light of nature

Five imaginary dialogs

Discussion A. Science and meaning

Harvey: “Science looks at the real stars for answers to the beginning and end of the universe. Paracelsus looked at them as inner spirits. Psychology looks at the basic ideas behind scientific theories and formulations of Paracelsus as archetypal images surfacing when someone tries to describe unknown aspects of nature. How are these related?

T.B.: “Jung says: ‘Science is tacitly convinced that a non-psychic, transcendental object exists. But science also knows how difficult it is to grasp the real nature of the object…’[1]

Harvey: “No, science assumes that the psyche, being a product of physics, is of quantum mechanical origin. And physicists are arguing like crazy over what that means!”

Ash: “They are all trying to find order or meaning. Fred Hoyle wrote: ‘It is probable that everybody is infused with some sense of religion. Scientists have a belief in a world with order. Some scientists even have a half-formed belief in a world of purpose, a view held overwhelmingly by the majority of people.’[2]”

T.B.: “Hoyle doesn’t seem to understand: it is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of experience. An experience that gives an undeniable feeling that there is a meaning and purpose in life, in the world, in the universe. Since rational science has not demonstrated a purpose in nature, this experience (of meaning) must have something of the irrational in it. The irrational component is needed to make the experience a religious one and also to make it a whole one.”

Harvey: “But what if science were to demonstrate that there is a purpose. I am aware that Descartes set out to do this, and felt he was successful, by showing that nature works causally, and since the ultimate Cause was God, that God existed. However, his picture was too one-sided, too mechanical; nature did not let herself get explained that simply. But still the natural scientist persisted, maybe they are driven by this need to prove a purpose in nature. Some scientists have claimed not to need God, empirical knowledge of Nature has replaced Him. The physicist I.I. Rabi, when he was deciding what to do with his life, told his orthodox Jewish father that he could not believe in God anymore and he had therefore to turn to science. This sounds similar to how I feel. Richard Feynman seems to have had the attitude that nature is so marvelous, there is no need for God.”

T.B. “He doesn’t realize that he has just replaced the term for God with “wonder at nature”. But I am not sure that the psychological content is the same; does the “wonder” include the experience of an irrational factor and a purpose in the world? If it did, then one would sense that that particular scientist had a religious attitude. This may be true of Einstein, but I am not convinced with Feynman. Worse, neither Feynman nor Rabi seemed to have attained a truly religious attitude.”

Harvey: “How can we read a divine purpose out of the material world, out of nature? What if science “proved” that there was a purpose, what difference would it make to someone confronted with God’s dark side?”

T.B.: “Don’t worry, science cannot “prove” anything irrational like a divine purpose in life.

Ash: “It could only be done by including the irrational, and then it would no longer be science (in the narrow sense).”

T.B.: “No, it is conceivable that science would be confronted with facts and the inability to understand them within the present paradigm, and therefore forced to accept the irrational. (I think science is reaching this place with synchronicity, for instance.)”

Harriet: “But let’s say that some physicist proved that there was a definite purpose in nature. Would this heal your character faults or the misery of your soul?”

Harvey: “But how could anybody prove a psychological experience (meaning, purpose) from a physical, material phenomenon?”

Ash: “Well, if anybody did, it would only increase my fear of God.”

Harvey: “I am sure that some scientists would still find a way to understand it in a rational way, like David Bohm understands quantum mechanics with hidden variables for instance.”

Harriet: “I still don’t understand, how could you read a divine purpose out of the material world?”

Harvey: “As an answer I give an example of how one scientist answers the question ‘Does the discovery of the charge conjugation/parity (CP) violation indicate a purpose in the universe?’ Jean Audouze, cosmologist and scientific advisor to French President François Miterrand said: ‘Some days I think yes, some days no. The universe is not uniform. And the universe is structured. And these two things are amazing. The universe is not something that happened at random.’[3] End of quote. Maybe I should explain that CP violation was discovered through experiments, it was not preceded by theoretical predictions but came as a surprise to the physics world in 1964. In essence, CP violation explains the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, which allowed life to come about.  ‘It accounts for the existence of humanity and the structure of the universe as we know it.’[4] I wonder if this was somehow known or foreseen in the psyche. How could something so important not be prefigured somehow in the unconscious?”

T.B.: “Maybe it has been and we have not yet seen it. CP violation is probably mirrored in a completely different language, in fairy tales, for instance, since the intellectual structure of physics is itself archetypal. Or maybe because it is not so important! Maybe the psyche, the symbolic and emotional life of man is far more important than the breaking of CP symmetry. Maybe meaning is more crucial to man’s survival than his intellectual understanding of nature. The real world, that of fantasies, is the infinity into which we fall every night.”

Harriet: “Maybe the unconscious somehow knows about how it came about in the material way, but does not know how the psyche functions – that would be the task of man, the real adventure. Where did God go? I am sure that He did not just disappear simply because a few inflated scientists thought they did not need Him anymore! This is only the first half of enlightenment. Like the Devil who has in Earth underground, He must have returned back into the psyche.”

Harvey: “God “went” into Nature. He is in nature, and He is no less of a powerful figure because of this. In fact, I feel Him to be even more wondrous as an object of empirical nature than He was as a figure of religious belief.

Ash: “Consider the statement by a modern physicist: “Die Physik lehrt uns also, dass die Realitäten nicht materieller, sondern geistiger Natur sind”.[5] Surely this is just what Jung is referring to!”

Harvey: “Your physicist is certainly referring to the modern attitude that an explanation of the physical world in terms of symmetries has more general explanatory power than in terms of a specific law. Look carefully at his wording; I do not think he is consciously saying that matter is (only) spiritual and not material.”

Discussion B. Historical and Eternal time

Harvey: “I don’t understand. How can the light of nature be “temporal” and yet be associated with the luminosity of the archetypes, which, as parts of the collective unconscious are not bound to time?”

Ash: “The way I understand it, when the archetype breaks into time (as the pattern behind a specific idea in a specific person at a specific time), it becomes then time-bound. That is, the light is temporal, although the patterning force behind the light (the archetype) is timeless. Take the example of Fermi; what would a fisherman do with a sudden fantasy to use paraffin instead of lead for a sinker? He certainly would not tell any of his buddies or he would get tossed out of the boat! Joking aside, my point with this fisherman’s tale is to show that the intuition, although not from Fermi’s consciousness, did break into time at the exact moment when he had to perform his important experiment. This is clearly a timely expression (bound to that particular moment when he was doing his experiment) of “luminosity” from the collective unconscious. In this sense, the light from nature is temporal.”

Harriet: “The big question still remains: if it was not the ego, then who knew that paraffin was correct? Which dark or light force was helping Fermi discover nuclear fission?”

T.B.: “A sense of the infinite – this is what religion is, isn’t it? – the infinite being the inner world, is what makes the finite real, concrete, and wondrous. The world of fantasies is the infinite; we step just into it, we are not aware of it. We have no idea of the real nature of time. Our words describe a narrow, one-sided view. Perhaps time is really a burst of colored sparks flowing like a comets tail through a universe that is psyche and matter. Only a painter or visionary could see this. Perhaps we all see this only at the moment of death – when our time stops and another kind of time begins.”

Harvey: “It is the fourth coordinate in Einstein’s field equations. The all-important fourth. Stephan Hawkins said that this was the major unanswered question in cosmology today: Why does spacetime have four dimensions? Also the fact that Einstein’s equations quantitatively describe so much of our universe is as equally wondrous as your painter’s vision.”

Discussion C. How old are the archetypes?

Harvey: “The observations of the stars certainly gave man a sense of order, (possibly even of understanding) within the chaos of the natural world around him. Take for instance the stone megaliths erected to observe celestial events as old as 5000 B.C. This knowledge could have been used to guide agricultural development.”[6]

Harriet: “What do you want to say?”

Harvey: “That in our cultural history and in the development of consciousness, observations of the real stars may have played a very important role. Thus it would be hard, if not impossible, to separate out a purely psychic component, say, an archetypal component, from a cultural component handed down through actual experience.”

T. B.: “But the archetypes are very ancient, more ancient than 5 or 10 thousand years…”

Harriet: “What then gave these people the idea in the beginning to connect stars with plantings?”

Harvey: “Through curiosity and observation these people witnessed that the seasons, obviously obeyed by the plants, were also identical with those obeyed by the stars.

Harriet:” But where did the curiosity comes from, the capacity to observe?

Discussion D. How does psyche move matter?

Harvey: “What is Jung referring to when he says that psyche can move matter? Is he thinking of how a thought causes physical action? But this can be described by a rational scientist without reference to psyche, for instance, as in the following quote:

Any voluntary action – the closing of a fist, for example – begins with the generation of minute electrical impulses by neurons in the brain. Leaping from neuron to neuron, these impulses pass through the spinal cord and peripheral nerves and finally to the muscles that control the hand, causing them to contract.[7]

Harriet: “What ridiculous causal thinking!”

T.B.: “Maybe Jung is referring to the manner in which an image (fear, hunger, love, jealousy, sadness, depression) gets translated into the electrical impulses by neurons or by the non-excitable brain cells called “astrocytes”! These must be the (biological) “stars” in the flesh and blood. [8]”

Harriet: “Neither Jung nor Paracelsus were ever so materialistic, rational, or extraverted. For them everything including “the flesh and the blood” was full of goblins and demons. You are taking this far too literally and destructively – this is the psychosis of our times.”

Harvey: “Paracelsus thought both materially and symbolically, he did not differentiate salt from NaCl but he referred to both a chemical and a numinous spirit of nature reaching into the mysteries of life.”

Ash: “If psyche and matter, life and death, are actually in the equations of physics, then the significance of the numbers and symbols takes on a gigantic aspect. Psyche, love, suffering, all of life must be in those relationships! How are we to understand this? Is it truly too vast to be comprehensible?

Discussion E. “On synchronicity” (incomplete)

Harvey: “But there might be naturally explainable events which carry the same numinous experience of meaning, even though to someone else they might be explained by natural facts. How subjective is the synchronistic experience?”

T.B.:”Take shamanistic experiences. They cannot be objectively verified, it would be senseless. It is precisely the subjective experience which is the crucial one. It does not matter if they are verified by natural facts or not. However in most cultures, the relating of the story gives the same numinous impression to the listeners.”

Harvey: “But not in our rational scientific culture of today.”

T.B.: “But that is their blindness, their one-sidedness; it is not something to be proud of.”

Harvey: “But it is still a general experience with which we must live. The child can except fairytales, the adult not.”

T.B.: “That is because he is afraid of the unconscious and doesn’t understand the potential meaning. Also, scratch any sensitive adult, and you will find a child still trying to find his way to the fairytale world, the world of his unconscious.”

---

[1] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Collins paperback, p. 384.

[2] Nature, vol. 339 (4 May 1989), p. 23.

[3] Reported by B. James, In Loire, a meetings of minds on matter, International Herald Tribune, May 29, 1989, p. 4.

[4] Leon Lederman, quoted in James, ibid., p. 1.

[5] Cf. H. Schopper, Technische Rundschau, 52/88, p. 11. Compare a slightly less modern spiritualist, Mary Baker Eddy: “Therefore God is spiritual, not material.” in her Key to the Scriptures. I have an intuition that there must be a huge,ugly, irrational fear behind this Christian Science attitude.

[6] Inspired by recent finding that a pre-Stonehenge site in Ireland was a very accurate observatory of the winter solstice, See Scientific American, April, 1989, p.  11.

[7] John Horgan in “Science and the Citizen”, Scientific Amercian, October 1988, p. 22.

[8] See another Scientific Amercian, article, this time “Astrocytes” by  H. K. Kimelberg and M. D. Norenberg, vol. 260, No 4 (April 1989) p . 44-55.