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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
We are still a long way from understanding what it signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small - and, oh, so transitory - consciousness has become aware of it.
Jung was even convinced that what he calls the unconscious somehow links up with the structure of inorganic matter — a link to which the problem of so-called "psychosomatic" illness seems to point. The concept of a unitarian idea of reality (which has been followed up by Pauli and Erich Neumann) was called by Jung the unus mundus (the one world, within which matter and psyche are not yet discriminated or separately actualized). He paved the way toward such a unitarian point of view by pointing out that an archetype shows a "psychoid" (i.e., not purely psychic but almost material) aspect when it appears within a synchronistic event — for such an event is in effect a meaningful arrangement of inner psychic and outer facts.
To take the parallels between psychology and microphysics even further: What Jung calls the archetypes (or patterns of emotional and mental behavior in man) could just as well be called, to use Pauli's term, "primary possibilities" of psychic reactions. .. there are no laws governing the specific form in which an archetype might appear. There are only "tendencies" that, again, enable us to say only that such-and-such is likely to happen in certain psychological situations.
…in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated.
The science of microphysics, on account of the basic 'complementary' situation, is faced with the impossibility of eliminating the effects of the observer by determinable correctives and has therefore to abandon in principle any objective understanding of physical phenomena. Where classical physics still saw 'deter-mined causal natural laws of nature' we now look only for 'statistic laws' with 'primary possibilities.'
Matter is a thing that man can at best tolerate; he refuses to recognize it. The contemplation of the world has become the penetration of the world. There is no mystic who, in his moments of sublimest rapture, ever attained the perfect abstraction of modern thought, or took his soundings with a deeper plummet.
In my mind, the collapse of the atom was the collapse of the whole world: Suddenly the stoutest walls fell. Everything turned unstable, insecure, and soft. I would not have been surprised if a stone had melted into thin air before my eyes. Science seemed to have been annihilated … It seemed as if I saw art steadily disengaging itself from nature.
From the psychological standpoint, the two gestures toward the naked object (matter) and the naked non-object (spirit) point to a collective psychic rift that created its symbolic expression in the years before the catastrophe of the First World War. This rift had first appeared in the Renaissance, when it became manifest as a conflict between knowledge and faith. Meanwhile, civilization was removing man further and further from his instinctual foundation, so that a gulf opened between nature and mind, between the unconscious and consciousness. These opposites characterize the psychic situation that is seeking expression in modern art.
…it may prove to be that "psyche" and "matter" are actually the same phenomenon, one observed from "within" and the other from "without”…
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