Paracelsus 3
The Eternal Light
Paracelsus uses three terms interchangeably to describe this third light. He calls it the “Eternal Light,” “Light of the Holy Ghost,” and “Light of Heaven.” Jung describes this as a light outside the light of nature by which [man] can search out supernatural things. The relationship of this supernatural light to the light of revelation [i.e., the natural light] remains, however, obscure. Paracelsus seems to have held a peculiar trichotomous view in this respect.[1]
Here Jung refers to the following text of Paracelsus:
| But in man is also a light outside the light that is in nature, it is the light by which man experiences, studies, and fathoms supernatural things. | Aber im Menschen ist auch ein Liecht, ausserhalb dem Liecht so in der Natur geborn ist,: dasselbig is das Liecht, dodurch der Mensch ubernaturlich dinge erfart, lehrnt, und ergründet.[2] |
What does Paracelsus mean by this “eternal light”? Although he characteristically molds the German language for his own purposes without attention to details, I still think it is significant that Paracelsus uses the construction “the light by which one experiences…” Although difficult to understand rationally, this phrasing sounds intuitively correct. To really experience something as supernatural, one must be conscious that it is not normal (or else the experience is just “natural” – there is no differentiation). Putting it another way, to perceive is an experience in itself; one experiences a perception as if it originated in a center far from the ego, and consciousness suddenly wakes up to it. Thus, maybe Paracelsus is trying to formulate that one needs a specific light, not only to learn and understand, but also to experience.
Occasionally Paracelsus gives examples of concepts he is presenting. In the case of the light of the Holy Ghost, he mentions the New Testament story of Jesus bringing back Lazerus from the dead and other miracles of the Apostles.[3] Now miracle healings are experiences of psychic and physical wholeness and are examples of what I think Jung and von Franz would call “synchronicities.” These are emotionally-charged events experienced as meaningful coincidences lying outside our normal causally-related flow of life. Jung and von Franz characterize synchronicities as occurring when “eternal” archetypal patterns break through into normal consciousness associated with concrete events[4] operating in time and space.[5] This particular eternal pattern that Paracelsus calls the eternal Light from the Holy Ghost is associated with if not identical to the Self, the spirit which seeems to guide our instinctive urge to live and to develop. In his examples contrasting the “natural” doctor with the “eternal” doctor (i.e. Christ or the Apostles; see next quote) Paracelsus points out the difference between healing with the ego and healing with the Self.[6] This is the crucial point which differentiates Paracelsus from the normal rational scientist of today.
| Now why this animosity between the temporal and the eternal doctor? For example: the temporal doctor makes the sick healthy, the Apostle also makes him healthy. True, the Apostle surpasses the natural [doctor], he makes the Rebirth. However, that thereby the natural light is rejected, this is not allowed by God. That the Apostle brings the dead back to life and not the natural [doctor] shows the natural [doctor] that his art is but a footstool compared to the Eternal.[7] | Nuhn was wolt es für ein Feindtschafft hie geben,zwischen dem Tödtlichen und Ewige Artzet? Als ein Exempel. Der Tödtlisch Artzet macht ein kranken gesund, der Apostel macht ihn auch gesundt; Das der Apostel ubertrifft den Naturlichen, das mach die Neue Geburt: Das aber darumb des Liecht der Natur verworffen sei, das gestatted die Gottheit nicht. Das aber der Apostel das Todte wider lebendig macht, und der Natürlich nicht, das erkennet der Natürlich, das sein Kunst ein Fußschemel ist gegen der Ewige.[8] |
Why do I think Paracelsus would call them synchronicities if he were still alive? Clearly, he refers to those events which cannot be ascribed to either the elemental or the natural light. Therefore I can only associate them with events that are not explainable by “natural” factors. Von Franz writes that “Synchronistic phenomena are actually, as Jung emphasizes, of a parapsychological nature.”[9] Harvey would prefer a slight rephrasing to say that synchronicities (sensu strictu) are experienced as being supernatural – and this is an all-important aspect of their nature because it makes them religious phenomena, not simply theoretical knowledge.
Eternity and absolute knowledge
Psychologically, the eternal world is a projection of the timeless, transcendent realm of the collective unconscious. Reformulating a concept first used by Gerhard Dorn (a student of Paracelsus who wrote around 1590), Jung has called this hypothetical unitary background to both psychic and physical reality the “one world” or “unus mundus”[10].
The transcendental psychophysical background corresponds to a “potential world” in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it. This obviously holds good as much for for physics as for psychology, or, to be more precise, for macrophysics as much as for the psychology of consciousness.[11]
The eternal light from the Holy Ghost is “consciousness” that can be ascribed to the Self. (I know that this is a contradiction: the only consciousness we are aware of is that which reaches our ego. Here something of a transcendental nature is implied: the awareness of a meaning (experienced as a force or an energy) spanning the microcosm and the macrocosm.) An inspiration from the Self, the archetype of totality, brings with it a feeling of “untarnished”[12] central importance. Like a religious meditation on a mandala, it includes psychic opposites in a holistic way (i.e. sees both as part of an irrational whole) and has a healing effect.
In her discussion of the West African divinity named “Fa”, M.-L. von Franz writes of a concept that I feel can be fruitfully applied to understanding the eternal light of Paracelsus:
[Fa] is not a force of nature, but rather portrays God’s solicitude for his creation…[13]
Fa represents a symbol of the Self and of “absolute knowledge”…an aspect of the God-image in the unconscious psyche, compelling man to seek higher consciousness, and consequently he also refers to an aspect of the Self activating and sustaining the development of higher consciousness in the individual….
This facet of the Self archetype does not, however, embrace the entirety of the collective unconscious which is certainly also the source of drives, chaos, and destructive passions.[14]
Paracelsus speaks directly to this last point as I will show in Part IV. Here I would like to dwell on his concept of absolute knowledge. In the language of Jung, absolute knowledge apparently has its source in the collective unconscious as experienced in dreams, visions, intuitions, and spontaneous psychic occurrences. Among these different kinds of intuitions there are those which, accompanied by strong numinosity, seem to originate from an all-inclusive and unbounding wisdom (usually experienced as “God” or “just-so” facts). These particular images are often accompanied by a feeling of wholeness, a healing experience which generates a sense of meaning. Jung might say that the natural scientist perceives this “eternal wisdom” in nature as it is reflected in the (timeless) laws of physics.
Jung:
…the idea of totality is always connected with the idea of duration, of immortality, the eternal return. That is substantiated by the fact that the actual psychological experience of totality, which is a religious experience, always expressed or formulated as the experienced of God, has the quality of immortality, the quality of eternal duration. That is confirmed also by the consensu gentium; you find the evidence in the literature of the whole world. There is that element of duration, either limited to the duration beyond death, or the immediate feeling of divine eternity.[15]
As I was working on this problem of the eternal and the temporal, I opened von Franz’s book Number and Time by chance to a page and read:
“…the world of timeless order, the collective unconscious…”[16]
Clearly, Jung and von Franz identify these two entities. On the same page, speaking of the “windows into eternity”, von Franz says:
In truth, as Jung realized and pointed out, an experience of the Self opens such a window into eternity for the individual, because it enables him to escape from the stifling clutches of a one-sided view of life. Through this “window” man touches the eternal in himself, and at the same time the eternal can reach into his time-bound world in the form of synchronistic events.[17]
When a synchronicity occurs the timeless world of the collective unconscious appears to breach the time-space world of our ego existence. Not only is this moment often experienced as very meaningful, it seems to be the vehical par excellance for giving someone the conviction that there is a purpose in life, something science in and of itself cannot do. My childhood fascination with the bioluminescence in the sea points to something eternal behind time-bound Nature. Surely the fascination could have been saying to me: Yes, contrary to the feeling of no meaning in this world that you experience from the world around you and the unconscious of your parents, there is indeed a light in the darkness. Also my current work in geology possibly rides on the wave of an underlying fascination with “deep time” and the duality of historical/immanent time, as eloquently expressed by Stephan J. Gould in his book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle.[18]
The three lights are One Light
Although Paracelsus tried to clearly differentiate the three lights, their exact bounderies are fuzzy when viewed in detail. G. Isler, in his essay on lumen naturae in Swiss alpine legends,[19] associates synchronicites with the light of nature. He remarks that when one experiences synchronicities they give one the feeling that God or fate was behind the coincidence of events.[20] Since they involve the experience of a (positive) power superordinate to the ego they appear to me to be closer to the “eternal” than the “natural light”. On the other hand, synchronicities by their nature involve our material world; thus in a larger sense they are “lights out of the darkness” (as in the quote from Jung at the beginning of this essay), the darkness being the dark material side of God.
Jung:
Paracelsus, like all the philosophical alchemists, was seeking for something that would give him a hold on the dark, body-bound nature of man, on the soul which, intangibly interwoven with the world and with matter, appeared before itself in the terrifying form of strange, demoniacal figures and seemed to be the secret source of life-shortening diseases. The Church might exorcise demons and banish them, but they only alienated man from his own nature, which, unconscious of itself, had clothed itself in these spectral forms. Not separation of the natures but union of the natures was the goal of alchemy.[21]
Paracelsus himself states that even though the elemental, natural, and eternal lights were totally separate he also felt that they were intrinsically related. He writes:
| As far as we can describe the origin of the inner man or body, we note that all inner bodies are only one body: one thing in all men. But they are distributed after well-ordered numbers of bodies, each one different from the other. And so they all come together as only one light, only one reason. Therefore, if we wish to live completely, then we should live coherently in one reason, not in two or three, etc. | Damit wir aber beschrieben das herkommen dess Innwendigen Menschen oder Leibs, so mercket uns also, das alle Innwendig Leib nur Ein Leib sind, und ein Einiges ding in allen Menschen. Aber aussgetheilt nach d’wolgeordneten zahlen des Leibs, eim anders dann den andern: Und so sie alle zusammen kommen, ist nuhr Ein Liecht, nuhr Ein Vernunfft, also, dass wann wir vollkommen leben wollen, so leben wir alle gleich in Einer Vernunfft, nicht in zweyen oder dreyen, etc.[22] |
And:
| Nature teaches all things, and what she cannot, she acquires from the Holy Ghost, who teaches her; and the Holy Ghost and Nature are one, that is, Nature is a light from the Holy Ghost and learns from Him and so it [light] comes to men, even if they be sleeping babies. | Die Natur die alle ding lehrnet, und was sie nicht kan, dass erwirbt sie vom Heiligen Geist, der sie lehrnt: und der Heilig Geist und die Natur sind eins, das ist, jeglich ist die Natur ein Liecht aus dem Heiligen Geist, und lehrnt von ihm, und also kompt es in Mensch, gleich als schläfflingen.”[23] |
Paracelsus appropriated the term “asleep” for his own use. In gnostic-hermetic tradition “asleep”, “numb”, or “intoxicated” were terms contrasting the normal, unconscious man against the wide-awake and enlightened man. The Gnostics said: “Wake from your slumber” and “The soul slumbers in Matter”[24], references which could just as well be applied today in a somewhat different context to the collective sellout of the soul to runaway materialism.[25] The Gnostics meant: “Wake up to your true nature, which is not of this world!” Psychologically they may have been saying: Wake up to your psychic nature, not material nature. Here psychic meant specifically kinship with the Self. Complexes, emotions, drives instincts, were all identified with the world, the cosmos and the stars – the Archons. Paracelsus, as a medical doctor with at at least one foot solidly in this world, explains:
| Man has a body which is asleep, therefore one must awaken it so that one can attain to the wisdom of the angels, that is, to God’s wisdom and art. | Der Mensch hatt den Leib, der schlafft, darumb so muss man ihn erwecken, auff das er komm in die Weisheit der Engel, das ist, in die Weissheit und Kunst Gottes.[26] |
Although Paracelsus may have grafted terminology from the Gnostics, he says we must awaken the body, not abhor it.[27] Jung says about this attitude:
But Paracelsus and his school assumed that matter was an “increatum” and hence coexistent and coeternal with God. Whether they considered this to be monastic or dualistic I am unable to discover. The only certain thing is that for all the alchemists matter had a divine aspect, whether on the ground that God was imprisoned in it in the form of the anima mundi or anima media naturae, or the matter represented God’s “reality”. [28]
Harvey and Ash wanted me to try to make a table. Here it is, although I am not entirely happy with it.
Comparison of terminologies:
| Paracelsus | Jung | Gnostics | Man on the street |
| elemental light | instincts |
| elements | personal unconscious | hyle | normal rational reasoning |
| earth | ego | body | good common sense |
| temporal | time-bound | matter | smart ideas |
| natural light | rational intelligence |
| stars | collective unconscious | psyche | intuitions “out of the blue” |
| firmament | archetypes | soul | strange ideas |
| temporal | partially time-bound | psyche | creative impulses |
| eternal light | irrational wisdom |
| Holy Spirit | psychoid unconscious | pneuma | knowledge from God |
| Heaven | Self | Spirit | miracles |
| out of time, timeless | wonder healing |
| synchronicities |
When describing the relations between the microcosm and macrocosm the ancient Chinese (like many modern physicists today when seeking universal laws of the physical world) preferred the energetic view. They imagined light circulating as energy. This energy could appear at one time in the form of hun, at another time as po, and still another time as a holistic symbol, the mandala.[29] In addition, these forms of energy could have both a time-bound aspect and a timeless aspect.[30]
The eternal, “atemporal,” non-material power is, in the terminology of the Gnostics, the (purely psychic) “acosmic” Self. Paracelsus would say that the eternal light shines through in the temporal (natural) light: the Self can manifest in the individual and in time as moments of sublime centering or feelings of order and wholeness.
How can the natural light and the eternal light be one? As the symbol of totality, the Self includes both the unconscious and the conscious realms. Jung states that “the self cannot be distinguished from an archetypal God-image and the “archetypal dispositions…are organized and arranged around the self.”[31]. Therefore the light of nature is one with the Self in that it shines to illuminate under the guidance of a higher order. This process is psychologically identical with the statement by Paracelsus (quoted above) that “Nature is a light from the Holy Ghost.”
| Because the Father has set us in the light of nature we can understand and know; because the Son has set us in the eternal light we also can know. Therefore the Father bequeths us the Light of God and the Son bequeths us the Light of God, here on Earth and also in the Eternal Life. Neither part hinders that; neither the Father his Son nor the Son the Father. Therefore it is entirely possible that man can deal with, understand, and experience both sides. | Dann ursach, von Vatter sind wir in das Liecht der Natur beschaffen billich das wirs können und wissen: von Sohn in das Ewig Leben, billich auch das wirs wissen. Also erbt an uns das Liecht von Gott dem Vatter und das Liecht von Gott dem Sohn. Hie uff Erden auch in das Ewig Leben und kein theil hindert das und der Vatter sein Sohn nit, noch der Sohn dem Vatter nit, also mag der Mensch zu beiden seitten wol handlen, erfaren und ergruendt sein.[32] |
How did Paracelsus resolve the “animosity” between the elemental and natural lights and the eternal and supernatural lights?
| But the number One heals me. And so I have two loves, and to each I give its light as God has ordered. | Aber die Zahl Eins erhelt mich. Und so ich Zwei lieb hab, und gib einem jedlichen sein Liecht, wie es Gott einem jedlichen verordnet hatt.[33] |
Harvey: “What is Paracelsus’ “One” that heals his split? Why do I not see it or feel it? Am I blinded by a rational standpoint, my crippled feeling function?”
Harriet: “Note that Paracelsus says “I give each its light…” Obviously he implies that the ego plays a very important role. He may even be unaware of the fact that he has made man practically equal to God here. I think that the answer to your question is up to you and God both.
A diversion into “the inner debates” between the psychologists and the scientists
Paracelsus did not consistently differentiate the physical from the psychic, which is not avery easy differentiation to accomplish in depth psychology either. Jung has said that the spirit is both physical and psychic,[34] and that “Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.”[35] Jung also declared:
Man himself is partly empirical, partly transcendental…we do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. [36]
Yet he also maintains:
…this much we know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background… The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can be at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.[37]
Jung’s phrase “empirical reality has a transcendental background” set off a wave of comments by my inner crew. An excerpt of the ensuing converstaion is reported here. More dialogues are recorded in Appendix IV.
T.B.: Synchronicities give an overwhelmingly strong impression that there is a transcendental background to life and our world. And this background sometimes breaks into our empirical reality.
Harvey: Yes but this is a psychological fact, a subjective experience. Jung says “empirical reality” a term which a microphysicist might understand differently. I do not know if he or she could measure a psychological state to the extent that it would be a part of his empirical reality. You have to give the poor guy an apparatus that would produce numbers.
Harriet: Jung considers “empirical reality” to be a subjective experience. This is obviously not what the normal scientist understands. (Thus the reality of the scientist is severely limited!)
T. B.: I just might be able to produce a number associated with each synchronicity. Do material problems have a temporal and a timeless aspect? Do psychic problems have a temporal and timeless aspect? Of course. One part of the eternal must be temporal. One-way time must be a subset of two-way time, itself a subset of timelessness.
Ash: Is this transcendental background cyclic (eternal) time?
T.B.: Yes, Jung refers to the fact that all statements about physics, microphysics, and the physical world, are all statements made by the psyche. There must be a common background or else there would be no agreement between the two! On the other hand, all psychic phenomena must be rooted in matter, after all, through the chemistry of the brain we can think.
Two modern physicists, who are concerned that time (by which they mean historical, irreversable time) is not adequately integrated into formulations of quantum physics[38], have written:
It is hard to avoid the impression that the distinction between what exists in time, what is irreversible, and, on the other hand, what is outside of time, what is eternal, is at the origin of human symbolic activity.[39]
I think the authors of this statement, I. Prigogine and I. Stenger, are referring to the fact that to understand nature we need to order the world around us. To perform this ordering we use the cyclical viewpoint.[40] The physical laws (the periodic table of elements, for instance) are eternal, cyclic, and immanent. However, this periodic table has brought order into our understanding of the elements. (Understanding in the sense of viewing patterns and symmetries.) There are a few, unfortunately very few, physicists who are aware that they view the timeless world in their theories.[41]
Harriet: You must first try to differentiate what the scientists are actually saying about matter from what they are (unconsciously) saying about the unconscious, and what they are saying about some (hypothetical) unitary (i.e. psychophysical) phenomena.
Ash: But the point is one can never differentiate what they are saying about “objective” matter from what they are (unconsciously) saying about the unconscious. All their statements are statements made by the psyche about some hypothetical “outer”reality”.
Albert Einstein once defined his attitude to religion in the following way:
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind…A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation.[42]
Jung has said:
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individuality and uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. “Lower down” that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional system, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e. in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence at bottom the psyche is simply “world”.[43]
Ash: “For me carbon is not “simply carbon.” The fourfold pattern of the valence structure of elemental carbon is one of the basis for all organic molecules and, thus, for life itself. Is it not interesting that quaternary structures play such a role in psychic images of wholeness? Am I seeing the analogy here or does it have a more objective reality? Also: the carbon in our body was manufactured in the stars (in supernovae). Thus I do not agree that archetypes are “extinguished” in the body’s materiality. It seems, rather, that they are as strongly present there as anywhere else. It is anyway my psyche projecting the concept of archetypes into such things as “carbon ” quaternary structures,” and “stars.”
Harvey: “We are not aware of it, yet our body functions with an amazing “intelligence.” There appears to be more “knowledge” in the body’s materiality, for instance, in the RNA-mediated information transfer of physiological information[44], than we have in consciousness. Is this the light of nature that Paracelsus was referring to?”
Jung might call the body’s knowledge the “psychoid unconscious”, the unconscious psyche which is so much a part of physical processes that it cannot be said to be strictly matter or psyche. This may be what Paracelsus meant when he referred to “the stars in the flesh and blood.”
Jung:
Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible. If research could only advance far enough therefore we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts. Our present attempts may be bold, but I believe they are on the right lines. Mathematics, for instance, has more than once proved that its logical constructions which transcend all experience subsequently coincided with the behaviour of things. This, like the events I call synchronistic, points to a profound harmony between all forms of existence. [45]
[1] C. G. Jung, Paracelsus, p. 115. It is not clear to me what exactly this trichotomous view is that Jung refers to, but I will discuss some of the ambiguities or uncertainties in Paracelsus’s texts that I found.
[2] Paracelsus, Prologue to Liber de Nymphis, sylphis, pygmæis et salamandrees, et de cæteris spiritibus, Huser IX (Olms V, second part), p. 46.
[3] Paracelsus often insists that healing through belief or the power of God is reserved for saints, not for ordinary doctors like himself. This is an example of his humility, absent in many of his stature.
[4] I am not sure whether Paracelsus sees these supernatural healings as events in space and time; he usually speaks of them as taking place “in the eternal light”.
[5] See C. G. Jung Synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle, Coll. Works 9, and M. -L. von Franz, Psyche und Materie (Daimon Verlag, Einsiedeln, 1988 pp. 422). Examples and discussions will appear in a future essay. Allow me to document another fragment of a daydream that I had at this point while editing the text. “A boy hiking in the back hills of Southern California breaks through barriers (of space and time) to where nature is alive and crackling with synchronicities, but he does not bring them down to Earth. He either asks if it is real or not. He should retreat but he just goes on.” This is a picture of how I used to be – until I sat down and tried to write this essay.
[6] Compare the Grimms fairytale “Godfather Death” where Death is both the master healer and Death himself.
[7] Note that Paracelsus uses the image of a footstool. Perhaps this has a certain meaning: a footstool is a way to reach higher, in this case higher consciousness. Thus for him living in the natural light is not the goal of personal development, but a stepping stone.
[8] Paracelsus, Vored, p. 8.
[9] M.-L. von Franz, C. G. Jung: His myth in our time, p. 242.
[10] C. G. Jung, Mysterium p. 533ff.
[11] C. G. Jung, Mysterium, p. 538.
[12] “gerecht, unbresthafftig Weisheit” [just, untarnished wisdom], Paracelsus – quoted in Part IV.
[13] M.-L. von Franz , Number and Time, p. 267.
[14] Ibid., p. 268.
[15] C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Notes of the seminar given in 1934-1939, edited by James L. Jarrett, quote from vol. II, p. 1045. Bollingen Series XCIX, Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 1578.
[16] M.-L. von Franz, Number and Time, p. 261.
[17] Ibid., p. 261.
[18] Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, pp 222.
[19] G. Isler, Lumen Naturae. Zum wissen” von Naturwesen in den Sagen des Alpengebietses, In: Studien zur Volkserzahlung, edited by Leander Petzoldt and Siegfried de Rachwiltz, Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1987, pp. 147-171.
[20] G. Isler, Ibid., p. 153.
[21] Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna…, p. 161.
[22] Paracelsus, De Generationis Hominis, Huser, VIII [Olms IV] p. 172.
[23] Paracelsus, Fragmenta cum lib. de Fundamento Sapientiae Congruentia. Von Offenbarung und Findung aller Künsten. Huser, IX [Olms V], p. 447-448.
[24] H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 69f.
[25] But why this possession with matter? Von Franz might say that it is an unconscious compensation for not consciously realizing the feminine (feeling function) therefore becoming possessed by the unconscious mother (matter).
[26] Paracelsus, Liber de Fundamento scientarum, sapientiæ que (Vom Fundament der Weisheit und Künsten), Huser IX [Olms IV], p. 428.
[27] Another daydream fragment: while editing this part I just saw myself with wide hips, looking like a woman. I suppose that this must be because I am here befriending matter and the feminine point of view.
[28] C. G. Jung, Mysterium, p. 537.
[29] I had the intuition here that mandalas lead one into eternity and that eternity leads one back into synchronicities.
[30] See the article “Weisheit des Ostens” by Richard Wilhelm.
[31] C. G. Jung, A psychological approach to the Trinity, Collected Works, vol 11. (Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 160.
[32] Paracelsus, Astronomia Magna…, Huser X, [Olms V], p. 482-3.
[33] Paracelsus, Vored, p. 7.
[34] Somewhere in Psychological aspects of the Trinity Coll. Works vol. 11.
[35] C. G. Jung, Paracelsus, p. 184.
[36] C.G. Jung, Mysterium, p. 536-7.
[37] Ibid., p. 538.
[38] Quantum physics is (at least to many interpreters) reversible, i.e., eternal, and thus (according to Prigogine and Stengers) can scarcely be said to be able to describe “real” events in the temporal world in which we live.
[39] Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger, Order out of Chaos, Bantam Books, New York, 1984, p. 312. Roger Penrose had a proposal for solving the time problem in quantum physics but I have not read it yet.
[40] One scientist answers the question: “But which is correct: cyclical or historical time?” by saying “Both and neither.”, see Gould, Time’s Arrow-Times Cycle, op. cit.
[41] Psychologically this is the world of the archetypes. I hope to explore this in a following essay on light (photons) and matter tentatively titled “The archetypal origins of quantum electrodynamics”. Another daydream fragment “…because…I said ‘No’, they are sitting around a table.”
[42] Albert Einstein, quoted in Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. vi.
[43] C. G. Jung, The archetypes of the collective unconscious, Collected Works, vol. 9, p.173.
[44] See Appendix III for example and explanation.
[45] C. G. Jung, Mysterium, p. 538.