The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events - J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung

identical--since individuation means to find one's own meaning,

which is nothing other than one's own connection with Universal

Meaning. This is clearly something other than what is referred to

today by terms such as information, superintelligence,

cosmic or universal mind--because feeling, emotion, the Whole of the

person, is included. This sudden and illuminating connection that

strikes us in the encounter with a synchronistic event represents,

as Jung well described, a momentary unification of two psychic

states: the normal state of our consciousness, which moves in a flow

of discursive thought and in a process of continuous perception that

creates our idea of the world called "material" and "external"; and of

a profound level where the "meaning" of the Whole resides

in the sphere of "absolute knowledge." (p. 258)

It is precisely this unification of our image of the material world with the deepest levels of our being that makes synchronicity such a revolutionary idea, with repercussions far beyond psychology. Whatever the archetypal meaning in a synchronicity experience, the expression of unity is always paramount. As von Franz (1975) says:

The most essential and certainly the most impressive thing about

synchronicity occurrences ... is the fact that in them the

duality of soul and matter seems to be eliminated. They are therefore

an empirical indication of an ultimate unity

of all existence, which Jung, using the terminology of medieval

natural philosophy, called the Unus Mundus." (p. 247)

Like any revolutionary idea that challenges the prevailing worldview, Jung's concept of synchronicity met with resistance and misunderstanding both within and without the Jungian community. After one of Rhine's many requests for him to write down his parapsychological experiences, Jung (1975) wrote on September 25, 1953:

I am not sure whether I can get together all my reminiscences concerning

parapsychical events. There were plenty. That accumulation of such tales

does not seem to be profitable. The collection by Gurney, Myers, and

Podmore(2) has produced very little effect. People who know that there

are such things need no further confirmation, and people not wanting

to know are free, as hitherto, to say that one tells them fairy

tales. I have encountered so much discouraging resistance that I am

amply convinced of the stupidity of the learned guild. (p. 126)

WORK BY RHINE THAT INFLUENCED JUNG

J. B. Rhine was a young psychology instructor at Duke University when he first wrote to Jung on November 14, 1934:

Dear Doctor Jung:

After having seen your interesting contribution, Modern Man in

Search of a Soul, I thought you might be remotely interested in my

work published in a volume, Extra-Sensory Perception [Rhine, 1934],

and I therefore asked the publishers to put your name on the list

for complimentary copies.

He goes on to characterize his Duke experiments as designed

to test the capacity of the human mind to exteriorize or externalize