Carl Jung: It is a path "sharp as the edge of a razor."

Although the attainment of inner balance through symmetrical pairs of opposites was probably the main intention of this mandala, we should not overlook the fact that the duplication motif also occurs when unconscious contents are about to become conscious and differentiated.

They then split, as often happens in dreams, into two identical or slightly different halves corresponding to the conscious and still unconscious aspects of
the nascent content.

I have the impression, from this picture, that it really does represent a kind of solstice or climax, where decision and division take place.

The dualities are, at bottom, Yes and No, the irreconcilable opposites, but they have to be held together if the balance of life is to be maintained.

This can only be done by holding unswervingly to the centre, where action and suffering balance each other.

It is a path "sharp as the edge of a razor."

A climax like this, where universal opposites clash, is at the same time a moment when a wide perspective often opens out into the past and future.

This is the psychological moment when, as the consensus gentium has established since ancient times, synchronistic phenomena occur—that is,
when the far appears near: sixteen years later, Miss X became fatally ill with cancer of the breast. [Footnote 168]

Footnote 168. I do not hesitate to take the synchronistic phenomena that underlie astrology seriously. Just as there is an eminently psychological reason for the existence of alchemy, so too in the case of Astrology. Nowadays it is no longer interesting to know how far these two fields are aberrations; we should rather investigate the psychological foundations on which they rest. [Cf. Jung, "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," passim.—EDITORS.]