2) Libido's Casino: Searching For Love, Cosmic Order and Synchronicity In A Chaotic Random Universe

The Birth of Synchronicity

"Falling in love again, what am I to do, can't help it."
From the film "The Blue Angel"

This blog provides a very brief overview of the birth of synchronicity by recalling the circumstances that led Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli to meet. Pauli liked to spend his nights studying the mysteries of atomic structure drinking in pubs and cabarets. Often he would still be sleeping and not attend early morning classes, yet he was unexcelled in his understanding of quantum theory by only its most gifted students. like Werner Heisenberg.

Pauli was seduced by his libidinal passions for a young sultry burlesque singer; their fondness for drinking and nightlife ignited a torrid love affair and eventually they married. But the endless nights Pauli had to endure watching other men lusting after his wife increased his already heavy drinking, dulling his academic productivity and clouding his once agile mind, leading to depression. Not long after their marriage ended in divorce. The film "The Blue Angel" is a loose account of Pauli's ill-fated marriage. Pauli sought out Jung's help. It was during Pauli's therapy with Jung that the concept of synchronicity was born.

Understanding the Concept of Synchronicity

This section provides a summary of Jung and Pauli's concept of synchronicity and its relationship to the intellectual and philosophical contributions of both these men. Those of us that are familiar with the word "synchronicity" define it as a "meaningful coincidence;" yet when we are asked to further define this happen-stance event it is often associated with good luck or the learning of a life-lesson and fulfillment of our destiny.

First of all, it is important to understand that the word "coincidence" means much more than any "meaningful chance-encounter." "Coincidence" refers to the "superimposition of two concentric circles of equal area." With regard to synchronicity, one of these circles serves as a representation of a psychological event (thinking of an old friend) while the other circle represents a corresponding physical event (the old friend showing up). Second the "entanglement of coincidence" in a synchronistic event involves both the possibility of a separation in space and/or a separation in time. This is why Jung and Pauli often referred to synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle."

The difficulty was that when Jung and Pauli postulated and eventually published their conceptual view of synchronicity they encountered resistance because of two unsolved problems. First no scientific concept existed to support or explain an acausal connecting principle. Second, synchronicity violated the concept of action-at-a-distance: How can there be a physical manifestation of "energy" beyond what is referred to as "localized" events in physics? What is the medium, the means of transmitting this kind of energy? This is the real scientific problem of accepting these kinds of phenomenon. Either you have to say that the type of energy Jung demonstrated for Freud in 1909 (another story) has no connection with the material world, or you have to postulate some kind of energy, some means of signal transmission that is not now known.

Some partial answers to these questions can be found in my blogs on David Bohm's Holistic Physics, my interview with Stanley Krippner and my work on parapsychology (psi phenomenon) and dreams.