Customer Reviews

Synchronicity, Science, and Soulmaking: Understanding Jungian Syncronicity Through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosphy

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This book is a fascinating excursion through contemporary quantum physics, buddhist emptiness, and Jungian psychology. Much ado has been made in pop-science about the failure of the Cartesian dichotomy and the search for quantum-informed world-views, quantum physics and its possible effects on health, consciousness, the nature of reality, and so on and on. Some of it is rather interesting. But most of those works remain at the level of sympathetic magic, turning on mere analogies. This book was written by a practicing physicist and buddhist, and next to it, the highly influential (but much over-rated) "Tao of Physics" pales by comparison. The author delves deeply into what it might mean to our world-view to take seriously the non-local nature of physical reality and the fundamental connectedness of the universe, as implied by Bell's theorem, buddhist "dependent origination," and synchronicity. If, like me, you remember learning about Kant and the death of metaphysics, you will find the description of Bell's theorem as "experimental metaphysics" (p. 75) simply staggering. And if nonlocality does prevail in our universe, it provides some support for Jung's concept of synchronicity, not just for explaining those eerie coincidences but as an enlarged perspective on linear cause-and-effect. Remember that Jung was not a physicist so in some ways his theory needs to be informed by a physicist. And anyone who's had a powerful synchronicity experience knows how radically it can upset our day-to-day notions of physical reality and causality. Much of the virtue of this book is that it isn't just some philosophical arguments and popular science spiced up with a few graphs and equations. The book creatively weaves a view of physics, mind, and causality around descriptions of the lived synchronicity experience of various friends and colleagues. For example, the "Philosopher's Stone" describes a woman's shamanic experience of discovering a stone face by a lake-shore (pp. 161-165). "The spirits of the lake love to hear their old name," she was told, "They respond." So she chanted. Well, they responded by directing her, via feeling warmth on a cold day, to a small stone face laying on the shore (see cover photo). It turned out to be named Singing Stone, from an old Native American story about a woman's search for her true self, and the stone itself "a compelling carrier for the archetype of the self." The story about Jung's "Aion" spontaneously leaping several feet off a bookshelf (p. 162) is equally astonishing. I'm a little surprised the author doesn't discuss Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics--after all, it gets rid of the need for a external observer of the universe by postulating the existence of all alternative event outcomes, with some rather obvious connections to transmigration. Despite my sympathy, I also have to wonder about the merit of this connection with "soul-making"--after all, buddhists don't believe in a soul, and Jungian individuation is a quite different goal than Eastern liberation (p. 212). But, given Jung's highly ambivalent attitude toward Eastern liberation, that is a question that *no one* has answered yet. The author deserves a great deal of credit for even addressing that issue, let alone for writing such an interesting book so clearly at odds with normal materialistic science. Even if all you got was the beautiful drawing of the Indian god, Ganesha (p. 74), the great photo of the impish John Bell (p. 122), or the fabulous picture of Pauli and Bohr, both middle-aged and merrily spinning a top like a couple of schoolboys (p. 10), this book would be worth its price. I strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Jungian synchronicity, or more than a passing interest in either of the other 2 topics. In fact, if you're reading this review, maybe now is time to buy the book!

We need more multidisciplinarians like Mansfield and Capra these days. The story of Pauli and Jung is as fascinating as that of Bohr and Einstein, it seems to me, and deserves a book and a movie all its own! One omission in this book, is the connection between the 'kundalini' experience and synchronicity, as the former is well known to stimulate the latter, giving rise to a common phenomenon known as 'synchronicity storms'. Another omission is discussion of the schizophrenic experience of living in a totally synchronistic universe, which the book 'Madness and Modernism' by Sass describes quite well. As Dr. Peat says, Synchronicity is a key 'anomaly' in the worldview of science these days, and as much as critics like Victor Stegner would like to pooh-pooh it as totally subjective, (which merely begs the question of the locus of 'meaning' after all), it does seem to point to the 'bridge between matter and mind'. Science has far too rigidly adhered to Newton's adamant 'Hypotheses Non Fingo' in banishing all discussion of 'meaning' from physics. i.e. the 'meaningless universe' of Stephen Weinberg et. al. is merely an artifact of an ad-hoc methodology, not an inherent attribute of Nature. 'Meaning' is where it's at, after all! And why *should* it be purely 'objective'?

I approached this book with initial scepticism due to its subject matter; quantum physics and mentalism. However, this book is so gracefully written that it guides the reader with relative ease through Einstein's special relativity and seriously questions reality as we know. This book is thought provoking in the utmost - well worth it.

This is perhaps the best thought-out analysis of synchronicity that I've read. The author (a professor of physics and astronomy) interweaves quantum physics, depth psychology, and Buddhism into a most satisfying explanation. All the world about us is a creation of mind- matter is not directly knowable, and space and time are outright creations of our mind. We are cocreators of reality (or at least our higher Self is) which explains how such impossible but meaningful coincidences can occur. He holds that our conventional materialist world view is the cause of our spiritual crisis and bankruptcy in the West- as do I.
This is an extraordinary book- as good or better than the _Tao of Physics_.

This was a very well written, easy to understand book about subjects that can prove to be difficult. The author does an excellent job of integrating concepts from Jung's synchronicity, quantum theory, and Middle Way Buddhism. It's a great read for anyone who believes there's more to our universe than meets the eye.

There are few topics that have generated as much heat - and as little light - as the concept of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. The subtitle to Carl Jung's original paper introducing the concept, was "An acausal connecting principle," implying that two or more events may be linked without any kind of force binding them together. Since we live in a world in which we can see causal links every day that can be a hard concept.

On the one hand, many proponents of synchronicity tell us that everything in the universe is meaningful and connected; while opponents say that they have "magical thinking" or do not understand mathematical chance.

Part of the problem has been that many writers have not tried to tackle Jung's work in the original German, and some of what he had to say has been "editorialized."

Victor Mansfield's book is exceptionally good. He is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Colgate University who has had long-standing interests in Buddhist philosophy and in the work of Carl Jung. Here he weaves together these three strands - physics, Jungian psychology and Buddhism - into a superb synthesis in which he proposes that "synchronicity is soul-making in action." There have been a great many books about synchronicity, but this is one of the most critical and creative.

One of the unusual things about the book is the way in which Victor inserts remarkable "synchronistic interludes" into the text. It took me a few pages to "get it." These interludes introduce a remarkable living experience into a book that could otherwise have been a little dry.

The central idea of the book is that there are correlations between our inner psychological states and events in the "external" world. What this book does is to develop that concept to show that a distinction between "inner" and "outer" is artificial. A great many popular books would now start talking about the mind causing changes in the material world. Although that may happen, that is not what Jung or the author of this book means. They are instead talking about linked events, in the same way that a clock tells us the time, but nobody thinks that the hands on the clock create time. Both writers warn against over-interpreting trivial events as "manifestations."

Victor traces the development of this false split between "internal" and "external" to the last middle ages, and believes that work in physics, psychology and in brain sciences is putting subjectivity back into our worldview. He finds a great deal of support for his position in Middle Way Buddhism where emptiness represents the lack of any independent existence. He also brings in the work of the English philosopher Paul Brunton and his teacher Ramana Maharshi.

In closing, Victor examines some of the consequences of the key issues raised by synchronicity: acausality, meaning, transcendence of space and time and the essential unity of the whole of creation.

This is a well-written and engaging book that I recommend highly.

This book is truly one of my favorites! It is a great exploration of three divergent philosophies on life: Jungian Depth Psychology (especially, of course, Jung's concept of synchronicity - "meaningful coincidence), Buddhism, and Quantum physics (especially the Copenhagen interpretation and its basic tenets of non-local effects, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and complementarity). I highly recommend this book as an introduction to each of these three fascinating fields of knowledge.

The main concept to take out of this book and the only one I felt I could use was - there are some elements of our world that we cannot measure and Western science falls short in this regard. It tries to be a unifying book, which brings science and spirituality together the way "The Tao of Physics" did. It falls far short. It is long-winded, boring and overblown with details. It is not unified nor the case for the principles that would unify synchronicity to other aspects of science put in any manner the reader could follow. I was compelled to buy the book simply because the title was too intriguing. Sorry, some good bits here and there, but not worth the read.

This product was delivered in a timely manner and was just as the description had listed... Positive purchase experience.

I bought this book based upon the excellent reports others gave it. I cannot be so generous. I found the book to be an exercise in the authors intelligence making the book almost unreadable to me. I just wanted to know what this subject was and how it applied to the world. I'm still reading and have not found out.

Jimmy