JFV's Books
Table of content
Foreward by David Peat
Chapter 1 : Unus Mundus
Chapter 2 : Meet the Other in a world one
Chapter 3 : The role of the culture in the rupture
Chapter 4 : Chaotic Acausality
Chapter 5 : Collective complexity
Chapter 6 : The way of the transformation
Chapter 7 : In between
Chapter 8 : The places that lives in us
Chapter 9 : The Other in us
Introduction
T |
he world of dream and that of reality certainly share more than they apparently reveal. At the very begining of the last century, Freud, with his book The Interpretation of Dreams, made us aware of symbolic messages from the uncounscious that unravel themselves during sleep. But does the uncounscious operate only at night, trough dreams ? Can we suppose that the symbolic life also extends into reality in the form of signifiant coincidences ?
This possibility of symbolic extensions in reality is at the heart o what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung introduced with his concept of synchronicity. This concept, worked out jointly with Nobel laureat Wolfgang Pauli (physics 1945), suggests precisely that mind and matter are conected to the same tree and that symbols can bloom on the branches of our dreams as much as on those of reality.
By pushing the exploration of these links between mind and matter even further, can we suppose that these symbols sometimes take on the aspect of a relationship with someone? The astrophysician Hubert Reeves, in his book La synchronicité, l’âme et la science, asks the question:”Does an encounter with someone who changes your life have a meaning somewhere?” Can meeting certain people have a symbolic impact on our lives? Can we apply the concept of synchronicity to the small details that lead us to a person? What would your life be like if you hadn’t met that professor, that author, that man or that woman? What would psychology be like if Jung hadn’t met Freud? What would philosophy like if Sartre hadn’t met Simone de Beauvoir? History is filled with these highly signifiant encounters that change a person’s life and sometimes the life of a community as well.
Just as there are books that we take with us on trips while others take us on a voyage, there are people at certain times of our lives that accompany us while others take us on a voyage. These beings, that incite us to travel to the deepest part of ourselves, open door for us. However, as a rule, the most important doors of our existence ar openend by people that will not go throught them with us. We probably all know someone who suddenly appeared in our life and left an indelibile mark. Our relationship with this person may have lasted only a short time. However, we could say that the flutter of his or her wings have set off storms that will determine the course of our existence. After their passage, we will never be the same person again.
In this book, I will explore synchronistic encounters, that is those encounters that allow for persons, authors and works to emerge in to our lives at determining moments, thus acquiring a symbolic value of transformation. I will also examine symbolic microprocesses. These take the form of thematic patterns or slopes that attract and lead us imperceptibility towards a certain person, job, author or country. These patterns unveil themeselves in subtle ways. They require the flickering light of our intuition for us to recognize them and thus admire the beauty and uniqueness of life.
The unfolding of symbolic patterns in the form of everyday events is one of Jung’s major contributions. Given its spectacular and unusual nature, this contribution was unfortunately rejected by scientists or awkwardly simplified by New Age followers. According to the Swiss psychiatrist, it is hard for us to perceieve these symbols because our rationality is too bright, just as it is hard for us to perceive the stars during the day because the sun is too bright. In the first case, we have a better chance of noticing these stars when we are living transition periods or when we are entering a chaotic phase; then the darkness allows these symbolic stars to shine in the form of mysterious synchronicities.
Synchronicity occurs more frequently during periods of psychological tension when the normal symbolic form of the dream has not managed to make itself heard. As Michel Cazenave have said, the psyche must be very much “disturbed” to draw upon an exterior symbol and communicate something using this medium. Moreover, the message must be very important for our development. Synchronicity seen from this angle is not necessarily a “magic gift”, as it is sometimes described in everyday language, even thought suffering can be perceived as a grace. I am always amused when I read the following phrase in a book or article: “ Trigger synchronicity in your lives!”. In fact, synchronicity eludes the control of the ego. You can only make yourself avaiable to the messages of the uncoonscious that use this avenue. In a determining phase of our existence, something tries to express istslef trought synchronicity and we take over from there to hear and decodes it.
I will try, using various examples, to illustrate how we can deepen the meaning of a synchronistic event in the same way that we can do this with a dream. I can try to describe how to prepare the ground, espacially by developing intuition.However, I would be hard pressed to say how these symbolic flowers can be made to grow faster, as I am not an expert in psychological fertilizers.
Because synchronicity is an abstract notion wich points to several dimensions of our existence, I will explore the concept in a specific realm, the interpersonal realm. Since relationship to others are particulary “chaotic” at the state of the present century, they may be more easily influenced by distrubances that will bring out symbols in the form of synchronicities. Indeed, relationship issues are the primary reason for consulting a psychotherapist and the principal factor bringing about a change.
Since synchronicity is a complex notion, I will be using metaphors taken from the science of complexity and the chaos theory to produce hypothese of understanding. The definition of synchronicity given in the first chapter assumes a very narrow concept of creative chaos found in the recent discoveries of the chaos theory. For purists, the term chaos has only a mathematical meaning. However, the etymological origin of the world is linked to verb to yawn. Originaly, it is a yawn, an opening. As I conceive it, and this supports interpersonal synchronicity, chaos is in a way this opening, this spontaneous stretching towards another person, providing oxygen to the soul when boredom begins to set into our lives.
The novel of our life
The determining encounters that mark our personal novel do not only happen with people in flesh. They also happen with ideas, symbols contained in culture. We all have discovered a book, some music or a movie that changed our existence. These encounters happen at key moments and can have a ring with personal issues. The synchronistic patterns from the culture will be examined according to the meaning and the circumstances which surround the arrival of works that disturb us and that echo, sometimes mysteriously, with our own lives.
The place
The encounter happens inevitably within a place: the encounter with people across our life indeed, but mostly the encounter with ourselves. This is why a particular attention will be paid to the places that mark our existence. The places very often will symbolise the encounter in process. They take the form of the decors designated by the unconscious in order to translate the coming transformations. In the place where we encounter the other, as well as in the place where we live, very often is written who we are and what we may become.
Moreover, the meaning is the main component of synchronicity. It is an impulse, a direction to give to our own voyage. The voyage metaphors contained in the present book display the main idea of each chapter and recall that synchronicity and meaning are intimately linked to the moves, guidelines which mark our existence. A voyage marks the major changes of our lives as well as it marks each chapter of the present book.
Synchronicity through the generations
The main patterns and themes of our personal novel will find their origin very often out of the family novel. The chapter covering life themes that go through several generations and the analysis of the patterns that follow the timeline will complete the present work. We will then address the mysterious coincidences of the “other in self” which appear across the generations through a strange unconscious loyalty.
“Le Visiteur”
What room do we make to synchronicity when it happens suddenly in our life ? Even though this book explores a new realm of study – relational synchronicity – it remains nonetheless an attempt to understand such a mystery.
Sometimes we have to face encounters that overwhelm us, disturb us and lead us to revise our own conception of the world, as did Freud in the excellent play written by Karl-Emmanuel Shmitt, “Le Visiteur”. This play features Freud whom, at the end of his life, is visited by a mysterious stranger. We don’t really know whether he is a former patient escaped from an asylum or God. This impromptu visitor, who fits in no category, comes out of apparently nowhere, questions Freud on the meaning of his work and upsets him through stunning revelations pertaining to his own life. Among other things, he leads him to examine the impact of his pessimism on human nature. He goes on to suggest that logic is not the only mean to approach reality which sometimes can be beautiful and irrational.
Freud, at the time of this visit, is himself very ill. The Gestapo invaded Vienna and kidnapped his daughter Anna; thus, he is in a very deep state of vulnerability. Unable to explain rationally this visit, he then accuses the visitor and irrationality of any kind of presenting themselves in the same way; which is in moments of great weakness and unbalance. After putting up him up with a little magical trick, changing his cane into a bouquet of flowers, Freud, at first almost amazed, then exasperated, tells him : Go immediately ! Not only are you a mythomaniac, but you are under a sadistic neurosis. You are a sadist ! A sadist enjoying a troublesome night ! A sadist who is taking advantage of my weakness. Then the visitor remarks to Freud :
“ If it were not of your weakness, where else could I enter from ?”