Does Anything Cross the Boundary?

In the first essay I said that Jung and Pauli deserved an essay to themselves. That was nearly three weeks ago. I have started this one three times and thrown away two beginnings, because every time I got a page in, I noticed the question was changing what I thought I had already settled.

The trouble is in my vocabulary. If you go back over the first two essays you find the same picture again and again: a pattern is received, the Spirit is given, something arrives, something enters. Levin's word for it is ingress, which just means going in. My own term, communion attractor, assumes a place made ready for something to come to. All of these words take for granted that there is an inside and an outside, with a threshold between them where the interesting things happen.

I think I got that picture from having a body. I am in here and the street is out there, and the noise of the tram comes in through the window. But the body is a less reliable guide than it looks. A violinist stops feeling the bow as a thing in her hand after a few years; what she feels is the string, at the far end of it. People who drive a lot feel the width of their car. So the edge of what counts as me moves around depending on what I am attending to. I now think the door in my sentences was a mistake, and a common one. A great many Christians spend their lives waiting for God to arrive, and I was one of them.

Wolfgang Pauli was one of the great physicists of the last century. He gave his name to the exclusion principle, which is part of the reason atoms have the structure they do, and he got the Nobel Prize for it. In his early thirties his life was going badly enough that he went to see Carl Jung, and the two of them ended up writing to each other for twenty-six years, until Pauli died in 1958. I have been reading the letters in the evenings. A good deal of the physics is beyond me and I skip it.

Their subject, underneath everything, was whether mind and matter are really two things. Pauli came to suspect that physics and psychology were describing one reality from two sides. He thought a full description would need what he called a neutral language, made of terms that belonged to neither side, and he never found one. Jung borrowed a phrase from Gerhard Dorn, an alchemist of the sixteenth century: unus mundus, one world. He meant a ground that is neither psychic nor physical, from which both come.

Jung's idea of synchronicity comes out of this, and it is probably the most misused idea he had. In 1952 he and Pauli published a book together, with Pauli writing on Kepler and Jung on meaningful coincidence, which he called an acausal connecting principle. People tend to forget the word acausal. Jung was claiming that an inner state and an outer event can correspond, and mean something, without either having caused the other. That is a long way from saying the universe sends us signs, and most of what is sold under Jung's name says exactly that. Pauli himself was never sure about the idea, and told Jung that he wrote things to him he would not have put to another physicist. I think they were both braver than the people who quote them.

Suppose they were right, and there is one ground that shows itself both as what I call my mind and as what I call the world. Then an image in my head and an event in the street could match without anything passing between them. Two windows in the same house can be lit at the same time, and neither one is lighting the other.

Levin has a good example of this, though he uses it to make a different point. Two kinds of cicada in North America spend thirteen and seventeen years underground before they come out. He points out that those numbers depend on how the primes are distributed, so that with different primes the cicadas would emerge in different years. Nothing travelled. The primes did not go to a wood in Ohio. Arithmetic and insects agree without any contact between them, and the example comes from a working biologist. Anyone who thinks that correspondence without a cause is mysticism has to explain the cicadas first.

The way I have started to think about it is that the world rhymes. The phrase is mine, but I believe the idea is Jung's. When two words rhyme in a poem, nothing has been sent from the first to the second. They rhyme because the language happens to allow it, and a poet with a good ear notices. A synchronicity would be the same kind of thing happening in the world instead of in a poem. It can mean a great deal and still nobody sent it.

I am drawn to this for a personal reason. When I am composing and a phrase comes, it really does feel as if it came from somewhere. It does not feel like something I made. For years I took that feeling as a kind of evidence. But a rhyme would feel exactly the same, since the phrase and I would be made of the same stuff and it would simply have become audible while I was listening. I cannot tell these two accounts apart by how composing feels, and nobody else can either. Every composer who says the music was given to him is reporting a feeling and calling it a fact.

There is a danger in all this, and I am the kind of person who is prone to it. Once you accept that things can correspond without a cause, it is very tempting to start reading your life as though it were addressed to you. A book falls open at a certain page, you hear the same name twice in an afternoon, and within a week you are receiving messages. I have seen what that does to people. Jung's own word rules it out, because a coincidence without a cause is also a coincidence without a sender. I try to remember that, the way I use a metronome when I know I am going to rush.

So what happens to my earlier distinctions if the door goes? In the first essay I separated three things. The first was instantiation, where a physical structure realizes a pattern, the way a crystal has a geometry. That one is unaffected, since nobody thinks the geometry is kept somewhere else.

The second was Levin's ingress. I think his space of patterns is Jung's one world in a lab coat, and he seems to see the resemblance himself, because on his own site he mentions Jung's archetypes as relatives of what he is describing. What I notice is that he uses two pictures and they do not quite agree. Sometimes the body is a thin client, with the important information held on a server somewhere else. He talks about realms. That is the door again. At other times he writes that whether something counts as a physical object or as a pattern is a matter of perspective, which is very close to what Pauli thought and leaves no room for a door at all. He also says he does not yet know how to handle time in his scheme and will not claim that the patterns existed first. I think he already suspects that asking where the patterns were beforehand is a bad question.

I think the second picture is what he believes, and that the first is a habit of speech he has not yet given up. When cells are arranged in the right way nothing enters them. A shape that was already possible in the material comes to the surface. Ingress is the wrong word for that, and the paper I am answering has it in its title.

The third thing was indwelling, by which I meant God being present to a creature without becoming one of its parts. I had been careful about that claim, and I had still imagined it as something coming in from beyond. When I went back to the writers I learned it from, I found that they do not describe it that way. Paul tells the Athenians that in God we live and move and have our being. Augustine writes that God was more inward to him than his own inmost part. Neither of them has anything crossing a threshold. I had been talking about God as though he were weather outside the house, and so does most of the preaching I have heard.

This was awkward for me. I had expected to defend my faith against the one-world picture, and I had planned to treat Jung as a respectable rival. It turned out that a psychologist who never claimed to speak about God had a better picture of God's presence than I did after a lifetime of going to Mass. There was nothing wrong with the belief. I had attached the wrong image to it.

I still do not end up where Jung does.

In Jung's one world everything belongs to the same ground, including the psyche, the stars, the archetypes and the images of God that the psyche produces. He always insisted that as a psychologist he could speak only about the image of God in the mind and never about God, and I take him at his word. Even so, his one world has nothing outside it, and Christianity says something different. For a Christian the ground of things is God, who is other than the world, and the world is something he gives. Paul writes to the Colossians that in Christ all things hold together. Jung is right that the world is one. He leaves out that someone is holding it, and that omission changes everything that follows.

What took me three weeks was seeing where that leaves the boundary between God and the world. I had assumed it must be a kind of outer wall, a long way off, past the last pattern. Augustine's sentence points the other way, since he puts God further in than his own inmost part. If he is right, the difference between what is given and the one who gives it runs through the middle of me, and through a score, and through the cells in Levin's dish. It cannot be walked to, because there is nowhere one could stand that is off it. This means that nothing in the world is merely natural. A cell healing a wound is already standing where the gift and the giver meet.

The tradition has a name for who is to be found there. Paul says that the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Augustine spends the last part of his book on the Trinity on that sentence and concludes that Gift is a proper name of the Spirit. Ordinary gifts can be separated from the people who gave them. I have books on my shelf and no memory of who gave them to me. The world is a gift in that ordinary sense, since it is distinct from God. With the Spirit the gift and the giver are the same. That is what I ought to have meant by indwelling from the start, and it explains why no door is needed, since God does not have to come from anywhere to be given.

This also showed me that Jung was wrong about the Trinity. He believed the Trinity was incomplete. In his account a threefold God leaves out a fourth element, which he variously identified with matter, with evil and with the feminine, and the history of religion is the psyche's long effort to put it back. I understand the appeal. The God he describes, all mind and no body, is one I recognize, and I have prayed to that God often enough. But Christianity already has an answer to the missing body, and the answer was never a fourth person. The creed says that the Word became flesh, which means that a human body, with a mother and eventually a death, was taken into the life of God. Jung wanted to complete God by adding matter to him. The creed says God took matter to himself. What Jung noticed was real, but it was a lack in how Christians imagine God, and I share it on most days. It was never a lack in the creed. He diagnosed the patient correctly and then operated on the wrong body.

The drawing at the top of this page is Blake's Enoch. Genesis mentions Enoch only briefly, in a list of men who lived a very long time. It says that he walked with God and then was no longer here, because God took him. The letter to the Hebrews adds that he was taken so that he would not see death. So Enoch is the one figure in these books who passes over without dying, and we are told nothing about how.

Blake leaves the passing over out of the picture altogether, which I think was a bold choice. He shows an old man sitting on a low step with a scroll on his knee. Around him are figures holding a lyre, a palette and more scrolls, who stand for the arts. None of them is looking up. If this is what walking with God looks like, it looks like a room full of instruments.

I think Blake meant something by this that is close to heresy, and I half agree with him. He is saying that Enoch got out of death by making things. The man who walked with God is shown among people singing the world, painting it and writing it down, as people do when the world makes sense to them, and by the time God takes him there is nothing left to depict. I cannot go as far as saying that art saves anyone. I do think that the difference between the gift and the giver is as present in a lyre as in a prayer, and that someone who has worked close to it all his life might not find dying so strange.

Looking at the drawing, I also thought of Pauli and his neutral language. He searched physics and psychology for terms that belonged to neither and did not find them. I think he was looking in the wrong departments. Musicians have been using such a language for about four hundred years. A score is neither mental nor physical. A mind and a pair of hands can both read it, and nobody supposes the music is in the paper. I believe every art is a piece of the language Pauli was looking for, and that the world is readable because it was written in something of the kind. I cannot prove this. I think it is true, and I think a physicist will eventually say so.

For the time being, then, I am going to stop saying that anything crosses over. I will go on saying that things are given, since a gift implies a giver, and I now think that difference is present in everything that can be read, myself included. I see no reason to drop the term communion attractor. It describes a kind of coordination in which people become more themselves, and it never depended on anything arriving from outside. I will be more careful with the word receive, which I used as if it explained something when it was only an image.

So my answer to the question in the title is no. Nothing crosses the boundary, and I no longer think anything ever did. There is a boundary, but it does not have two sides that one could stand on. In the first essay I said the world could be read, and I should have stayed with that word, because reading does not involve anything arriving. When I learn a score, the music becomes legible to me. I used to wonder where it had been before that, and I have come to think the question only makes sense if you already believe in the door.