THE INVISIBLE ORIGIN

Up to now we have overlooked that the word Tao contains two references, which identify it as the most precise expression for the ultimate principle or potential of the mental consciousness. These are on the one hand its four meanings, on the other it is its hidden and the word-founding root.

Perhaps a remark may be worthwile on a surprising incidence while writing these pages: I discovered the text of the Dschuang Tse only several months after having completed the chapters “Before the First Day” and “An Agraphon.” [10]  I think I owe this remark to the relevance of my description.

An Agraphon

The picture presented so far should suffice to put the statements now to be quoted in their true light. These statements will remain noncommittal only for those who have renounced the spiritual heritage of the occident. I will confine myself to quote, will refrain from any interpretat ion but point to the consequences of the problems in question (those concerning evolution, freedom of will and future).

From the Syrian Ephraem we have been handed down an apocryphal saying, an agraphon (i.e. a saying of Jesus Christ, not written down in the bible) that he spoke to his disciples:

“I selected you before the world came into being.” [11] Another form is contained in an agrapha edition published with ecclesiastical permission to print. It reads: “I selected you before the world was created.” [12] Analogous statements can be found also in the New Testament. Thus St. Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians (1,4): “As he (God) has selected us through the same (Christ) before the world had been founded.” And in his second letter to Timothy he sp eaks (1,9) of the “grace given to us in Jesus Christ before the time of the world.” [13] There are still further hints to this fact in the New Testament, so by St. John (17,5) where Christ states: “And now transfigure me, Father, with yourself, with the clarity I had before the world existed.” And also at the same place (17,24): “You (Father) have loved me before the world has been founded.” “And St. Peter speaks in his first letter (1,20) of Christ ,who was chosen for that before the foundation of the world but at the end of times he revealed himself for your sake.” [14]

There is no need to comment the apocryphal word of Jesus and its confirmation by the disciples. Apart from that, any comment could be understood as an exegesis which to perform as a non-theologian I am not competent. Suffice it to remark that we are dealing with a statement of divine and sober depth and elucidation that cannot be explored intellectually, particularly since also the spiritual origin of humankind, the spiritual anthropogenesis, lights up in it. A frightening majority of Western huma nkind has however lost the memory of this spiritual origin in a disastrous manner and to an almost fatal extent. The agraphon could restore it to the one or the other as a certainty. This would be an enormous improvement. Those people however, who regard Christ after their resignation to believe, only as a legendary appearance since he never became evident to them, cannot use his word. But those who do believe have avoided to speak about it. In the protestant literature it was only Karl Barth (according to authorities of the church), who mentioned these statements in his “Kirchliche Dogmatik” (Ecclesiastical Dogmatics) without comment, only as a hint to the pre-existence of Jesus Christ. These facts are characteristic. Neither for the rational nor the irrational human being it is possible to understand or accept here, let alone to draw consequences.

Apart from this incompetence with regard to consciousness, there might be another reason to be silent about these statements: the fear that freedom of will might break up, even become illusory when consciously acknowledging them. This however is a rational false conclusion. At first the concept ‘fr eedom of will’ is a misconcept, acceptable only if one interprets it as ‘freedom to decide.’ Second, there is no loss of freedom to decide when we practice it in our day-to-day life, since the basic decision has been taken not in the visible but in the invisible, in this case at a pre-earthly “time.” We have no choice but to live according to this pre-determination; to do it or not to do it, remains our freedom or unfreed om. And where remains the evolution? Can the secondary process of the given or predetermined potential to mature be called progress or evolution?

An intelligent contemporary of unknown name remarked recently: “Time is an invention to prevent that everything happens at the same time.” In our case all things happened at “the same time” in the invisible which can here in the visible only occur one after the other, which can also be called “evolution” or, over a longer period, “higher development.”

The restraint to think these statements to the end, expresses itself as the fear to lose the arrogant anthropocentricity and to have to do without the little page of glory for having individually participated in the accomplished but misunderstood evolution. To talk of a renunciation of freedom of will is not only unnecessary but wrong. We will come across this fact in a further example. We live by all means not without freedom to decide, since our entire life consists mainly in the task to remain faithful to the decision that had formerly been taken in the invisible and in all freedom. What is felt as a renunciation, turns out to be m erely a transfer from the visible into the inv isible. The decision taken there became valid for our life here, and that constellation, in which this occurred, is at the same time also our most inner core which rests deeply within us and accompanies us at all times. In contrast to that, the continuously changing and variable little Ego, being proud of so many ephemeral things like freedom of will and being often fairly capricious, contrary to the inner security of the core protecting us, plays its sometimes necessary role which is however indispensable for human encounters.

Selected ten billion years ago: can we speak here of evolution? Certainly the above example deals with humans of a special kind, the disciples of Jesus Christ. But anybody looking back on his life can detect, if he finds at all anything evolutionary, that not he himself was the trigger but his inner voice or the so called accident or something else apparently independent fr om him. Not without reason there is the saying felt as a praise: “He remained faithful to himself.” Where and of what kind of knowledge may this saying come from, to which we cannot find an egocentric undertone?

Going back to the disciples, even there was “Development.” Saulus became St.Paul at the decisive moment. St. John wrote the Apocalypse at old age. Everything was within them from the beginning. Faithful to themselves they decided only according to that pre-decision to which they had agreed in advance with regard to talent and consciousness.

The insight into the true character of what is called “evolution,” also with regard to the human being and to consciousness, appears to me important. The power of acceptance of what is called evolution as seen from the visible, must be reduced to the correct value, since otherweise we risk to lose finally the participation in the invisible origin that constitutes all of us all the time.

Two Examples for the At-Once Structure

The obstacle to our question consists of the fact that we have to attempt today, due to lingustic lack of expression, to cope with constellations alien or non-existent to the visible realm, by using an inadequate terminology. Here belongs among others the simultaneity that is said to be valid for constellations in the invisible. We are dealing here with that simultaneity of all possible tenses that belongs to the Orig in as far as anything “belongs” to the Origin.

Up to recently it was generally understood that the invisible can neither be grasped nor comprehended. The detections of nuclear physics have opened our eyes; there they are working with matters that are “invisible” but at least mathematically very well describable. The invisible simultaneity inherent in the origin and expressed in the basic constellations, cannot be desribed mathematically but for the attentive it may become evident. Here are two examples for that from the area of dream psychology and of nuclear physics.

The Core Dreams

I realized that a particular type of dreams, that does not belong to the so- called high dreams, shows a particular uncertainty. This uncertainty consists of the large difficulty of the dreamer during the reconstruction of the dream after being awake again. Although he recalls very clearly the very complex content of the dream and its meaning, the dreamer cannot bring the dream into its consecutive order which is necessary for its presentation. Again and again he hesitates, while attempting this, because it remains unclear, in what consecutive order this or that dream element occurred. Although such a dream can very well be called significant and meaningful and at the same time pointing to the visible realm and hence being directional and matched to a presentation requiring consecutive order, the rationally reconstructing dreamer does not succeed in putting the individual dream elements into the order of a firm succession. How can this be explained? If I dare give a hint of my own, since I'm not a professional psychologist, this hint may be regarded by psychologists, as far as they know this kind of dream, as a contribution to dream interpretation. And it is less the hint I am giving, but the hint this type of dream itself gives with regard to its origin. Since the meaning of these dreams is significant, they are not at all chaotic. With their resistance to a rational presentation requiring succession, they make their origin known as well as the ir character: they mirror in a certain sense the at-once structure of the invisible origin that appears dream-like in the inner realm of the psyche, but opens itself only with difficulties to the security demand of the mental-rational consciousness. This at-once structure is insofar a salient feature of the origin, since it is “timeless” before all times and hence undivided, but contains potentially the three phases of t he appearing terrestrial time.

In this type of dreams our participation in the impact of the archaical, of the pristine, becomes noticeable; from the structural point of view they are not only deep dreams but, as I would like to call them, core dreams. The concept archaical should not be understood here art-historically or as a synonym for “primitive” but with regard to consciousness and in that sense as it has been defined in “The Ever-present Origin” for the archaical consciousness structure, valid also for the undivided pristine consciousness. [15] From this, all three consciousness structures presently constituti ng ourselves have emanated and are still emanating th at will shortly be mentioned again. Looked at it this way, it turns out that such core dreams contain, or are, a self representation of the simultaneity or, better of the ‘at-once.’ This ‘at-once’ is inherent as a potential in everything that rests archaically in the creative pristine constellation which shares our life in its mostly latent and invisible way, unless it even contains its origin.

Only G. R. Heyer has pointed at this rare type of dream, as I realized later, in his letter of January 15, 1948. Continuing from a brief note in his book “Vom Kraftfeld der Seele” (About the Power Fields of the Soul) where he remarks “that not those dreams are most ‘profound’ which are happening in pictures and scenes. . . but those which are mere states.”he writes “that it is well known to the psychologist from his work on the interpretation of dreams , that there exists an unsolvable problem insofar, as a simultaneous state of one together with the other, possible in the unconscious, can be thought and reported only consecutively as soon as it becomes conscious,” an attempt which proves unfeasible as he demonstrates with a hunting dream of one of his patients. [16]

In the core dreams a track of the invisible or at least a track of the complex constellation inherent in the invisible origin becomes perceivable: its reflection presses, so to speak, into the visible and becomes transparent, which makes it evident to the mental consciousness. Where this execution of becoming transp arent and evident succeeds-in this execution it is no more relevant that it is based on science or belief-our three-membered consciousness structure is integrated within or by the pristine universal consciousness.

The insight into these contexts makes accessible to those, who are capable of opening themselves to them without reservation, immediately and for ever, the life altering experience of sharing the unexplorable seclusion and the all-illuminating clarity of the World Foundation, the Origin, the Tao, the Divine, of God. The Taoist could then claim to have reached Tao, the Hindu to have experienced samadhi, the Zen Buddhist to have received satori, the Christian could confess like St.Paul that God dwells in the “inaccessible light” and the Athos monk could claim to have perceived the uncreated light. [17]

All three consciousness structures as mentioned above, the mental-rational, the mythical-psychic and the magical-vital are becoming transparent with regard to the universal consciousness. But this is equivalent to the mutation into the integral consciousness as executed by us. This may be called ‘integral’ from our point of view because it is capable to integrate itself consciously with the universal.

It may be allowed to consider so-called psychical phenomena like the core dreams, as belonging to the charming, appalling, sometimes also demonic interim realm, where they light up not as flash-like intuitions (originating from the spirit), but as images in the twilight zone between invisibility and visibility. But this enables us to execute the mutation into the integral, which makes it possible to experience the world no longer as only unperspectival-mythical or to grasp the world well-aimed perspectively and hence rationa lly, but to perceive it a-perspectively and a-rationally (i.e. freed from perspectival fixation and rational target directedness) as a whole down to its origin.

The Nuclear Process

Let us now turn to the nuclear physics example. We owe the remark on a constellation in the nuclear physics area, that resembles the timeless constellation of the core dreams, to the brilliant observational gift and expressiveness of Werner Heisenberg. Both contain the prealigning force of simultaneity which is inherent in the invisible. This simultaneity is called “synchronicity” by C.G.Jung, [18] it is however limited to phenomena occurring in the glaring visible and being provable in day-to-day life. His meaning of simultaneity relates to occurrences different from those becoming visible in the nuclear process or in the core dreams. It should be emphasized that the principle of synchronicity is not concerned with the simultaneity of different time sections, but with the simultaneous occurrence of two events of equal content which are however causally not interrelated. I mention this type of occurrence since its evidence offers the potential of a new evaluation of timely processes. Synchronicity is not so much simultaneity but acausal coincidence.

Genuine simultaneity of different time sections may however in its comprehensive meaning be understood as timelessness. Using the term “simultaneity” that contains the concept “time” while having to designate something that eliminates the timely aspect, thus leading to the concept of “timelessness” indicates again the terminological difficulty already mentioned. Since the “simultaneity” contains also the aspect of coincidence, e.g. of two synchronistic events, it may be replaced by the term “timelessness” only in a restricted sense, since it excludes any events which are always tied to specific times. Therefore I suggested the term “at once” that contains the time only in a hidden sense, since the at-once contains the timeless aspect. While becoming conscious of the character and the structure of the at-once that denies the timely aspect, since it expresses a constellation existing before any time, and hence containing the time only as a potential, we understand “at once” that we are not only dealing with a timeless structure, where there is no time, but with a much richer structure. After all, the invisible origin extends its impact from its pretemporary cons tellation into the temporary present. Therefore its “at-once” is timeless only as far as we consider it merely from its presence permanently acting within us. When realizing its presence it becomes more evident, and when we take it into account the timelessness changes into the consciously realized freedom of time: origin and presence are an “at-once,” freed from time and freeing ourselves from it. The realms of origin and presence, rationally separated by mistake, obtain in their ‘at-once’ a wealth, which has up to now never consciously been realized. The consciously realized ‘at-once’ of both realms i s the enrichment, that comes into effect in the achieved freedom of time. [19]

The ultimate degree of this effect consists of our understanding of reality becoming transparent, thanks to the freedom of time (that includes the ego freedom, i.e., being liberated from the ego instead of a regress into egolessness), since it realizes the whole as an interplay of origin and presence and hence of the invisible and the visible. In this transparency that great event may occur, which the Athos monks called seeing the “uncreated light,” which was called by St. Paul (in the first letter to Timothy [6, 16]) the “inaccessible light” in which “God dwells.”

Some of this transparency which, differently described, is also inherent in the “Invisible Origin” irradiates as a remote possibility and potential not only the core dreams but also the nuclear realm.

In his lecture “Nuclear Physics and Causal Law” Werner Heisenberg points out “that within very small space-time-domains, i.e. in ranges of dimensions of elementary particles, space and time are strangely blurred in such a way, that one can no longer define correctly the concepts earlier and later. Macroscopically the space-time-structure would remain unaltered, but when experimenting in very small space-time-domains, one should be aware that processes could run in a timely reverse order as compared to its causal sequence” [20]    (See also p.20)

The “very small space-time-domains” characterizing the nuclear process and situated almost in the invisible, indicate the same constellation as we have met in the core dreams. That in the atomic constellation certain “processes apparently run in a reverse direction as compared to their causal sequence” indicates nothing else, but that cause and effect are not only interchanged but “it is no longer possible to define correctly the concepts earlier and later,” since there is no more earlier or later. This applies also to the core dreams, where the reporter is unable to tell whether this or that element occurred earlier or later, making it impossible for him to deduce a causal sequence, an order of events, out of the constellation. Here and there time is not yet existent, at least not in its present form. Thus simultaneity or the ‘at-once’ dominate also in these high-intensity atomic constellations.

At a higher degree of differentiation in an Aristotelian-Thomistic sense and therefore sometimes overexposed as compared to my remarks on the ‘at-once,’ the phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius ensues the just quoted statement of Werner Heisenberg and assumes “that it may become necessary to take also the time to be quantized in nuclear processes. There must exist smallest durations of time” quanta are a physics concept for smallest undividable quantities“ during which time does not flow. Within a time element there would be no ‘it will be’ and ‘it was.’ The processes would run in a mode of being of equal actuality.” Hence “an exactly ontological explanation of the nature of empirical time [arrives] equally at a time quantized in its very basis.” With this definition Conrad-Martius is close to what I designated the at-once structure of the invisible origin (she calls it the “the very basis”) which becomes clear in her statement: “A singular quantum of being and time can therefore not be understood as timely or even measured.” [21]  With this she expells the time quantum out of the temporality of this world. But should it not be seen as a first growth into the visible out of the time form called by her the “eonic world time,” “standing between our time and Godís eternity,” ? “In the eonic reality” which is und erstood in the Aristotelian sense as cyclic, “the future already exists and the past remains, since everything is totally present,” to quote from a presentation of her conception by Gebhard Frei. [22] But the total presence without “being” and “remaining” and without the Aristotelian corresponding antinomy calling it cyclic, this is the signature of the pristine at-once which appears psychical in the core dream and physical in the nuclear process and if at all locally bound-is only there present.

Apart from all this one should not forget that these nuclear processes, even when recognizing certain limitations, are the foundations of life and of our entire physical construction. In the core dreams as well as in the physical processes, that pristine ground constellation is represented in its adequate manner, which is also valid for the most inner nature of the human, as long as he is staying in the invisible. Everything there is unblocked by space and time, the keystones of the visible. There the spiritual core of the human is conceived, since also the disciples were-albeit special humans. There the elementary particles of atoms as structural elements of matter are being composed. There the basic constellation of his latent inner nature appears to the human, when carried out of space and time into deep sleep. In all three forms represented so far, there rests the imperishable core and germ of the human, of matter and of-it may be allowed to say-the human soul. There it is determined what later, when passing into the visible, expresses itself as fate and is interpreted as evolution which, when seen in this manner, are only secondary processes of the space-time-free basic constellation in the invisible.

The Present Future

At least the occidental part of humanity is still largely future oriented. It still has not realized that it chases after what is already its own. This chase is in the end a flight, i.e. a flight out of the presence which, apart from the past, contains also the future events. For all those who are sympathetic to the thought that evolution is a secondary process, the above classification of the future should not be difficult.

In earlier works and in other contexts I have frequently drawn attention to various statements of physicists, poets, painters and others who have consciously formulated this new assessment of time including the future.

Premonition and Foresight

Before coming back to those statements I may remind of certain events that everybody has heard of and which have occurred with certainty and may have happened even to some readers personally. They are nonetheless denied to some extent, at best the conclusions a re not drawn from them and the event itself is being plaid down. We are dealing with those cases where the persons concerned have escaped their certain death. They followed a premonition, so to speak, a foresight. A flight already booked is not boarded immediately before take-off, although there are only a few steps to the entrance. Even the expensive ticket price does not keep them from following their inspiration not to fly with that particular airplane. Several hours later the news is broadcast that this airplane is crashed and all passengers dead.

In this context it may be reminded of the well-known foresight the young Goethe had after his farewell from Friederike Brion at Sesenheim. After a brief description of this wrench he reports:

Now I went on horseback on the footpath towards Drusenheim, and there one of the most peculiar foresights overcame me. I saw, not with my bodily eyes, but with the eyes of the mind, me myself coming towards me on the same footpath on horseback and clothed as I never was: it was pike grey with a little gold in it. As soon as I shook myself out of this dream the appearance had vanished. It is however strange that I wore this cloth eight years later not by choice but by accident, when I traveled the same path to visit Friederike again. Whatever the background of these things, the strange phantom gave me some comfort in that instance of separation. [23]

Those cases that irritate the rational human conduce him easily to deny the well-founded premonition, to call preconceptions like those of Goethe hallucinations and to dismiss events like these as accidents, since he still believes that there are only blind accidents. They do exist; but let us be careful, blind accidents are a small minority.

Everybody who has still some connection to the invisible knows that the majority of cases considered to be accidents are acts of providence. These acts of providence may also be called correspondences that exist between the inner constellation of the individual and the outer of his environment. These correspondences may however become effective only if the individual is deeply trustful and unintentionally “in the order”: In that case the events coming naturally to him correspond to his predecision which, innate from the invisible and sprung from the Divine, is the basic chord of his life may this be of a tragical or a blissful kind.

For those separated however, not only the above-mentioned cases of premonition and foresight are enigmas, but also the agraphon of Ephraem and the confirming statements of the disciples. After all, future events must not be predictable. What would happen to the freedom of decision if the future is already predetermined in advance? Humans, who conclude in this way, feel degraded to the puppet of fa te, but they are merely at the mercy of that intellect which has lost the rebonding, the religion, into the evidence of the invisible. They know nothing of the pregiven and by the individual condecided course of life, to which he who was saved from crash remains faithful, since he obeyed his “inner voice,” as it is said. In addition-to remain with this example the waiver of the flight was only obedience and faithfulness to his predetermined course of life. It was his personal freedom to decide to take the flight or to leave it. A renunciation of freedom of will (in the sense of freedom of decision) is therefore out of the question.

Three Types of Statements

The actuality of the future as described so far, is only real as far as this is at all rationally conceivable, as far as we accept the complex constellation in the invisible, which can bring its central at-once into representation only as a succession, i.e. a timely flow of life. Several scientists like philosophers and psychologists, artists and poets have already expressed the knowledge around the fact that the time-phase future of this world may be simultaneously inherent also in the other time phases of this world.

It is quite difficult to coordinate their statements which are different with regard to starting point and terminology. Only the respect for the intellectual integrity and severity of the researcher in question will then guarantee that statements, meant and intended differently, are not carelessly interrelated. This risk can be avoided by paying special attention to the basic structure and the essential reference of those statements, and less to the intellectual and linguistic formulations of the specific science. If this does not happen, the different styles of physics, philosophy, psychology, of the artists and poets form an unsurmountable obstacle for revealing collectively new intellectual approaches which, while visible in their basic stucture, may remain incompatible in their expressions.

Since we deal in these statements with references to the all-inherent basic structure of the invisible origin (references for the first time formulated exoterically and dispassionately), any protest against the diffamation of the readings of these basic common structures as being mere speculation is unnecessary. Each theme has its own dignity or indignity. The dignity of the theme of this script renders any careless proceeding impossible. It is always good to know what one does. This is certainly difficult. But with this theme such a knowledge is necessary.

It is of course not possible to quote all the accessible statements here. There have been far too many in the last millennia. As an example, I have dared to comment the Tao according to our present consciousness structure. I will limit myself to statements of our century, since its wisdom is based in recent sources, ways of thinking and expression. This appears to me decisive as well as relevant and obliging for our present understanding of ourselves and the world. They are all a reference to the presently emerging new i ntegral consciousness. Since they represent a hardly recognized counterbalance to the prevalent destructive instinct with their depth and their recognition of all that the majority appears to discard, a reference to them may certainly be appropriate. This even more so, since those making these statements are personalities of world esteem. There are the physicists Arthur Stanley Eddington, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan; philosophers like Sri Aurobindo who is much more than a philosopher; psychologists like C. G. Jung and G. R. Heyer; researchers of the future like Aldous Huxley and Robert Jungk; painters like Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso; poets like StÈphane Mallarmé, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Marcel Proust, R. M. Rilke, Robert Musil, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Guillén. With all of them, three types of statements can be distinguished:

With some the insight into the actuality of the future expresses itself unspoken in the fact that in their statements the inner execution can be recognized, which I had called in my writings the “overcoming of time”;

in the statements of others their experience, consciously or not, of the nearness to the origin appears;

and there are those, who either deductively or spontaneously articulate distinctly in brief sentences, which become key sentences, the fact that future is presence.

Additional comments to this disposition:

the overcoming of time is condition for the at-once structure as part of the invisible to become evident:

only this evidence enables obliging statements to be made about presence and effectiveness of the origin, which p rotrudes into and engraves the space-time-world;

only after this overcoming has happened or has been perceived, the realization of the validity of this at-once for presence and future also for this world becomes possible.

This makes it clear that I do not try to give a merely mental-rational explanation of this extremely complex and basic constellation, which is based on belief, knowledge and recognition, but that I endeavour this basic constellation to become evident and transparent to our intensified consciousness in an a-rational, integral way.

The Overcoming of Time

It may be advisable to start with two examples which appear at first sight to be harmless if not irrelevant, but are highly symptomatic. It is about the titles of two books that appeared in 1944 in London and 1952 in Bern. Only thirty to fourty years ago these titles would have let the books pass without notice; quite different twentyfive to seventeen years ago: at that time they were immediately widely discussed and accepted despite all the astonishment and bewilderment.

At first it was the title that Aldous Huxley gave to his novel: “Time Must Have a Stop.” This title is a Shakespeare citation. Unfortunately its German translation: “Zeit mufl enden” gives the wrong impression of the authorís intention. [24] What Aldous Huxley meant, was briefly to show the necessity to reduce the exclusive validity of the measured time to its appropriate measure. Not the time in the sense of the Shakespeare quotation comes to an end, but the three-phase time consideration or handling, i.e. it “must have a stop” in order to make the participation of the more essential “time” acceptable, that contains by means of the at-once potentially also our time and reaches into our day-to-day life. That this was his final intention Aldous Huxley confirmed to me in May 1954 in St. Paul de Vence. These facts, that distinguish his book, are equivalent to the attempt to overcome the sole validitity of the time of this world and to give conscious recognition to the pristine at-once for its effectiveness down here. This recognition of what I call the founded at-once is however also the recognition that future is always presence.

By the way and this must unfortunately be stated here this keen sense of smell of Aldous Huxley's for the genuine values and for the transparency that follows not only from the overcoming of the Shakespearean understanding of time as confirmed by him, but also from his appreciation of Stéphan Mallarmé's stat ement [25] that he proved with “time must have a stop” and his ”Philosophia perennis,” this is only the one side of his nature. Tragically it remained intellectual yearning he apparently was unable to fulfill, since otherwise he had not become the propagandist of the synthetic mescalin (with his book “The Doors of Perception”) and the trigger of the epidemic of drug addiction that contaminates presently mainly the large jouth groups in Europe and America: To the genuine demand of the modern youth which is commendably revolting against the dullness of an excessive material wealth to this demand for extraordinary experiences (only attainable through self-work: through purging towards the invisible origin by means of gradually discerning the more intensive integral consciousness), which are matching the material “wealth,” he had opened the easy evasion to find the desired experiences without self-work through narcotism; but “inspiration” thus gained by trickery is doomed to death.

The other title expresses this constellation of presence and future more clearly although the book itself is more pragmatic than Huxley's. It was Robert Jungk, one of the soundest and fairest contemporary journalists and one of the most significant researchers of the future who gave his book about future questions of the American (as well European) civilization the title: “The Future Has Already Begun.” [26] That the meaning of this title which, one would think, contradicts the general thinking of the time, has been accepted (notwithstanding certain misinterpretations) indicates that this novel concept was subliminally already generally valid. This fact appears to me symptoma tic and justifies mentioning in this context the book titles of these two important authors.

A similarly executed overcoming of time shows in the perception already contained in the statement of Werner Heisenberg above, that the sequence of time and hence the dependence of cause and effect can be reversed. [27] Pascual Jordan who founded quantum biology together with Erwin Schrodinger and Ernst Dessauer, [28] and who also investigated philosophically the “problem of simultaneity” [29] writes:

. . . as a result of the quantum theory and its study of mesons, for example, we have learned something new about time and causality. On occasion, with or inside the explosion of an atomic nucleus under bombardment of a very fast particle of matter, the usual order of events is reversed: the explosion comes first, then followed by its cause. This has enormous implications for psychology and parapsychology, since such reversals of the cause-and-effect sequence are proved possible and philosophically valid. [30]

That these deductions from nuclear processes can presently not only be drawn, but can be shown to be relevant, may well be taken as an overcoming of the prevailing time thinking: the projecting of the pristine at-once structure into our three-dimensional world is thus implicitly accepted. Because in the origin, earlier and later, cause and effect and the three time phases are an at-once. If this at-once lights up in our three-dimensionally limited and observed world, this minimal motion element conveys to us the impression of an open directional tendency that represents to our mental capacity, to our interpretation and to our descriptional capability also a reversed sequence of events.

Before we turn to the statements of some poets we should mention the achievements of C. G. Jung that have by themselves contributed to a newly founded assessment of time.

The synchronicity principle of C. G. Jung, which is limited to the empirical investigation and clarification of non-causal or accidental but meaningfully connected coincidences in every-day events, has already been mentioned. [31] Any coincidence is a form of the at-once in accordance with its simultaneity character, although only a faint reflexion of its genuine invisible primitive form-as long as one may call the at-once structure a form, since it is from our point of view at the same time formless.

Any synchronicity event is characterized by its non-causal structure that C. G. Jung called “acausal”-a terminologically regrettable denotation since, i nstead of the negation “non-,” the Greek “alpha negativum” is being used, which may however also be used as the “alpha privativum” (the liberating “a” ), which expresses no negation but a liberation. I have therefore always distinguished between uncausal (or non-causal), which denotes a state “before” causality and acausal which describes being liberated with regard to consciousness (meaning freedom from causality). The acausality or freedom from causality is effective where we live as ego-free (but not ego-less) in the order, i.e. in accordance with the world total, the origin or whatever these concepts be called. Although some parallelism exists between the non-causality of synchronous events and that of nuclear processes, as already C.G. Jung points out, it appears to me that synchronous events occur within the precausal or not-yet-causal magical structure. Instead of the causal connex it is associated with the vital connex, the pec uliarity and effectiveness of which I showed for the magical structure. [32] In any case, this concept of Jung shows the psychological attempt to overcome the mere running time by recognizing the non-causal or precausal structure.

C. G. Jung came a step closer to the original constellation by researching the “anticipatory dreams.” [33] They are dreams which anticipate future events. The mostly symbolically predreamed events have later come into the life of the dreamer as reality. He as a psychologist locates the source for these phenomena into the mightiness of the better knowledgable unconsciousness-so to speak into the psychical mirroring of the at-once that contains also the future.

As to the statements of poets we will first quote those by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil. They contain, each in its way, a mostly unspoken reference to the “overcoming of time” or “overcoming of the time concept” as I named it first in the book “Occidental Transformation” (1942/43). [34]