The Blackberry Walk

Jung was a man with a specific goal: to resurrect the pre-modern mindset in the modern age. How did he achieve it? Through synchronicity. Modes of thinking through history can be subdivided into three main categories: the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern. The pre-modern mindset is to believe in the reality of narrative, to see the reality as having been organised in the patterns of stories. For the ancients and medieval peasants, myths weren't just an "attempt to explain the world through stories", like many scientists hypnotised by late Victorian anthropologists like Tylor and Frazer believe - instead stories were the fundamental organisation of the world, and myths were real. Modernism, as pioneered through enlightenment thinkers, propagated the idea of matter as fundamental. Instead of stories governing the world, laws of nature do, like F=ma and F=kx - mathematical laws which govern reality. As modernism has progressed, these laws have become ever-more complex, resulting in headaches like quantum mechanics. "Nature is fundamentally chaotic", the modernist thinks - small laws govern at the atomic, unsplitable, level, manifesting in near infinite complexity at the macro level. The post-modern era, as prophesised by Nietzsche, is where even these God-given laws die - God is dead, after all. Man becomes the measure of all things, and the seemingly uncrackable bedrock is burrowed through. Unlike in the modernist age, the pendulum has swung back and stories take on a new level of significance once more. However, instead of stories being the fundamental nature of reality, stories are treated as evil spirits which possess people - only propaganda exists now, expressions of power which aim to bend what people think and how people act. Here we see this tripartite vision of history; a vision which Jung manages to bridge. Jung's influences are numerous, but his starting point is that of a scientist. He first trained in the medical profession, then specialising in what was previously a subset of medicine: psychology. Outside of scientific senpais, Jung was deeply influenced by Kantian metaphysics, the fingerprints of which are abound in his work - the collective unconscious is a kind of noumena (Jung oft uses the word 'numinous' for transcendent), and the archetypes are akin to Kantian a priori knowledge. Another deep influence on Jung, from quite a young age, is Nietzsche - the aforementioned godfather of post-modernity. Jung evidently saw himself much like Nietzsche - they both grew up disillusioned with faith as sons of pastors, after all. The Red Book reads much like Zarathustra also - Jung idolised the man. Finally, a major influence on Jung is that of the alchemists, the mysterious spiritual tradition which emerged most strongly around the 16th century. There's an interesting link between alchemy, a mystery tradition very much working within a mythical pre-modern framework, and the reformation / counter-reformation, wherein the protestant faith emerged as part of the zeitgeist of modernism, with the Council of Trent modernising the Catholic church shortly after. Alchemy, in the western tradition at least (Eastern Orthodox maintains many of these pre-modern ideas) is almost the last underground gasp of the age when myths were truly real for people. Jung's madness stage demonstrated to him the reality of stories and that our narrative understanding of the world and the material reality of the world touch and are one: what people from time immemorial would call fate. Jung the scientist sees these patterns as archetypes which live inside of people's heads - Jungians like Anthony Stevens take this biological understanding of Jung's works, seeing him as a scientist who possesses great insight into the mind. But then we are confronted by the insight Jung has in that fate exists - reality fits narrative, and this just doesn't fit into this scientific model. Only matter should matter, not stories. The leap to 'psychic reality', wherein archetypal models and notions are woven into reality itself, not just our perception of it, is aided by the idea of synchronicity - that the bizarre coincidences between the world and the one's spirit occur all the time, and that it isn't merely the mind 'pattern matching'. Through accepting synchronicity, the world isn't a maelstrom of chaos, but rather an understandable ordered narrative following from womb to tomb. These coincidences are no longer 'bizarre' - they're fate, always meant to happen, perhaps even messages as to what you should do. Jung's project was to bridge our modernist biases to achieve a pre-modern and spiritually fulfilling understanding of the world. The post-modern, a world Jung wasn't alive for much of, is a step to that end. The post-modern is the break down of the scientific world order, a kind of fire in the forest to fertilise the narrative worldview of the future. Now, the question becomes which seeds are planted...