Carl Jung: ...if you look long enough into a dark hole, then you perceive what is looking in.

Dear Professor: 29 October 1934

Please accept my sincere thanks for kindly sending me Jordan's essay.

I believe that this essay should be published, as it deals with the actual shift of the physical approach to the psychological sphere.

This essay was inevitable.

It was inevitable that the systematic investigation of the unknown center of the atom, which has led to the conclusion that the observed system
is also a disturbance caused by the observance would show that essence of the observing process will be perceptible in the disturbance caused by the actual observation.

To put it simply, if you look long enough into a dark hole, then you perceive what is looking in.

Hence, this is the principle of perception in Yoga, which derives all perception from the absolute emptiness of consciousness.

This method of cognition is thus a special case of the introspective exploration of the psychic in general.

With regard to Jordan's reference to parapsychic manifestations, spatial clairvoyance is of course one of the most obvious phenomena to represent the relative nonexistence of our empirical image of space.

Taking this argument further, he would also necessarily have to bring in temporal clairvoyance, which would represent the relativity of the image of time.

Naturally, Jordan looks at these phenomena from the physical point of view, whereas I do so from the psychic point of view-specifically from the fact of the collective unconscious, as you have correctly noted, which presents a layer of the psychic in which individual distinctions of consciousness are more or less extinguished.

However, if individual consciousnesses in the unconscious were extinguished, then all perception in the unconscious would occur as in one person.

Jordan states that a sender and a receiver in the same conscious "space" observe the same object at the same time.

One could Just as easily tum this statement around and say that in unconscious "space: sender and receiver are one and the same perceiving object.

As you can see, my point of view as a psychologist would be that of the perceiving subject, whereas the physicist expresses himself from the standpoint of the common space in which two or more observers find themselves.

Carried to its ultimate conclusion, Jordan's approach would lead to the supposition of an absolute unconscious space in which an infinite number of observers are looking at the same object.

The psychological version would be: In the unconscious there is just one observer, who looks at an infinite number of objects.

II you wish to draw Jordan's attention to my writings, may I perhaps recommend that, in addition to the essays you have already quoted, you also mention the one in the same volume on "Das Grundproblem der Gegenwartigen Psychologie" [The Basic Problem of Contemporary Psychology]

With regard to the collective unconscious there is in the earlier volume, Seeleprobleme de Gegenwart [Soul Problems of the Present], an essay in which I go into this subject in some depth, namely "Die Struktur der Seele· [The Structure of the Soul] (Page 144)

I would be obliged if I could hold on to Jordan's essay for a while.

By the way, it has just occurred to me that on the subject of time relativity there is a book by a student of Eddington, Dunne, An Experiment with Time, in which he deals with temporal clairvoyance in a similar way to how Jordan deals with spatial clairvoyance.

He postulates an infinite number of time dimensions that more or less correspond to Jordan's "intermediary stages.

I would be very interested to hear how you respond to these arguments of Dunne's.

I also thank you for the news of your well-being and hope you continue to make progress.

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

[C. C. JUNG]