What are the implications of Jung’s theories about the Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, Synchronicity and Individuation? What can they suggest about the nature of reality and the anomalies of modern science?

In this episode we have the fascinating topic of the metaphysics implied by Carl Jung’s theories to discuss. Jung is one of the great hero’s of this podcast, we covered the collective unconscious in episode #6 and synchronicity in episode #14 for listeners who want to go into detail about that. And the topic of The Shadow is coming up too, so look out for that. But to understand the metaphysical implications of his theories we need a special guest.

He is philosopher and author Bernardo Kastrup. Bernardo is the executive director of Essentia Foundation and his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental (he has a PHD in philosophy). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (he also has a PHD in Computer science!). He has written many academic papers and books, has appeared on many media outlets and writes regularly for the Scientific American. 

Today we’ll be mostly speaking about one of his most recent books “Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, the archetypal semantics of an experiential universe”. But we do take time first to talk about his scientific and philosophical worldview, as it related directly to Jung’s.

What we discuss:

00:00 Intro

06:40 Materialism VS the church: The history of Idealism

14:20 The dissociative boundary between us and the mind at large

22:20 Neural correlates + interacting across the dissociative boundary

25:50 Anaesthesia: Mistaking unresponsiveness for unconsciousness

29:45 Jung’s Metaphysics

31:20 The unconscious is active and creative, not a passive container

38:40 Archetypes are primordial templates of manifestation

39:40 ‘The ego is a little boat floating on a raging ocean of psychic activity that it cannot control’

43:20 Was Jung an idealist?

46:00 Causality + synchronicity: Wolfgang Pauli and Jung

47:10 Individual quantum events are not causal, so they are governed by synchronicities

48:00 Causality itself is an aggregate effect of microscopic level synchronistic effects

01:04:40 Bernardo’s midlife crisis - the first and second half of life

01:06:20 Individuation explained

01:09:20 ‘The freedom of the Slave’: The impersonal flow of nature channeled through you

01:20:50 Etiology: spontaneous VS deliberate purpose

01:26:20 Interpreting quantum phenomena through an idealist, Jungian lens

01:34:20 Physical quantities only exist if you look, if you measure

01:35:20 Entanglement and materialism’s difficulty

01:40:20 The states of the world are not physical but probabilistic states, physical states arise from measurement

01:48:20 Primordial truth beyond space time, is projected into space-time

01:51:50 Evolution is a spatio-temporal projection

01:53:30 Are Psi phenomena and military UAP experiencers manifestations of the unconscious?

02:03:40 Humility in the face of the unknown about the nature of reality

References:

“Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics, the archetypal semantics of an experiential universe” Bernardo Kastrup 

“Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” Carl Jung