German version available with the title "Editorial: Zum Kern der Sache – Carl Gustav Jung, Synchronizität und das Ringen mit empirischen Daten"

Hans Bender, German parapsychologist and professor at the Freiburg University, met with C. G. Jung on December 8, 1960. The discussion was recorded, and the transcribed version is available here for the first time in English. A key aspect of our article is a description of the phenomenon of synchronicity based on Hans Bender's concrete experiences during a drive through Switzerland to an Eranos Conference in Ascona and further on to the Côte d'Azur for a workshop of the Parapsychology Foundation in August 1960. At the same time, his mother suffered a stroke, which caused her death shortly afterward. Bender was returning to Freiburg at the time when she died. He was familiar with the stages of his return trip from earlier trips. He had intensely emotional experiences at certain places, which he, in retrospect, interpreted as synchronistic in connection with his mother's death.

Hans Bender, German parapsychologist and professor at the Freiburg University, met with C. G. Jung on December 8, 1960. The discussion was recorded, and the transcribed version is available here for the first time in English. A key aspect of our article is a description of the phenomenon of synchronicity based on Hans Bender’s concrete experiences during a drive through Switzerland to an Eranos Conference in Ascona and further on to the Côte d’Azur for a workshop of the Parapsychology Foundation in August 1960. At the same time, his mother suffered a stroke, which caused her death shortly afterward. Bender was returning to Freiburg at the time when she died. He was familiar with the stages of his return trip from earlier trips. He had intensely emotional experiences at certain places, which he, in retrospect, interpreted as synchronistic in connection with his mother’s death.

Hans Bender, German parapsychologist and professor at the Freiburg University, met with C. G. Jung on December 8, 1960. The discussion was recorded, and the transcribed version is available here for the first time in English. A key aspect of our article is a description of the phenomenon of synchronicity based on Hans Bender’s concrete experiences during a drive through Switzerland to an Eranos Conference in Ascona and further on to the Côte d’Azur for a workshop of the Parapsychology Foundation in August 1960. At the same time, his mother suffered a stroke, which caused her death shortly afterward. Bender was returning to Freiburg at the time when she died. He was familiar with the stages of his return trip from earlier trips. He had intensely emotional experiences at certain places, which he, in retrospect, interpreted as synchronistic in connection with his mother’s death. KEYWORDS C.G. Jung, Hans Bender, Synchronicity, Psi experiences.

The name of Carl Gustav Jung tends not to be associated with a concern for philosophical realism, seen, as he is, as one of the worst apologists for obscurantism, mysticism and spiritualism of the modern age. Yet the thesis I try to defend here is that Jung’s work can be read as an elaborate attempt to escape the ‘correlationist circle’ and the impasse of finitude every bit as rigorous and compelling as that undertaken by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude. This argument I propose to advance via a reading of that work of his which is considered perhaps the least defensible in terms of philosophical or scientific realism, namely the short treatise entitled Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. It is here that the monist or ‘psychoid’ ontology underpinning all of Jung’s psychological work on the archetypes of the collective unconscious is given its most extensive treatment. This, I will argue, rather than being a pre-critical metaphysical curio is a remarkably sophisticated philosophical concept, consistent with Kant’s transcendental conditions while transgressing them from within in order to undermine the gap of finitude between thought and being.

This presentation will trace the arc of the Jungian process of synchronicity exploring its depth in the cosmic Self. It will focus on the dynamic of the psyche as (ProcessMind) field and the unus mundi. Synchronicity has a “vertical” and “horizontal” depth integrating all awareness a-temporally/a-spatially/a-locally. This theme will be developed through personal, sentient experience, including examples of synchronicity—e.g., an out of body experience, significant dreams and foretelling’s. The last part of the paper will explore how synchronicity is integral and a leap into a new cosmic awareness that is also a responsibility for the individual. I will also look at how synchronicity is seen as subjective from the currently predominant Mental-Rational consciousness, but is integrally connected across the cosmic field, as Jung would see it from a magic/mythic/mental awareness. Jung’s subjective focus goes beyond the subjective, the psyche, in its presencing with the field of the unus mundi.