Reviews for On Divination and Synchronicity The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Originally Presented As...

The average rating for On Divination and Synchronicity The Psychology of Meaningful Chance. Originally Presented As... based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-11 00:00:00 Craig Pacelli I love reading anything by Marie-Louise von Franz. This book is transcribed from lectures looking at various divination methods from a psychological viewpoint, such as tarot, astrology, and the I Ching. The book also explores the workings of synchronicity, in contrast to, and in harmony with, modern science. Here are some passages from the book: “Now what is the difference between a modern, physical scientific experiment and a divination oracle? In a physical experiment chance is eliminated, one pushes it out on the border as far as possible and then the little remains which cannot be eliminated. That is annoying and then one says, ‘Oh well, that’s just bad luck,’ but the scientist says, ‘We can ignore that,’ and that is the last condemning word. It is such a small matter that we can ignore it. In the oracle one takes a different, complimentary approach, namely one takes chance as the centre; you take a coin and throw it and the very chance that it falls heads up is the source of information, and in the other chance is the disturbance or the factor one eliminates. They are absolutely what in modern scientific language one would call complimentary to each other. The experiments eliminate chance, the oracle makes chance the centre; the experiment is based on repetition, the oracle is based on the one unique act. The experiment is based on a probability calculus and the oracle uses the unique, individual number as a source of information.” "We know that big inner tensions generally occur when an archetype is constellated. Someone having an archetypal dream is generally in a state of high dynamic tension, which is why Jung defines the archetypes as being the nuclear dynamisms of the psyche." "If, for instance, an analysand has a big archetypal dream and is in a tense state, it is extremely likely that synchronistic events will happen in his surroundings." “As Jung points out at the end of ‘On the Nature of the Psyche,’ the concept of energy is originally derived from the primitive concept of energeia or mana, which simply means the extreme impressiveness of something. Whenever something is enormously or intensely impressive and therefore affects one psychologically, i.e., makes a psychological impact, then primitives say it is mana, or mugu. Therefore the original concept of energy was more the idea of psychological intensity.” “Number indicates a quantity – but in its original form it also indicated the quality or the pattern of a structure, and not a quantity; that aspect has been lost and slowly left behind in the development of number theory in the West, until in modern mathematics number is only a quantity. Therefore, naturally, if we us a quantitative number to measure physical quantities we cannot use it to measure psychic energy, because psychic energy in its essence expresses itself in quality. It is a qualitative factor, which is why Jung says we can only measure psychological intensity with the feeling function. The feeling function, in contrast to the thinking function, informs us about the quality of things, it tells us if a thing is agreeable or disagreeable, dangerous or not dangerous, threatening or not threatening. We express qualities in adjectives. People who use many adjectives coulour what they say with their feeling, whereas thinking types use very few adjectives and many nouns in their speech.”

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-25 00:00:00 William Melchior A highly readable and informative transcript of a series of lectures explaining, by way of Jungian psychological theory, the conjunction of the qualitative and the quantitative, that gives rise to synchronicity enabling divination. Areas such as, unconscious field theory, archetypes and the theory of dream analysis are also touched on in an edifying way. For the most part the book was uncomplicated, although the paradigm shift required to understand number from a Chinese perspective was a little challenging.