The importance of doing things before you're ready

As I work on a new book, I am reminded of one of the basic rules of life: If we wait until we are fully prepared in order to do something, we may never get it done. Perfection is not available in our human condition. It's important to do things before we think we are ready.
    A case in point, mined from my own journals in the period when I was working on my book The Secret History of Dreaming: 

I've spent the past few days reading and sketching my way into a chapter about Jung and Pauli. I have been prey to both the temptations and the performance anxiety associated with this theme.

    One of the temptations is to wait until I have read or re-read the 18 volumes of Jung's Collected Works (I own nine of these volumes, plus five volumes of selections from the others) and his memoirs and letters, and at least half a dozen of the biographies, and a dozen of the studies of his approach to synchronicity (all of which are also on my shelves or my desk). 
    There’s also a strong temptation to wait until I have found someone to explain Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, and Riemann Surfaces, and Violation of Parity and the Fine Structure Constant to me, and exactly where and why he differed with Einstein and (on another front) with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen School, and the whole debate over symmetry - and until I have found someone else to disinter and translate Pauli's full correspondence with Aniela Jaffe and Marie-Louise von Franz. Oh yes, and of course to delay getting on with this chapter until I have hunted down the text of Schopenhauer's Essay on Spirit-Seeing, which turns out to have been a critical influence on Pauli's approach to dreams and reality and - after he pushed Jung to read or re-read it - on Jung as well (but is almost completely unavailable in English today and which I have - so far - been unable to locate online).

    At the very least, I realize, I want to go through the entire Jung-Pauli correspondence yet again (and the 400 Pauli dreams summarized and analyzed previously in Jung's Psychology and Alchemy) page by page, checking every reference, grounding every allusion in the personal and general history of their lives and their time, making sure I have missed nothing and understood everything.

    The performance anxiety centers on knowing that I understand Pauli’s physics no better than Jung, and do not have the advantage of having Pauli around to give me personal tutorials. And on the fact that there are a thousand Jungians (maybe many more) around ready to howl at any misrepresentation of the master.

    There is only one satisfactory response to such temptations and concerns.

    The only recourse is to get on and write the chapter NOW, regardless.

A 2-minute history of dream creation

Dreams and twilight states of consciousness have inspired great scientists, inventors, musicians, writers and liberators of human possibility throughout history. Here are some examples:

• Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
• Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
• Giuseppe Tartini dreamed his famous Violin Sonata in G Minor, known as the Devil's Trill. By his own account, Tartini gave the Devil his violin in the dream and was awed by the brilliance of the fresh composition he received.
• Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
• William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
• Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.
• Lucille Ball was inspired to launch her phenomenally successful TV show by a dream in which she was visited by a departed friend, the actress Carole Lombard (who had been killed in a plane crash in 1942). Later Lucy’s departed mother appeared in dreams to give her business guidance.
• Jack Nicklaus dreamed up a new golf grip.
• Polynesian master navigators were able to cross thousands of miles of ocean, without maps or instruments, because they followed courses shown to them in dreams. A priest (and royal tattooist) called Hau Maka dreamed the way to Easter Island, describing the location in great detail. His king and his people trusted the dreamer’s travel report. They all set sail with everything they had and after two months sailed into Anakena Bay, which was exactly as Hau Maka had described.
• In his speech on acceptance of his Nobel Prize, quantum physicist Niels Bohr attributed his discoveries to his dreams. 
•  Another Nobel laureate and quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, said that dreams were his "secret laboratory."
• Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped 300 slaves escape to freedom by leading them along the roads she discovered and scouted in her dreams.
• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, told a commencement audience at his alma mater that the idea that put him en route to creating the search engine that became a financial behemoth came to him in a dream, counseling, "If you have a big dream, grab it."
• The biggest gusher in the history of oil, at the time of its discovery in 1938, was the direct result of the dream of a retired British colonial official. It was the origin of Kuwait's oil wealth, the source of the fuel that got American shipping across the Atlantic in World War II - and of the later Gulf War.
• Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among scores of popular musicians whose songs have been directly inspired by dreams.

For much more on dreaming as a secret engine in the history of all things human, please read The Secret History of Dreaming.

Picture: "Tartini's Dream" by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1824)

Kairomancy and the Grammar of Epiphany

 

The word “synchronicity” was coined by Jung to flag patterns of meaningful coincidence. He defined “synchronicity” as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning”, the work of “an acausal connecting principle.”

Things come up at the same time, or in a certain sequence, that feel as if they are closely connected, but cannot be attributed to any linear sequence of cause and event. Dreams and waking events may interweave closely, and may have the same quality. Coincidence is at work, but it cannot be shrugged off as “mere” coincidence. Synchronicities mean something. Sometimes they nudge us towards the perception of a deeper meaning in our lives than our everyday habits and attitudes have made room for. They can feed that hunger for meaning that is a defining characteristic of any human who is truly alive. They move us beyond our tendency to put fences around possibility.

Benign synchronicities tend to come thick and fast at times of change, moments that stir the soul, when our passions are aroused – when we fall in love, or make a leap of faith, or are embarking on a new creative endeavor, or are close to birth or death. Benign synchronicity may provide powerful confirmation of a path we are testing – or open a path of which we were previously unaware. Synchronicities can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation. Like the exchange of secret handshakes between members of a secret fraternity, these signals alert us to the fact that we are not alone, that we have invisible sources of support, and that we are on the right course even when the whole world seems to be going the other way.

Negative synchronicities and counter-currents tend to multiply when we are resisting change, or insisting on following an ego-driven agenda.

Synchronicities carry us beyond stolid distinctions between inner and outer, mind and matter. They may arouse the suspicion that, when we are most deeply alive, we somehow call up from the depths of soul the events and situations that are played out around us.

Synchronicity helps us awaken to the fact that beyond the surface of things, everything is alive, animate, conscious. By making it our game to enter actively into the play of synchronicity, we move towards conscious engagement with the powers of the deeper world.

Synchronicity is the grammar of epiphany. An epiphany is literally a “showing forth”. The epiphanies of life, those numinous “show times” when we glimpse the deeper reality behind the manifest world, and derive insight into the larger meaning of our personal existence, come with the intersection of a hidden order of events with our seemingly linear progression through space/time.

The play of synchronicity helps us to move into a creative flow state, and invites us to step outside linear time and history into kairos time, the “jump time” of creative opportunity.

As English physicist F. David Peat writes lyrically in Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind. , through synchronicity, as well as peak experiences, “creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole domain of consciousness. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”

     A conscious engagement with synchronicity, like a conscious relationship with the dreamworlds, enables us to connect with a multidimensional perspective and become co-creators of what is manifested from a deeper reality in our physical worlds.

Dreaming and synchronicity are the warp and woof of our experience of a deeper reality. In dreaming, we go there. Through synchronicity, the forces of that deeper world leave their mark on our surface world and give us a spur to live juicier, more magical lives. 

Wolfgang Pauli, the pioneer of quantum physics who helped Jung develop his theory of synchronicity, did not like the term, which literally speaks only about things happening at the same time. Pauli suggested “isomorphy”, a term that in mathematics refers to identity or near-identity of form, and this is a useful word since connection by resemblance is arguably a more significant element in meaningful coincidence than convergence at a single moment in time. Indeed, we may experience a series of coincidence over a considerable period of time, a situation I have called reincidence. However, “synchronicity” has entered the household vocabulary and sounds scientific and so we are stuck with it.

I decided that we need a new term to describe the practice of navigating by synchronicity, and so I invented one: kairomancy. The first part incorporates the name of a Greek god of time very different from Chronos, the lord of tick-tock linear time. Kairos is the god of special moments, the god of jump time or opportunity time, when time operates quite differently. You may feel that time has stopped or that something from outside time is coming into play. Kairos is depicted as a fleet young man, hairless except for a lock of hair falling over his forelock. From this image we get the phrase, “Seize time by the forelock.” Kairos embodies the moment of opportunity you do not want to let slip.

Hence, kairomancy, literally, “divination by special moments”.  Develop this practice and you become a kairomancer, someone who is always poised to recognize and act in those special Kairos moments of opportunity.

Text partly adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

What Wolfgang Pauli Read in His Dreams

 

I am always astonished when people tell me they don't read in their dreams or find that if they try to dream the text blurs and they can't follow it. I read even more in dreams than in regular life, and often surface from a dream with the text - and sometimes a voiceover,often my own - still streaming. I have been able to catch whole pages from these experiences. Last night, in the library of a French chateau, I was reading and singing with a group from the libretto of an operetta with dual texts in English and neo-medieval French.

Revisting Wolfgang Pauli's correspondence in preparation for a new course, I was delighted to recognize a kindred spirit, a fellow dream reader. Pauli was a Nobel laureate, pioneer of quantum mechanics, and creative colleague of Carl Jung in the development of the theory of synchronicity and the effort to understand the interweave of mind and matter in the universe. He once declared that dreams were his "secret laboratory".

Again and again, he receives and reads letters in his dreams. Sometimes in dreams he reads and signs documents. He dreams that he is in Copenhagen and Niels Bohr tells him that three popes have given him a new house. He signs a document and Bohr gives him a train ticket so he can ride to the new house. He wakes but sleeps again and the dream continues. A Catholic uncle tells him the house is for him and his family. He comments that "my dreams make no actual distinction between laboratory and church so the new house could be both."[1] 

He is told in a letter that there "with me there is something essentially different from C.G.Jung." His number has changed from 206 to 306, not so with Jung. The letter is signed Aucker, a mystery name to him. [2] 

He takes a tram to a large house that is the new building of ETH, the top science and technology university in Zurich where he found an academic home. In his new office are two letters, one very long signed by his boss; it says "ferry dues settlement". The other, in an envelope that says "philosophical chorus society", contains beautiful red cherries, some of which he eats." [3] A voice says: "At the place where Wallenstein atoned for his sins with his death a new religion shall arise." [4]

These two dreams, he tells Jung, are fundamental for him. They speak of the need to move beyond "the nonfunctioning of the religious tradition that strikes me as the distinctive characteristic of the West in the Christian era" towards "a chthonic, instinctive wisdom" and a religion that "attaches more value to the transformation of man through immediate experience than to an old book." [5]

His dream language substitutes scientific terms for Jungian psychology whose terminology is "less differentiated." [6] His dreams inspire him to tussle with Jung over the vocabulary the pyschologist developed to describe meaningful coincidence. A mathematician tells Pauli in a dream, "Cathedrals will be built for isomorphy"[7] and he wakes in high excitement. He proposes to Jung that he should substitute the term "isomorphy" - which means identity or close similarity of forms - for the word "synchronicity" which Jung had invented. [8] 

He has his own math-derived dream language of which "isomorphy" is a prime example. He has a symbolic language he tries to decode according to ancient myths and Gnostic legend like Jung, as with his dream of being at a house in the tropics where one cobra rises from the floor and a second from the earth. He dreams word codes involving foreign languages. In one of these dreams, Bohr tells him that the difference between V and W corresponds to the difference between Danish and English. As he wakes the word vindue enters his mind and he counts it part of the dream. He realizes that in Danish the letter W does not exist. He hasn't grasped what is going on until he nearly collides in the dark, after a meeting, with an Anglicist  named Straumann, a philologist who specializes in early English. Strausmann explains how the W vanished from Germanic languages. Next morning Pauli finds himself sitting opposite Strausmann on the tram , a phenomenon he calls "doubling".They discuss their previous night's speculation that vindue originally means "wind eye". In refelecting in the meaning of this episode, Pauli writes "The dreams and their images are 'Windaugen' for me." [9]  The wind is spirit (pneuma) producing dreams through a visual faculty.

Sometimes, in dreams, Pauli reads formulas on a blackboard. [10]

Two elements in his dreams that may speak to many of us: his dream self is more fluent in foreign languages, especially French (11) and, again and again, he can't get through to someone (usually his wife) on the phone (12).

References

1. C.A.Meier (ed) Atom and Archetype: The Jung/Pauli Letters, 1932-1958 trans. David Roscoe (Princeton NJ: Pinceton University Press 2001) pp.135-6.

2. ibid p.137

3. ibid p. 138

4. ibid p.139

5. ibid p.140-1

6. ibid

7. ibid p.139

8. For a full account of Paui's dream life and dialogue with Jung, see my Secret History of Dreaming (Novato CA: New World Library, 2009) chapter 11.

9. ibid p.145

10. ibid p.150
11. ibid

12. ibid p136

Acts of Creation

 

To be creative is to bring something new, and valuable, into our lives and our world. You don’t have to be an Einstein or a Shakespeare to be creative. You need to play the best game you can, in whatever field is calling you, and come up with some new moves, and play so hard you don’t think of your game as just work (and may never want to retire from it).

What makes a world-class creative remains mysterious. But new research in neuroscience is telling us interesting things about how the association centers of the brain work when new ideas are coming through, confirming that one characteristic of creative people is that they make connections between things that other people don’t see as connected. Nancy Andreasen, a pioneer of brain imaging at the University of Iowa, found that in episodes of high creativity, multiple association cortices of the brain are communicating back and forth with each other - not to process sensory input, but in free conversation. Wild and novel connections are made, and from these – through the brain’s character as a self-organizing system – new creation emerges.

 Educational psychologists who try to rate creativity levels speak of a “fourth-grade slump”, when adult assumptions and formal training start to block kids’ natural ability to make things up. This suggests another key to creative living; we want to stay in touch or get in touch with the spontaneous creativity of our inner child, our master imagineer. 

Something important that creative people have in common is that they develop creative habits. For choreographer Twyla Tharp, these include “subtraction” – making a conscious effort to minimize distractions and make sufficient time and space available for a new project. For creativity researcher Keith Sawyer (a psychology professor at Washington University in St Louis) good creative habits include “working smart”, creating a daily rhythm that sets the right balance between hard work and “idle time” when the best ideas often jump out.
    For Columbia business professor William Duggan, creativity in business hinges on “opportunistic innovation”, the readiness to watch for unexpected opportunities and change your plans in order to cash in on them when they turn up.

A high tolerance for ambiguity is a characteristic of highly creative people. This increases our ability to think outside the box, make connections others can't see, and escape from either/or choices..We grow our tolerance for ambiguity when we share dreams in the right way and receive feedback from multiple perspectives - and find that every viewpoint has something to offer. Active dreamers are capable of checking all the boxes when given multiple choices.

Great creators in all fields are dreamers, not only in sleep but in twilihght states of reverie where connections that escape the ordinary rational mind come easily and contact with higher intelligence is often made. Robert Louis Stevenson said he received his stories in a state of “reverie” in which benign visitors he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
      Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that dreams were his “secret laboratory.” Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kekulé, – and Newton in his own day, and Hypatia in hers – were all dreamers. They drew inspiration from sleep dreams and developed the ability to slip into twilight states of consciousness

Other habits of creative people: 

- They find personal ways of getting “into the zone”.

- They are risk-takers. They are willing to make mistakes, and learn from them. They look at mistakes as experiments rather than failures.

 - Creative people are “prepared for good luck”; they view coincidences as homing beacons and turn accidents into inventions.

- They make room for creation – time and private space.

- They are visual thinkers.

- They find a creative friend. This is a person who provides helpful feedback and supports their experiments.

- They persevere. 

Creativity is not just the preserve of a lucky – or tormented – few. It’s a power we can all claim. 

And here is what, for me, is the most important key to creativity. When we take on a creative project - and its element of risk - and step out of whatever box we have been in, we draw supporting powers, especially the power that the ancients called the genius or the daimon. Most people understand this intuitively, even though we may fumble for an agreed language to describe it.

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture, we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times, and a greater Self. We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Yeats wrote about what it required to engage the daimon with quivering passion in his essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The title means “The Friendly Silence of the Moon”. He borrowed it from Virgil's description of the Greeks approaching Troy by stealth. Under the poet's moon, Yeats explains how we  can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times and on other planes of reality. 

Yeats believed, as I do, that whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by a larger self he called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose.

The daimon loves us best, Yeats said, when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

Art: "The Red Tree" by Robert Moss

 

 

Whatever you think or feel, the universe says, "Yes."

 

 

  

Whatever you think or feel, the universe says, "Yes." Perhaps you have noticed this. Yes, we are talking about the law of attraction.  It is indeed an ancient law, never a secret to those who live consciously. “All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other's power,” according to the medieval magus, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It is a rule of reality that we attract or repel different things according to the emotions, the attitudes, the feelings, the agendas that we carry.

Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you. If you go about your day filled with doom and gloom, the world will give you plenty of reasons to support that attitude. You’ll start looking like that cartoon character who goes about with a personal black cloud over his head that rains only on his parade. Conversely, if your attitude is bright and open to happy surprises, you may be rewarded by a bright day, even when the sky is leaden overhead, and surprisingly happy encounters.

Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody. This process begins before we speak or act because thoughts and feelings are already actions and our attitudes are out there ahead of us. This requires us to do a regular attitude check, asking, What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?

It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field. If you go around carrying a repertoire of doom and gloom, you may not say what’s on your mind, but the universe will hear you and support you. Attitude adjustment requires more than reciting the kind of New Age affirmation you see in cute boxes with flowers and sunsets on Facebook. It requires deeper self-examination and self-mobilization.

What are you doing? A woman in one of my workshops told me she hears this question, put by an inner voice, many times a day. Sometimes it rattles her and saps her confidence. But she is grateful for the inner questioner that provokes her to look at herself. It’s a question worth putting to yourself any day. As you do that, remember that thinking and feeling are also doing. 

“The passions of the soul work magic.” I borrowed that from a medieval alchemist also beloved by Jung. It conveys something fundamental about our experience of how things manifest in the world around us. High emotions, high passions generate results. When raw energy is loose, it has effects in the world. It can blow things up or bring them together. 

There is an art in learning to operate when your passions are riding high and recognize that is a moment when you can make magic. Even when you are in the throes of what people would call negative emotions; rage, anger, pain, grief, even fear, if you can take the force of such emotions and choose to harness and direct them in a certain creative or healing way, you can work wonders, and you can change the world around you.

How? Because there is no impermeable barrier between mind and matter. Jung and Pauli in concert, the great psychologist and the great physicist, came round to the idea that the old medieval phrase applies, unus mundus, one world. Psyche and physis, mind and matter are one reality. They interweave at every level of the universe. They are not separate. As Wolfgang Pauli wrote in his essay on Kepler, “Mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality.”  I think this is fundamental truth, and it becomes part of fundamental life operation when you wake up to it.

The stronger our emotions, the stronger their effects on our psychic and physical environment. And the effects of our emotions may reach much further than we can initially understand. They can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

When we think or feel strongly about another person, we will touch that person and affect their mind and body — even across great distances — unless that person has found a way to block that transmission. The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote in Louis Lambert that “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.” 

Scientific experiments have shown the ability of the human mind and emotions to change physical matter: studies by Masuru Emoto have shown that human emotions can change the nature and composition of water, and the Findhorn experiments have taught us that good thoughts positively affect the growth of plants. Conversely, rage or grief can produce disturbing and sometimes terrifying effects in the physical environment.

"We are magnets in an iron globe," declared Emerson in his essay "Resources". If we are upbeat and positive, "We have keys to all doors. ..The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck." Conversely, "A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst... dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us." 

Whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude, and that this can change everything.

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

 Art: René Magritte, "The Portrait"

Look for the hidden hand behind synchronicity

Jung described the pairing or clustering of events through meaningful coincidence as an “acausal” phenomenon. Certainly, we do not observe causation in the play of coincidence in the way that we can say the kettle boiled because we turned on the burner. A characteristic of coincidence is that it does not have a visible cause.

But this does not mean that there is no cause for coincidence. "Beyond the accidental surface effects of this world sit - as of yore - the gods," Joseph Campbell declared.

Most human cultures, across most of recorded history, have believed that there is indeed a hidden hand at work in coincidence: that it is through the play of unusual or unexpected conjunctions, and natural phenomena, that gods or angels or animate forces of nature or other dimensions send messages to humans or actively intervene in our world. Let’s not shrug this off as a “primitive” idea — it has worked, and continues to work, in highly practical ways. And let’s not classify this idea as a “metaphysical” belief.

The forces that cause meaningful coincidence may be quite physical. We miss this because we cannot observe their workings with our ordinary senses and our regular assumptions. These forces include our own thoughts and feelings, and those of others connected to us. They may include the powers that Jung called “archetypes” — as long as we remember that in Jung’s mature thought the archetypes are not structures but “habitual currents of psychic energy” and “systems of readiness for action,” and that they are as much physical as psychic. The physical forces that play with us through coincidence may include our parallel selves in parallel universes, interacting with our world in constant and complex weavings through what quantum physics has taught us to call “interference” patterns, forever shifting the balance of probabilities for any specific outcome.

 Quantum physics shows us the universe as a dynamic web of connection. Subatomic particles are not separate “things”; they have meaning and identity only through their connections with everything else. Those connections do not depend on physical proximity or causation. Particles that have once been in contact with each other remain connected through all space and time.

 Quantum physics also confirms that when we go to the heart of physical reality, there is no separation between mind and matter. Subatomic particles exist in all possible states until they are observed — at which point something definite emerges from the soup of possibilities.

 Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

 In the hidden order of reality, there is no distinction between mind and matter. The split between inner and outer — subjective and objective — that we experience in ordinary life is unknown in the deeper reality.

Richard Wilhelm’s account of  the Chinese rainmaker contains the essence of a worldview in which the human mind and the external world form a whole. A village has been without rain for weeks. The desperate villagers send for a rainmaker. When the old man arrives, he shuts himself up in the house provided for him, performing no ceremonies until the rains come. When asked how he brought the rain, he explains that when he arrived he noted a state of disharmony in himself, so he retired to compose himself. When he restored his own equilibrium, the rain came according to its natural pattern.

As we become more awake to what is going on, we may become personal magnets for coincidence, “strange attractors” that draw more and more interesting and unexpected encounters and events toward us. The brilliant analyst and classicist Marie-Louise von Franz, who knew both Jung and Pauli well, alluded to this: “The larger our consciousness is, and the more it develops, the more we get hold of certain aspects of the spirit of the unconscious, draw it into our own subjective sphere, and then call it our own psychic activity or our own spirit.”

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss.Published by New World Library

"The Houses Are Watching". Photo of house in Sibiu, Romania by Robert Moss

Quantum dreaming

The findings of leading-edge physics have brought us scientific confirmation of the worldview of ancient shamans, mystics and dreamers, who have always known that there is a place beyond surface reality where all things are connected, a place beyond  time where all times are accessible, and that consciousness generates worlds. The new science suggests the following:

-        *  Mind is nonlocal. Consciousness is not confined to the brain or to space and  time.

-        * You  are living, right now, in one of Many Interactive Worlds. You have parallel selves moving through life in parallel worlds.

-        * Time travel  is possible.

-        * There is no firm separation between subject and object in the universe.

-        * At quantum  levels the act of observation plucks one event into manifestation out of a soup of potentialities. This may also be true on a human and  macro scale.

-       * Humans have an innate ability to communicate and influence people and objects across a distance.

-      * Any event that occurs in the universe is immediately available anywhere as information.

-      * Our experience of reality, like our experience of linear time, is a mental construct. Change the construct, and we change our world.

How do we bring all of this together with our lived experience, our human needs, and our hopes for world peace and a gentle upward evolution of our species?

     By mastering the skills of Active Dreaming. Bring these powerful techniques together with ancient wisdom and  new science, and you are ready to practice quantum dreaming, become a full citizen of the multidimensional universe and be present at the creation of your world.

    You will find that you hold the secret of time travel. You can travel into the possible future, scouting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. You can travel to the past and into parallel world. You will gain first-hand knowledge of the multidimensional universe that science is modeling – and you can use this to heal and  thrive in your everyday life.

     Active Dreaming is a discipline, like yoga, or archaeology, or painting with oils. It offers wild fun and great entertainment, but – like anything else worth doing really well – it requires practice, practice, practice. Active dreamers have an advantage over most people when it comes to putting in the hours required. We can do a lot of practice in our sleep! We are also doing deep practice when we learn to navigate by synchronicity are look at the everyday world around us as a set of dreamlike symbols. 

     The best place to look for the chance of a quantum leap in our contemporary lives is the place where many pioneers of the new science have found their inspiration: the secret laboratory of dreams and half-dream states.

      Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel laureate who was one of the founders of quantum  physics, declared that dreams were his “secret laboratory”. He demonstrated  this by sharing 1,500 dreams with Carl Jung and his assistant over an 18 month period. Jung, the founder of depth psychology, wrote that all his important work was guided by dreams and that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.”

      The dreams you remember are your best portals for travel into the deeper reality, and your royal road to lucid dreaming. A dream is a journey; it is also a place. You went somewhere in your dream, near or far from the fields you know in your regular life. Because you have been to that place, you can find your way there again.

       In dreams, we are time travelers. Released from Newtonian physics and our consensual hallucinations, the dream self travels into past time, future time, and alternate realities. As quantum dreamers using the skills of shamanic journeying and lucid dreaming, we can travel consciously across time to scout the future for ourselves and others, and grow a better future. We draw confidence from the knowledge that the new physics confirms that in the limitless field of nonlocal mind the time is always Now. All probable event tracks – past, future or parallel - are accessible in this moment and may be revised for the better.

       Every night, your dream self goes ahead of your waking self, scouting out challenges and opportunities that lie on the roads ahead. This is part of our human survival kit. Once you wake up to the fact that you dream events before they happen in regular life, you can graduate to the good stuff, which is changing your possible future for the better and becoming co-creator of your reality.

      You are a natural psychic of a high order in your dreams, when you let down your left-brain inhibitions and just do it. You routinely practice precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy. Such powers are sometimes described as examples of ESP. Today scientists are reviving a better term invented by the great Victorian scientist of the unseen, Frederick Myers: supernormal. Scientists like Dean Radin maintain that quantum entanglement means that supernormal phenomena are inevitable. Laboratory research confirms that supernormal abilities are for real, and that the spectrum of possibility extends to retrocausation; reaching back across time to influence events in the past.

       Your dreams may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices. Physicist Brian Greene speculates that we all have "endless doppelgangers" leading parallel lives in parallel universes. When we develop the skills of Active Dreaming, you can explore this experientially - and learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one. Through these excursions, you will grow a personal geography of the multiverse and accumulate first-hand data on the reality of parallel worlds

       Medical science confirms that thoughts are things and living cells respond to consciousness. It gets better, and stranger. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that the nervous system responds to physical events before they take place. If future events can influence the current state of the body, it follows that we may be able to reach back into the “past” to improve our body’s history and performance. This is one of many exciting avenues for quantum healing

       As a time traveler, you can journey to a younger self in her own Now time. As a voice in her mind, you can provide the encouragement and counsel she may need at a time of unbearable pain or challenge. You can be the friend and protector she lacked when her need was great. From this can flow tremendous healing for both of you, for you in your present time and for her in her own time

     The immense body of data on near-death experiences (NDEs) is scientific evidence of the survival of consciousness after the physical body has closed down. If you are now awakened to your own supernormal abilities to step outside time and space, you know that awareness is not confined to the body and brain, and therefore is able to survive death. You are ready to learn that healing and forgiveness are always available across the apparent barrier of death, and to develop your personal geography of the afterlife.

     What happens after death is far too important for us to rely on hand-me-down beliefs and second-hand accounts. We need first-hand knowledge. We get that by visiting places where the dead are alive, and by receiving visitations from those who have departed this world. Both ways of knowing are opened, easily and naturally, in dreams.

     Inner and outer, subjective and objective, interweave and move together at quantum levels, on a human scale, and no doubt everywhere in the universe. We live in an energy field where everything resonates — to a greater or lesser degree — with everything else. The world we inhabit mirrors our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

     The physicist and the dream shaman agree: we live in a conscious universe where everything is alive and connected, and mind and matter interweave. To live most fully in this universe, we must learn to navigate by synchronicity, poised to recognize and act in those special Kairos moments when the universe gets personal.

     A kairomancer is someone who is ready to recognize the special moments when synchronicity is at work – and to seize on the revelation or opportunity that is now available. To be a kairomancer, you must be open to new experience, willing to set aside plans, grateful for secret handshakes and surprises, and ready to honor your special moments of revelation by taking appropriate action.

     In the creation story of the Wayuu, the world begins when a god becomes conscious that he is dreaming and is made aware by a spirit of awareness that he can choose what to pluck from a matrix of potentialities to make an earth and the beings that will inhabit it. This is a mythic analog for the observer effect in quantum physics. As quantum dreamers, we can go consciously into the matrix, observe the pulse of possibility, and choose what we will bring into manifestation. 

    As a active dreamer, you can step outside time and move towards the source of the events and circumstances that will be played out in your lives. You can stir the quantum soup of possibilities, and select what will emerge into form and manifestation.

Graphic: Quantum entanglement may operate at human as well as microcosmic levels.

The Man Who Blew Things Up

Wolfgang Pauli was one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneer work in quantum physics. He was also a world-class dreamer. He described dreams as his "secret laboratory". Early in their relationship, Pauli shared 1,500 dream reports with Jung and his assistants over an 18 month period, and these were a primary source for Jung's book Psychology and Alchemy.
    The creative collaboration between Pauli and Jung over many years is one of the great examples of cross-pollination between great intellects working in different fields. The pioneers of depth psychology and quantum physics found themselves in ever-deepening agreement that there is no fundamental divide between mind and matter. In a paper on "Background Physics", Pauli discussed the need to develop “a description of nature integrating both physis and psyche” He explained that in developing this model he would use terms and concepts from physics that came alive as symbols in his dreams. [1]
    Pauli and Jung found themselves in agreement that the study of synchronicity is the royal road to the unus mundus, the identity of mind and matter in the deeper reality. Pauli made a tremendous contribution to the theory of synchronicity for which Jung became famous. Ironically, he disliked that word "synchronicity", coined by Jung.  He preferred older terms like "correspondence" or the term "isomorphy", used in mathematics to describe the identity or near identity of forms.
    In an excellent summation, Suzanne Gieser observed that “Pauli had from the start a very well-defined opinion of synchronicity: it represents a coinciding of an internal condition – for example a particular state of consciousness – and an external process which is related to the condition. The relationship between the internal and the external appears meaningful, in other words a kind of ‘sense in chance’. Pauli therefore felt that the emphasis ought to be on the experience of meaning and significance, not on the relative simultaneity as is implied in the concept of synchronicity. It would be more appropriate to speak of a meaningful connection or correspondence of meaning. The phenomena…often arise with a transition from an unstable state of consciousness into a new stable state” [2]
    Pauli lived this stuff. He became the poster boy for a dramatic mode of synchronistic phenomena that is now known, in his honor, as the Pauli Effect and can be found in almost any dictionary.
    “Pauli Effect” is a term invented to describe the way the mere presence of the pioneer of quantum mechanics, tended to cause things to blow up, especially physics experiments and equipment. At least one experimental physicist (Otto Stern) banned Pauli from coming anywhere near his laboratory.

    Pauli was brilliant, but he was also a roiling mass of conflicted emotions. His mother’s suicide, his father’s subsequent marriage to a woman half his age, his discovery as a young adult that his parents had concealed the fact that three of his grandparents were Jewish, his heavy drinking and a disastrous early union with a cabaret dancer who ran off with another man, all contributed his violent mood swings. The way the material world seemed to react to him is a case study in how mind and matter interact, so egregious that we can hardly miss drawing the lesson that thoughts and feelings are actions that change the world we inhabit.

   Pauli's friend and colleague Rudolf Peierls (a German-born physicist who moved to England and later worked on the Manhattan Project) described the Paul Effect as follows: “This was a kind of spell he was supposed to cast on people or objects in his neighborhood, particularly in physics laboratories, causing accidents of all sorts. Machines would stop running when he arrived in a laboratory, a glass apparatus would suddenly break, a leak would appear in a vacuum system, but none of these accidents would ever hurt or inconvenience Pauli himself.” [3]

   When important experimental equipment in Professor James Frank’s laboratory at the Physics Institute at the University of Gottingen blew up for no apparent reason, someone remarked that this could be the Pauli effect. However, Pauli was nowhere in the area; he was on a train, traveling to Denmark. It was later discovered that at the time of the lab explosion, the train carrying Pauli from Zurich to Copenhagen was making a stop at Gottingen station.

  When he arrived at Princeton in 1950, an expensive new cyclotron that had recently be installed burned for no obvious reason, and there was again speculation about the Pauli Effect.

   Such phenomena happened outside the laboratory.

   When the Jung Institute was inaugurated in Zurich in 1948, Pauli attended the opening ceremony, since Jung had asked him to become a “scientific patron” and so represent the convergence of physics and psychology. At the time, Pauli's mind was turning on the tension between two earlier approaches to knowledge represented by the alchemist Robert Fludd and the scientist Johannes Kepler. When Pauli entered the reception room for the Jung party, a large Chinese vase inexplicably slid off a table, creating a flood that drenched some of the distinguished guests. Pauli saw huge symbolic significance because of the echo of “Fludd” in the phenomenon of the spontaneous “flood”. This incident inspired him to write his paper “Background Physics”.

    On another occasion, Pauli was sitting at a table in the window of the Café Odeon, thinking intently about the color red and its feeling tones. While thinking “red”, he was unable to take his eyes off a large, unoccupied car parked in front of the restaurant. As he watched, the car burst into flames and his field of vision was filled with fiery red.

    In yet another, quite hilarious, incident in New York, Pauli was lunching with Erwin Panofsky, the famous art historian and two other scholars. When they rose from the table after dessert, three of the men found that they had been sitting - inexplicably - on whipped cream, now smeared over their trousered rumps. The only one unscathed, of course, was Pauli.

    According to his close colleague Marcus Fierz, “Pauli believed thoroughly in his effect.”  He experienced an unpleasant inner tension before things blew up. After the event, he felt relief and release from tension, even moments of euphoria. No doubt he enjoyed his ever-growing reputation for producing wickedly strange phenomena. This was, after all, the man who dressed up as Mephistopheles for a skit in front of Niels Bohr’s circle in Copenhagen. [4]

The best story on the Pauli Effect is from Rudolf Peierls. Some of Pauli’s fellow-scientists plotted to spoof the effect attributed to him at a reception. They carefully suspended a chandelier by a rope that they intended to release when Pauli entered the room, causing the chandelier to crash down. “But when Pauli came, the rope became wedged on a pulley and nothing happened – a typical example of the Pauli effect.” [5]

It has been suggested that the reason Pauli was not invited to join the Manhattan Project – which recruited many physicists from his circle – was that the directors knew Pauli’s reputation and were worried that he would blow up something vital.

Refererences

1. C.A, Meier (ed) Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958 (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) 176, 180
2. Suzanne Gieser, The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics  (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2005) 284.
3.R.E.Peierls. “Wolfgang Ernest Pauli 1900-1958” in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society vol 5 (February, 1960) 185.
4. Charles Enz, No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 150.
5. Peierls, ibid.

Text adapted from chapter 11 of The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.   


No the upside-down photo is not an example of the spontaneous working of the Pauli Effect. However, the fact it nearly failed to load could be.

The Double on the Balcony

You are not my shadow.
You stand closer to the sun.
Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.
You are watching when I forget you.
You are with me when I don’t notice.
You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.
You are the one who remembers.
You are my witness on the balcony above the world.

My friend the witchdoctor calls you
My “double in heaven”. You smile at this,
Reminding me the African lives are mine, not yours.
You saw all of it, from your balcony,
But did not drink the blood or savage joy.
It’s the other way round in other lives, you say:
From life to life, we change places.
When you come down to Earth
I take your seat on the terrace above.

We are together now, for a moment.
I’ve slipped out of the body
That neither confines nor delights you
To join you on your balcony above the world.
The wine in the cup is the color of moonlight.
Below us are all the roads of the world,
The casts and dramas of the many lives
Laid out in dioramas, as manageable from here
As toy soldier sets, or tea-party dolls.

You chide me gently (since humans are forgetful animals)
For forgetting you. I have been a serial amnesiac,
Losing bright nights when we roamed together,
And an ingrate – not seeing your hand in everyday miracles,
Not hearing your voice in the still sure moments of knowing,
Not feeling the breeze of your wing when you come,
In reluctant extremity, to restrain or release me.

When my road was blocked, you were the one
Who reminded me we can fly.
You love to travel in disguise
And I often missed you behind your masks.
When I mislaid my sense of humor
You burst in as a stand-up comic
And shocked me alive with belly-bawdy farce.
It’s easy for you to bring light, and lighten things up:
You stand closer to the sun.

This poem is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming, published by Excelsior Editions.

Poems really shouldn't be explained. Robert Frost once said to someone who asked him to explain what one of his poems was about, "You want me to say it in worse English?" Nonetheless, I'll add two notes to the poem above because I am interested in encouraging conscious exploration of the many aspects and levels of the multidimensional self.
    The Yoruba of West Africa say that while we are living our lives in the "marketplace" of this world, we have a "double in heaven" who observes us from a higher level, and that we swap roles from life to life.
    In a big dream Wolfgang Pauli encountered a mysterious bright-and-dark stranger. Having been mentored for years by Jung on the categories of analytical psychology, the great physicist asked, "Are you my shadow?" To which the stranger responded, "You are my shadow. I stand between you and the sun." This episode is fully recounted in chapter 11 of  The Secret History of Dreaming.