Another interesting perspective in regards to possibility and its relation to creation and manifestation had been shared by J.M.E. McTaggart, when he wrote: “Possibility may mean nothing but a limitation of our knowledge. Thus, if I say that it is possible that it may rain tomorrow, the most obvious sense of the words is that I do not know whether it will rain or not. In this case, clearly, it is a statement, not about any non-existent reality, but about my existent knowledge.”
In a sense, possibility implies something other than the reality that is manifest, and as a result, there is nothing that can really or truly be non-existent. Possibilities are not independent of the actual nature of existence, as McTaggart argued. One may then be curious as to why one possibility manifests over all other possibilities. And as Carl Jung argued, there is something more than just a “causal principle” embedded in mechanistic natural laws which can explain certain phenomena. Simply put, certain occurrences and phenomena cannot be explained by either chance or by identifiable causes.
The explanation for a number of occurrences and phenomena, most likely, is “a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity” as Carl Jung put it. Physicists and scientists have dubbed this falling together in time and simultaneity of multiple occurrences and phenomena which seem to be linked together as “synchronicity.” And what synchronicity suggests is that “psychic conditions” can render space and time as “elastic” and in turn the “relativization” of space and time “is no longer a matter for astonishment but is brought within the bounds of possibility.” As Carl Jung wrote: “In themselves, space and time consist of nothing. They are hypostatized concepts born of the discriminating activity of the conscious mind, and they form the indispensable co-ordinate for describing the behavior of bodies in motion.”
In turn, the “psychic conditions” which shape reality are determined by something even deeper, namely, the unconscious “archetypes” which are “formal factors responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes” or “patterns of behavior” to borrow from Jung. In a sense, everything is tied up to “archetypes” of an unconscious rooting and source, as Jung contended. It follows that a number of events and occurrences or phenomena which appear external or separate from the psychic state of an individual or a number of individuals are actually deeply intertwined with the psychic state of an individual or a number of individuals. As Jung wrote: “Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrences of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state – and, in certain cases, vice versa.”
In sum, space and time disappear in large part as a result of synchronicity, and with it, mechanistic causality disappears as an explanatory factor for a number of events, occurrences, and phenomena. As Jung wrote:
“Synchronicity in space can equally well be conceived as perception in time, but remarkably enough it is not so easy to understand synchronicity in time as spatial, for we cannot imagine any space in which future events are objectively present and could be experienced as such through a reduction of this spatial distance. But since experience has shown that under certain conditions space and time can be reduced almost to zero, causality disappears along with them, because causality is bound up with the existence of space and time and physical changes, and consists essentially in the succession of cause and effect. For this reason synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with any conceptions of causality. Hence the interconnection of meaningfully coincident factors must necessarily be thought of as acausal.”
In other words, we have to look beyond appearance and physicality and delve into the idea or notion that the simultaneous or synchronistic functions or operations of two different psychic states whereby there is a “flow” of one into the other and in turn negates any surface level causation can explain a wide range of occurrences and phenomena. Knowledge of any situation, as Jung argued, consists of two factors:
- An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolized or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition
- An objective situation coincides with this content
And the fact that no one knows how such content arises into consciousness and into an objective situation is the reason why we must do away with mechanistic and surface causes as an explanation for events and occurrences of varying significance and importance, given that the rise of such content into conscious life and into seemingly objective situations is the common theme amongst all events and occurrences, regardless of their varying significance and importance. Not only is the content of the unconscious the common theme of events and occurrences of varying significance and importance, but the content is also the instrument for the ordering of a reality that is transposed from the unconscious level and onto the conscious level.
Adam A. Azim 