from Carl Jung’s Red Book
In 7 Secrets of Synchronicity, we talked about how synchronicity often occurs during periods of transitions – a move, marriage or divorce, birth, death. Tonight, I ran across some good ones involving Jung.
I was paging through a biography on Jung by Barbara Hannah- Jung: His Life and Work, a Biographical Memoir. Hannah was a pupil and close personal friend of Jung’s and a training analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. As she states in her preface, her book isn’t an official biography of Jung, but rather a biographical memoir, “showing his life as it appeared to me.” She knew that Jung’s children were against anything biographical being written about him; they felt he had said it all in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. So Hannah didn’t tell them she was writing the book. But when she had completed it, she gave it to them to read. “They thoroughly disapproved.”
Toward the end of the book, in a chapter called Back to Rhitzome, 1960-1961, the author discusses Jung’s last recorded dream, which he had several nights before his death on June 6, 1961, It was recorded by Ruth Bailey, a woman who worked for Jung, and she gave it to the author.
“He saw a big, round block on stone in a high bare place and on it was inscribed: This shall be a sign unto you of wholeness and oneness.
In the dream, there were “a lot of vessels, pottery vases, on the right ide of a square place.” There were also a “square of trees, al fibrous roots, coming up from the ground and surrounding him. There were gold threads gleaming among the roots.”
Hannah recognized this as a death dream, but thought it was quite beautiful and illustrated his “unity and wholeness,” which were shown to him in the symbol of a round stone. She also felt the pots in the square to the right were meaningful. “In ancient Egypt, some parts of the dismembered corpse of the god Osiris were kept in pots, because it was from these that the resurrection was expected to take place…The old Greeks kept pots in their houses full of wheat seeds. The pots and the soil represented the underworld and the seed the dead waiting for resurrection.”
Jung passed away at 3:45 (interesting time, right? Sequential numbers!) on a Tuesday afternoon, June 6, 1961. Hannah says that just before he died, she went to get her car and found found the battery was completely run down. The car wasn’t old and the battery had never given her any trouble. “This puzzled me very much at the time; when Ruth telephoned about half an hour later, it seemed quite natural and as if the car had known.”
There were some reports that a thunderstorm had occurred when Jung died, but Hannah points out that the thunderstorm occurred several hours later ( scroll down to Miguel Serrano).
“The lightning struck a tall poplar tree in his garden at the edge of the lake. This is most unusual, for the water attracts the lightning and therefore trees and houses on its banks are usually immune. The tree was not destroyed, only a great deal of its bark was stripped off.”
Miguel Serrano, a Chilean author who developed a friendship with Both Jung and Herman Hesse at the end of their lives, wrote about this in his book, Record of Two Friendships: “I took it as a sign that Jung had reached the center of universal forces; Nature had responded; it had been moved; there was synchronicity.”
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When I read this story about Hannah’s battery, I was reminded that when our first agent died years ago, I heard about it shortly before I left the house to pick up Megan from school. I was in the pickup line when the car suddenly died. The battery in our car, like the one in Hannah’s, wasn’t old. It really was as if the car knew that the agent’s life had run out. Perhaps dead car batteries are like clocks that stop at the time a loved one passes on, another archetype of synchronicity.
Interesting, thanks. Three days before my brother had his fatal stroke, my car battery died. I had it replaced, and day later it went dead again, and I had to tow the car to a mechanic. I never thought of the significance of that before……..
Maybe this battery thing is more common than we realize.
Speaking of Jung.
What ever happened to your header of Jung’s boat painting out of “The Red Book”?
I really liked that picture.
And what’s the significance of the knew header?
Just curious.
No significance. Just a chance. I’ve been thinking about putting Jung’s boat back up there. Thanks for the reminder!
About the rainbow across the moon….our son the photographer is a night-sky watcher, and not long ago he came inside to get his dad and me to go with him back out into the yard. There was a rainbow crossing the moon. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen that except the night my dad died. Batteries: the “anniversary clocks” run on batteries, as do other types of clocks, and we know of many situations where a battery clock has stopped at the very moment of a person’s death and never runs again no matter many repairs are attempted. Makes me wonder about the human heart, our physical “battery”, and just how connected our hearts are to the electro/magnetic grid on planet Earth…..that “Net” in which each and all of us are intertwined. Perhaps the human species is merely another kind of electro/magnetic entity, covered in clothes of skin. Provocative thought. R2D2 and C3PO???
Lots of interesting bits in this post. Never thought about cars ‘dying’ as someone else does i.e. batteries failing. But why not.
Since waking (ring story) during the night at 3:33 I check the clock if I wake up now. Last night I awoke at 3:45 and immediately thought of Pythagoras (triangles and all that) – maybe I should have thought of Jung instead.
Interesting post.
You and Jung and 3:45!
Does that mean if you wake up at 3.14 you’ll think of Pi(e) .-)
? – Can you throw this question mark up to my above comment on Pi(e) ?
I forgot to put it in.
Cheers.
Maybe!
This resonates with me on so many levels right now, synchronistic with the sudden unexpected death of my dear friend Sherry so recently. From what we’ve been able to ascertain, Sherry had a very aware transition. Mere moments before she passed she wrote quite legibly into her diary, “ascension into Light body” followed by a straight line that sort of skids downward on the page. She’d evidently rec’d intuitive pre-emptive notification of her imminent passing, according to the brief notes in her journal during the three or four days prior to leaving, and in that final page she asked if Universe could change the Timing to allow her to live. She wasn’t old and had no apparent illness, yet she was aware her life here was done. Our souls KNOW, and sometimes they give us awareness that our transition to the next dimension is impending. As with Jung, and as with Abraham Lincoln. When my Dad died at Emory in Atlanta, there was what I now call a “Spielberg sky” and a massive thunderstorm that rocked the very bowels of the planet for about thirty minutes before Dad passed. At the exact moment of his death, the thunder and lightning and torrential rain stopped as if a switch had been flipped, and the silence was deafening. The only sound was raindrops falling from the huge trees outside. I felt as if they were shedding tears for his loss….then when I walked outside, there was a kind of rainbow across the moon as it appeared from behind the clouds….a highly unusual night celestial event. I’ve never forgotten. I will never forget.
Dramatic, Math. Very interesting stuff here.
A similar thing happened at my wife’s Grandfather’s funeral.
He had died in the Ipswich Hospital and his funeral was at the Mt.Thompson crematorium in Brisbane.I didn’t know him that well,but I had taken my mother-in-law up to visit him a couple of times before he died,as her sons didn’t want to go
(he was a bit of an old Scoundrel by all reports) and I would wheel him around the gardens up there to get him some fresh air and away from the ward.
Anyway,the day of his funeral was a nice day,but as we arrived at the crematorium a storm seemed to be building up rapidly and coming from Ipswich way.When the actual service got underway,so did the storm.It got that heavy that side windows had to be closed to stop the rain blowing in.And right at the conclusion of the service…and this is no lie…soon as the priest,or whatever he was said Amen,there was the loudest clap of thunder that the whole storm had produced and the back doors slammed open with a large gust of wind coming in
(like someone had come to take him away) ,but as soon as we had filed out of the chapel,the weather outside was perfect again.
It was the spookiest service that I have ever been to in my life.The timing of everything that happened was like watching a movie with all events happening right on que.
At least I have plenty of witnesses to back up this story,along with a funeral date and time and I’m sure local weather records would also back this up.
I might do a post on this one later on my blog.
Would love to see you do a post on this!
Many years ago I became fascinated with Jung and read everything I could get my hands on about him. I thought he had the most amazing dreams. But I have them, too, if I remember to write them down. My old journals from the 1980s have plenty of really interesting dreams, and when I read them today, I can remember what it felt like to be in them.
I’ve never experienced the synchronicity of car batteries, but now that I’m thinking about it, I’m sure there were others I simply missed because of not being conscious of them. Hmmm. Now you’ve got me thinking.