about that later.