On Active Imagination

When I say I hear voices in my head, I trip over how that sounds, how it reads out loud. I have been studying Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli’s professional relationship and personal friendship that spanned many years, right up until Pauli’s death in 1958.

I have dreams; vivid and intense dreams, highly symbolic. Case in point: the other day, I dreamt that I was surrounded by light and a voice told me, “Synchronize.”

That’s sort of what brought on my research in synchronicity, which ultimately led me to Pauli and Jung’s working relationship between psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics. I grew up with a father who mentioned quantum entanglement, how two entangled particles could affect each other from a distance that includes light years.

Synchronicity is defined by three core principles:

1.) Non-Locality & Entanglement

2.) Complementarity

3.) The Observer Effect

In relation to Non-Locality & Entanglement, there is the idea of acausal correlation. What this means is that the world is often understood in terms of a clear causal relationship (A causes B). At a quantum level, what ends up happening is that two particles that exist light years apart from one another mirror each other and affect each other. When Jung and Pauli observed this, they put their minds together and supposed that there must be non-localized entanglement.

When I consider this, one of my first thoughts is the Lorenz Effect. It involves quite complicated math, which I do need to study more of, but at a fundamental level, it is the idea that starting conditions alter the whole. Chaos is not chaos, but the result of what happened at the very beginning. The result is not predictable and gives rise to a strange attractor.

What Lorenz noticed was that the starting conditions did not result in something random, but rather, an infinite looping that resembles a butterfly when it is mapped out. It loops forever, but the lines never intersect or leave their respective boundaries. There is an invisible structure, an order to chaos.

When I hear voices, they are often reflections of people I’ve met who I did not receive or attain closure with. They mark events, some of which were incomprehensible at first, but clarified with time. I downloaded Quran Widgets on my phone and one of the quotes it provided me with was this:

“Water does not clear without first becoming turbid; the turmoil in your life is the painful harbinger of the clear days to come.”

It’s comforting to imagine order in chaos. I may perform seemingly chaotic acts, but there is an underlying principle. I could not control my starting conditions. I’d have to stretch so far back into the space-time continuum that I’d eventually have to give up and acknowledge there must be an underlying reality. An invisible but highly structured bond between mind and matter that can be touched through archetypes and ego and persona and shadow.

When I hear, “Let there be light,” now, I think about God, a space between mankind and earth, the physical and the metaphysical, cognition and chaos. I wonder about order, how I exist in accordance to mathematical axioms I wouldn’t be able to explain, science I wouldn’t know how to enumerate.

What I do know is that I’m alive. There is a sensation of being, both peculiar and not. Periodically stifling, but on the whole, quite stunning and if I may borrow this term, miraculous. It is this sense of wonder that keeps the cogs turning in my mind, swings the pendulum left and right.