ATD | Kabbalah & Divine Light (HUGE SPOILER - only read if you finished!)

[Keith]

As Above, So Below....Renfrew Werfner.....Neville/Nigel....Deuce/ 
Sloat......Lew/Webb.....etc etc.....et al./et al.
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7042.html


SYMMETRY

There is another subtle and profound link between the intuitive if  
clumsy probings of alchemy and Pauli's work, based on his use of  
symmetry and its effects. Symmetry is a roving and variable concept,  
used and applied differently to objects, categories, and laws in  
various fields, including aesthetics, mathematics, and physics. It  
may describe symmetries of things--faces, crystals, cubes of salt--as  
well as internal symmetry principles that "impose a kind of family  
structure on the menu of possible particles," and "the symmetries  
that are really important in nature . . . the symmetries of laws  
which state 'that when we make certain changes in the point of view  
from which we observe natural phenomena, the laws of nature we  
discover do not change.' So the "symmetry principle is simply a  
statement that something looks the same from certain different points  
of view." But in the mathematics relevant to Pauli, "a symmetry isn't  
a thing; it's a transformation. Not any old transformation, though, a  
symmetry of an object is a transformation that leaves it apparently  
unchanged." Symmetry also states that all elements of a system can  
undergo transformations--rotation or reflection in a mirror--without  
being fundamentally altered and so "has become the epitome of truth  
and beauty." Symmetry is implicit in such alchemical dictums as "For  
there is one stone, one medicine, to which nothing from outside is  
added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are  
removed." It is more explicit in the motto "as above, so below; as  
within, so without." The alchemists imaginally and physically aimed  
toward succeeding stages of conjunctions between pairs, couplings,  
and asymmetric symmetries, both in physical experiments and in  
psychic attempts to achieve inner balance. Their intent was to  
provide the purest, perfect, most inclusive physical substances, as  
well as internal integration. Their motive was to replicate or  
imitate the original oneness, when all was potential in the mind of  
the creator, before it dispersed into the four directions, four  
elements, and discrete forms.

The alchemists worked toward symmetries of all kinds of opposites to  
reach both backward and forward toward the one. Symmetries in physics  
operate with varying degrees of sophistication and complexity in  
Newton's mechanical relativity, in Einstein's space-time relativity,  
and in quantum mechanics. From the perspective of current physics,  
Weinberg writes, Heisenberg's and Pauli's quantum-field theory is "on  
the track of something universal--something that we call the laws of  
nature . . . [a] theory that rigidly will allow us to describe the  
forces--gravitational, electro-weak, and strong--that actually as it  
happens do exist." The alchemists played with their sulphurs,  
mercuries, and salts to reintegrate elements and to provide  
themselves with imagery on which to meditate as they sought  
equilibria between soul, spirit, and body. Particle physicists now  
deal with thousands of numbers involved in the properties of the  
elementary particles known to date. While the conscious intent is  
entirely physical and not psychological, the symmetry principle  
carries on the search for "the beauty of simplicity and  
inevitability--the beauty of perfect structure, the beauty of  
everything fitting together, of nothing being changeable, of logical  
rigidity." From Jung's perspective of the psyche's tendency toward an  
ordering, mandalic pattern of compensation, it follows that in the  
attempt to deal with inner fragmentations Pauli, as a scientist, was  
deeply drawn to the notion of a unifying principle. For Pauli,  
symmetry was the archetypal structure of matter. Just as the  
alchemists looked for the substratum of reality beneath matter, he  
came to the view that the elementary particles were not themselves  
the ultimate level of reality. As he became more familiar with  
alchemy as a psycho-physical unity, Pauli saw the same lumen naturae,  
the light of nature, or the "spirit in matter," glimpsed by  
Paracelsus and Jung. "Rather than seeking the ultimate level of  
nature in terms of elementary particles, Pauli believed that the  
material level is the manifestation of something deeper, an Unus  
Mundus that is also the domain of symmetry," where mind and matter,  
religion and science originate. During his fifties, Pauli concluded  
that in order to develop a unified framework for modern physics and  
depth psychology, "besides physics, psychology, and a neutral  
language, a fourth element is needed--Eros." He went so far as to  
define physical knowledge as the meeting place of inner psychological  
images and outer facts. This accords with the view that it is "the  
self-same reality which, looked at from within and from without" is  
described by alchemy, depth psychology, and physics, as "we largely  
concern ourselves with the same subject, that unknown living  
factor . . . the animating power in matter which for want of a better  
name we now call the unconscious."

In his domain, Jung came to see the psyche as one force containing  
multiple perspectives, "a multiplicity within unity." He increasingly  
saw psychic energy as a large field from one source, with two  
complementary but not incompatible conduits, the conscious and the  
unconscious. These exist between the subjective and objective,  
emerging from a mind-matter continuum that can only partially observe  
itself, which Jung came to call "psychoid." Just as Pauli perceived  
physical knowledge as the meeting place of inner psychological images  
and outer facts, Jung extended from his psychic end into the spectrum  
of matter. The inclusion of subjectivity in quantum observation was  
seen as complementary to Jung's assertion of "the objective reality  
of the archetypes." Jung credits C. A. Meier for the insight  
regarding "the parallelism of psychological and physical  
explanations" through which relations of complementarity are seen to  
exist not only within psychology and physics but also between them in  
"a genuine and authentic relationship of complementarity as well."

 From 1946 onward, Jung further differentiated his concept of the  
archetype as transconscious--that is, as beyond psychic integration  
and thus psychoid. It is also transpsychic insofar as "not purely  
psychic but just as much physical in nature." As the unknowable  
structuring element in the collective unconscious, it also arranges  
the registering of acausal events. Matter and mind are both objective  
and subjective, complementary in their structure and, at the psychoid  
level, reflective of each other. Further, as he wrote in his last  
major work, "we do not know whether what we on the empirical plane  
regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be  
identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from  
the physical as psychic . . . They may be identical somewhere beyond  
our present experience." He also anticipated further research:  
"Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter,  
just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side  
of psyche. Both . . . have yielded findings . . . and both have  
developed concepts which display remarkable analogies."