Author Topic: Critique of Synchronicity  (Read 3331 times)

Matswin

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Critique of Synchronicity
« on: October 14, 2012, 11:11:40 AM »
Abstract: Unlike his dream theory and theory of archetypes, Carl Jung's notion of synchronicity hasn't met with success. The metaphysical system surrounding the hypothesis includes notions of supernaturalism (transcendence). This is a religio-philosophical viewpoint, rather than a scientific. The deleterious consequences are obvious. It undermines scientific respectability, promotes superstition, and has kindled obsolete polytheistic ideas in the post-Jungians. There is to date no scientific evidence to support synchronicity. But the strongest argument against the synchronistic notion is the fact that it hasn't proved helpful in any respect. Jung's unitarian model of the human self is criticized. The self really consists of two complementary aspects, a worldly and a spiritual.

Keywords: meaningful coincidence, archetype, unus mundus, psychoid, transcendental, polytheism, Hegel, Platonism, complementarian self.

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Critique of Synchronicity

Mats Winther

Matswin

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Re: Critique of Synchronicity
« Reply #1 on: October 15, 2012, 04:48:07 AM »
Humans beings are endowed with a self that is a two-unity. Adjustment to the spiritual path necessitates that we absorb the spiritual worldview of faith and reclusiveness that is already present inside us as the trinitarian aspect of self (the 'ternarius', using a medieval term). This spiritual pattern of personality is already inside us, from the beginning. It grows in the moonlight, while we are busy in the world. Jung's critical argument is really predicated on his own self model. His position is that the self is quaternarian, that is, committed to worldly realization of wholeness and completeness. The trinitarian self of religious tradition, and the spiritual practices surrounding it, are incompatible with Jung's model and are therefore rejected. It has been argued that Jung's argumentation depends on a misreading of the Eastern traditions. Leon Schlamm says:

"Welwood insists that meditation is a royal road to non-dualistic experience, rather than to a subterranean unconscious mind, revealing awareness of a unified field where divisions between subject and object, the inner world and outer reality, and consciousness and the unconscious, are recognised as possessing only conventional significance, but from the perspective of a higher order of truth of Buddhism simply do not exist. Such divisions, including Jung's division between ego and unconscious, are, for Welwood, symptomatic of the confused state of mind known in Buddhism as samsara [...]
Mark Epstein, for example, has argued that, from the Buddhist perspective, it is mistake to view egolessness as a developmental stage beyond the ego. During transpersonal states of consciousness the ego is not abandoned, nor completely transcended; rather, the spiritual practitioner realises that the ego lacks concrete existence. It is not the ego that disappears; rather the belief in the ego's solidity, the identification with the ego's representations, is abandoned in the realisation of egolessness during states of ordinary waking consciousness" (Schlamm, 2010).

It is evident that the trinitarian self brings with it a quite different, "non-dualistic", way of seeing reality. From a complementarian standpoint this is unobjectionable, since its quaternarian complementary is retained, anyway. According to the quaternarian standpoint the "dualistic" perspective does not at all represent a "confused state of mind". We can accept both views although they are mutually exclusive. Thusly, we can solve this endless schism. But Jung's model is unitarian, i.e., there cannot be two wholenesses in one self, but only one, so the trinitarian interpretation is rejected as erroneous. On the other hand, the teachers of the East regard Jung's worldview as a confused state of mind known as samsara. This is equally wrong.

Mats Winther