Synthetic Tradition: counter to the analytic tradition is the synthetic tradition. Fundamental to this second tradition is the assumption that we can only identify “something” when we synthesize: (a) put things together, and/or (b) identify patterns and meaning. This second tradition is commonly found in the humanities, in many of the behavioral sciences (including humanistic psychology and cultural anthropology). It is in the attempt to stick things together, to find what is held in common by several entities, and to discover meaning and purpose in that which initially seems to be meaningless and purposeless.
Much of what I have attempted in this essay comes from the Synthetic tradition. Along with Don Howard, John Van Eenwyck, George Klein, Carl Jung, Rudolph Otto, and many other “synthesizers,” I have been trying to “make sense” of nothingness. We synthesizers construct “from whole cloth” and interpret that which might ultimately be nothing but randomness. Everything is an ink plot, and we, as human beings, are great at generating a story about the splattering of ink on a blank piece of paper. Ultimately, we are pulled, as homo constructus, toward a synthesized (often simplified) version of reality.
Synchronicity-Redux: at the extreme of the synthetic tradition, we find the concept of synchronicity. As I have already mentioned, Carl Jung proposed that perceptible events are linked together imperceptible. An “acausal” connection is established between two or more entities. Meaning and purpose are to be discovered among a variety of entities that seem unrelated to one another. At first glance, their relationship seems circumstantial. Or it is found only in the mind and heart of the observing person. However, with further exploration, there is something that ties the events together—and important guidance can be found in this exploration.
According to Jung (1960, p. 25), synchronicity “means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” The key point in this statement is that Jung finds the unifying force (the “glue”) which brings and holds external events together is to be found not in their causal relationship, but instead in one’s internal psychic state.
As a noted Jungian, Ira Progoff (193, pp. 13-14) has drawn an important distinction:
“. . . Jung’s work . . . enables him to deal with “psychological facts” without making them “nothing but” psychological. There is a dimension of human experience that is not external to us in the sense that it can be directly and tangibly grasped. Rather, it is within us, but the word within must also be understood metaphorically. It reflects a depth in us as human beings and also depth of the universe. Perceiving one, we perceive the other. But we cannot do so directly, as we would in laying our hands on something and grasping it. We can only do so indirectly, or symbolically.”
Thus, we are led once again to the powerful role played by symbols, especially in capturing something about our vast internal psyche and equally as vast as the universe in which we dwell. It is through the use of symbols that we can not only convey something about nothingness and its transformation into Being, but also about the events that seem related to one another in an acausal vacuum.
