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.















