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Mind over matter? When the golden scarab beetle flies away again

Carl Jung's idea of 'synchronicity' as phenomenological explanatory model for contingent events


We cannot see ourselves in the eye. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung attested our human consciousness a quite similar limitation in functionality: "Although our mind cannot grasp its own form of being, because it lacks the outside Archimedean point, it still exists. Psyche is existent, it even is existence itself."


A steeper start into his speech 1937 at Yale University on the autonomy of the unconscious. Particularly implying that our consciousness does not only constitute all reality, but reality should consist of it. Jung might have supported his view by the highly astonishing events during a therapy session with a client.


Matrix 4 coming Dezember 2021 © Warner Bros.


She told him about a dream in which a golden scarab beetle was given to her. Right in this moment Jung heard something hitting the window. When he checked, he discovered a rose chafer, cetonia aurata, from the family of scarabaeide. The story goes that he caught the insect in the flight, and with it the idea of 'synchronicity'.


'Synchronicity' for Jung means correlating events, which are not related through a causation. That the client tells about a scarab, and coincidentally a "real" scarab makes himself notable at the window, are two events, which only at first glance have nothing conditional to do with each other. At a second glance this conditional could be psyche itself.


Hence the telling of the scarab could be held as an inner psychic event that occurs as its own physical manifestation. And when "psyche is existent (...) even is existence itself", one became the witness of an example of this phenomena in this anecdote. But should the scarab fly away again now, as fast as it came, let me recommend a film release - December 2021. You will see the scarab there as rubber duck.

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