synchronicity: Was Back to Atd & Iceland spar

[Ian Livingston]

So I looked into myJung reader (The Essential Jung) to keep on track. I'll try.

> One other resonance of Iceland Spar might be 'synchronicity' in Jung's sense, yes?

Yes. I do think this works, if we take synchronicity in the full
richness of Jung's musings. In his early formulation of his idea of
synchronicity, Jung started from the Gnostic notion of the "Pleroma",
"A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath
all qualities.... In the pleroma there is nothing and everything....
The opposites are contained in the pleroma, but because they are
equally  balanced they are void. Although the opposites are manifested
in individuals, they are not balanced and void. The individual's task
is to pursue his own distinctiveness, and this involves him in
distinguishing himself from the opposites" (342).  In Freudian terms,
the pleroma might be reduced to a sort of expanded projection of
repressed memories of the undifferentiated amniotic state, and there
may some credibility in that. But in Jung, it is the beginning of his
notions of a collective unconscious.

Archetypes are those elements of irruption of the pleromatic
collective unconscious into the world of which we are conscious.
Although we are unaware of them as such, archetypes are repeatedly
validated in the arts, religions, philosophies and communications of a
culture. This is where Jung's ideas got bogged down in criticism.
Every symbol was reduced to an archetype and that was all there was to
a story.

Synchronicity refers to those moments where an archetype irrupts into
consciousness by way of two apparently unrelated events occurring
contiguously. Driving home from work with a friend one day "One Trick
Pony" by Paul Simon played on the radio and I commented to my friend,
"That was probably Paul Simon's hottest band." A moment later, as the
song ended, the d.j. said, "That was probably Paul Simon's hottest
band." The two events consisted of exactly the same words, both in
reference to the same stimulus, but both formulated in very different
circumstances. My friend said, "Sometimes you creep me out." Okay
that's a stretch, but the story's true and can be seen as an
illustration of the Trickster archetype at work. On board the
Stupendica, Frank crosses the ocean (the unconscious), and upon
meeting and becoming aroused by Dally, he is transferred from a slack,
luxury crossing of a quiet sea to a turbulent crossing under wide
awake militant conditions. The tired reductive archetypal references
to consciousness as a ship sailing the dark unconscious, the feminine
arousing the masculine to opposing elements of his own consciousness
are too obvious to fit Pynchon's complex pictures of human conditions.
The ship as mechanistic extension of human creativity becomes
interesting, though.

In the "Answer to Job," Jung chronicles God's creation of man as
prefiguring God becoming man in the shape of Jesus. Now, if a god
creates man so that he can become, well, manifestly man, and man
creates mechanisms so that he can become more fully manifest in them,
do we have a broader, maybe deeper archetype playing out? Is this man
becoming god through his creation? Is the process of differentiating
(individuating) one of making opposites synchronously cognizant so
that we can project ourselves into eternity through them. AtD,
remember, follows closely on the heels of Zarathustra's announcement
of God's death. If man lacks god, must he then become god by
generating a new singularity? Is the great contemporary delusion? That
we can create our way technologically out of planetary ruination and
the loss of individuality in mass culture?

-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant