Entersection

According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.

Carl Jung, the swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.[9]

Jung’s friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world…[10]

If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.
— Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1979), p. 56.

Footnotes

[9] Carl Gustav Jung in his Collected Works, Bollingen Series XX, Volume 9, Part 2: “Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self”, Edition 2, translated from the German by R. F. C. Hull, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 71.

[10] Wolfgang Pauli in his essay “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler’s Theories”, translated from the German by Priscilla Silz, in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, written with Carl G. Jung, (Taylor and Francis), p. 175. First published in English (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955). First published as Naturerklärung und Psyche, (Zürich, Switzerland: Rascher, 1952).

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
— Carl Gustav Jung in his essay “The Philosophical Tree”, paragraph 335, (1945). Available in Alchemical Studies, Collected Works Volume 13, translated by R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 265.

Although with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object.

Let us suppose that a certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. The projection-making factor then has a free hand and can realize its object—if it has one—or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power. As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.
— Carl Gustav Jung in “The Shadow and the Syzygy”, Part 1, “The Shadow,” paragraphs 16-17. Adapted from a lecture delivered to the Swiss Society for Practical Psychology in Zurich in 1948. Originally published in Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde und deren Grenzgebiete, Vol. I, (1948), p. 4. Available in Aspects of the Feminine, (Taylor & Francis, 1982), p. 166. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Cited in part by Victor Mansfield in his paper “The Guru-Disciple Relationship: Making Connections and Withdrawing Projections,” (March 1996).