Gary Zukav on physics as “the study of the structure of consciousness”

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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).