Synchronicity as intimation of a non-dualistic cosmology for the mental health field

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe growing interest in religion and spirituality in the mental health field has not resulted in the latter being relieved of the binary (dualistic) worldview by which it remains hamstrung. The phenomenon of synchronicity began to receive attention in the 1950s, thanks to the work of C.G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. The issue of the therapeutic significance of synchronicity has received widespread scholarly attention but its implications for the mental health field are not limited to the therapeutic realm. That is, synchronicity intimates a non-dualistic cosmology that could affect a transformation of the mental health field toward wholeness.KEYWORDS: synchronicitynon-dualistic cosmologyreligion/spiritualitymental health AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to Dr. Keiron Le Grice PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California and to an anonymous reviewer for providing very helpful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The specific term that Gebser used in The Ever Present Origin (Gebser, Citation1985) to describe such developments in western thought as quantum physics and Jungian psychology was “aperspectival manifestations” (p. 528/531). Aperperspectival manifestations (or irruptions) are said to afford a glimpse into a higher, transcendent consciousness, one that is anathema to ego-level, dualistic thinking. These glimpses portend a more pervasive shift in consciousness in the future.2. The extra-conceptual, extra-phenomenological quality of unus mundus is brought home in Dorn’s own definition of it as “the potential world of the first day of creation, when nothing was yet in ‘actu;’ i.e., divided into two and many, but was still one” (as cited in Jung, Citation1970, p. 534)., a definition that Jung himself draws on in Mysterium Conjunctionis (Jung, Citation1970). Le Mouël (Citation2021) reflects a similar idea in asserting that the fundamental idea represented by Dorn’s concept of unus mundus—is that of “the transcendental unity of all phenomena” (p. 437) while adding that the idea is not entirely new, and that it “can be found in wisdom traditions from all over the world” (p. 437).