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

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.

Freud studies isomorphy at the corner of my street

Freud is observing the traffic at the corner of my street. He looks to be in the prime of life, wearing a well-cut suit and hat, his beard glossy and recently trimmed.
     Some of the cars approaching the stop light look like parade floats. Freud pays close attention when they slow as the light changes. A group atop a truck look like rebel soldiers from India in the era of the British Raj. People in costume on other vehicles seem to be enacting historical tableaux, showing the passage of great events.
     Freud is adjusting his view that dreams are inner psychological experiences that have nothing to do with anyone except the dreamer (and of course the analyst). He is tracking resemblances between inner dreams and outer events, in the world as well as an individual life. He is a keen student of isomorphy.
     With some excitement, he is also developing and modifying his theories - reflected in his "historical novels" (as he once called his works on Leonardo, Moses and Akhenaten)  - that the evolution of a society or a religion can be compared to that of an individual. Standing outside the swirl of events, he can read their patterns better. Like the observer of a passing parade.

I woke from this dream before 4:00 a.m. today with feelings of satisfaction. It seemed well and good that Freud is alive and well in my neighborhood, his agile mind in motion, not stuck in past grooves. Freud, after all, was not - and, it seems, is not - a Freudian.

    I love finding that Freud is a student of isomorphy. In his correspondence with Jung, quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested that "isomorphy" - meaning identity or close similarity of forms - is a better term than "synchronicity" for the phenomena Jung tagged with that neologism.
    I am curious about the people dressed as Indian soldiers, maybe sepoys from the Indian Mutiny. Freud kept a statue of Vishnu, commissioned for him by his followers in the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, on his desk. In her memoir of her sessions with him, the writer H.D. describes handling it; the shape of this white figure reminded her of a lotus. I don't know whether Freud knew much about India, or studied Indian history. I will add that to my list of research topics.

As I record this short dream report, I do a quick count of the stack of books by Freud and about him on a table of current reading near my desk. Only ten. Ah, that's a manageable assignment for reading and re-reading. Only half the size of the stack of books by and about Mircea Eliade on the same table.
    I have been writing a story about Freud, off and on. I have great admiration for the depth of his culture and his studies of archaeology, history, mythology, languages, literature, religion. I have often wondered what he makes of his own theories, wherever he is now. Maybe I'll have the chance to learn more about that through direct observation. Will "my" Freud choose to speak with me face-to-face? I'll be open for that.

Action plan: Finish my story about Freud.
Bumper Sticker: On my street, Freud is not a Freudian.

Mr. Tickle, Mr. Fish and Things That Resemble Each Other

Glasgow

My daughter spotted him on a suitcase on the baggage rack of a train bound for the Western Highlands. Mr. Tickle, a beloved character created by Roger Hargreaves. What fun we had when she was very small, chorusing phrases about his very long arms and trying to wind our own arms around chairs and cushions to tickle each other.
    Last night, after my birthday dinner, Mr Tickle - or at any rate some of his attributes - appeared in my dreams. I met a character who called himself Mr Fish. His repeated injunction, echoing another favorite game from childhood, was "Go Fish." He demonstrated what he meant by this by extending incredibly long and flexible arms.
    He showed me how to go fishing across time and space for things that resemble each other. I understood that this was a very lively and animated approach to one of my favorite endeavors: stalking synchronicity. When we notice things that resemble each other, in a series of symbolic popups in the world around us, we begin to awaken to a hidden order of events.
    Such patterns of resemblance can involve far more than a one-off conjunction of an inner sense of meaning and an outer event. They can can play over days, weeks, years, centuries. So the hunt for resemblances can take the seeker far and wide. I think of Plutarch, writing biographies in pairs, noting similarities between Greeks and Romans who changed history. In my dreams, my favorite professor - a famous Australian historian long departed from this earth - is working on "Parallel Lives" of his own, noting how events in one life can shape the progress of another life being enacted in a completely different time period. I know Mr. Fish is inviting me to extend my inquiry into the interplay of choices that are being made, and dramas that are being enacted, in the lives of many personalities in many places and times in the multiverse.
    I was not able to see the Super Moon on my birthday, since the sky over Glasgow (and over Oban earlier in the day) was overcast. But I am tickled by Mr Fish and the expedition he invited me to continue, seeking resemblances over larger periods of time and space than we generally bring into focus. That's a stretch I'll enjoy.