I was trying to email a friend about Jung’s theory of synchronicity… when my wife called me and if I had not known about Jung’s discovery I would not have seen it.
The backstory: two years ago I built a special bird feeding station for our garden. As gales often blow here I built it round a foundation plate of a marble-like slab some 18ins square from which four legs rise to provide a crossbar on which hang the normal wire mesh feeders. So air and ground feeding birds are cared for, and it does not blow over!
The dream A few nights ago in the strange way of dreams, the little birds milling around on the base plate turned into little people and I was feeding them not grain but Jungian words.
The Coincidence Here I was composing this long email about synchronicity when my wife called through to me: ‘look at that pheasant on the bird feeder!’
I only had to turn my head to look out of the window and there on that slab was the most beautiful black cock pheasant pecking away at the grain. ‘That’s amazing’ I thought because while we have seen plenty of gold pheasants we have never before seen a BLACK one as they are quite rare though not unknown. I had to photograph it.
I want you to notice its eye as a day or two ago I had been reading what Jung says about looking into an animal’s eye:-
“She (his patient) looks directly into the eyes of the animal, and they are full of woe and beauty because they contain the truth of life, an equal sum of pain and pleasure, the capacity for joy and the capacity for suffering. The eye of very primitive and unconscious men have the same strange expression of a mental state before consciousness, which is neither pain nor pleasure; one doesn’t know what it is. It is bewildering, but undoubtedly here she sees into the very soul of the animal.” … “This is an experience everyone should have in order to find again the connection with nature within” (My emphasis) (Interpretation of Visions)
This is not itself therapy though it comes from a therapeutic encounter and is a far wider reflection arising from their interaction, and it reminded me of our blue Burmese cat, Franzli, who would sit on my knee for hours while I was on my computer. From time to time he would raise his head and look up so directly into my eyes I was drawn into the depths of a silent engagement with this remarkable animal, with whom we had an almost human understanding.
From the pheasant photo if ever it were possible to have such eye to eye connection it seems likely there could be built up a similar sense of each other’s worlds.
Meaning. Our new Eco-Jung small group has only met once so far and I have been worrying as to how we could make meaningful Jung’s own involvement with Nature. Now there appeared unexpectedly this extraordinary bird at the very moment I needed him to illustrate the subject for me, and to amplify my dream which came back to mind, and to take to the new group.
If you are conversant with Jung you will remember he felt that both mind and matter belonged somehow to their common transcendental background. Marie Louise von Franz says: “Jung again and again encountered cases where rare outer events tended to coincide meaningfully with archetypal dream images”. (Psyche & Matter p298)
I am deeply distressed by the state of our planet caused, we now know, by human action which in my view stems largely not from malice but from thoughtlessness about how we use and abuse both ourselves, each other, and the matter of which both we and the planet are composed. Yet here nature gave me this astonishing bird moment…
Synchronicity is essentially meaningful, just as the scarab beetle was in Jung’s patient’s dream as a symbol of the rising sun as he tells us in MDR.
Had it not been for Jung none of this would have had meaning for me which also involved the feminine...
Richard Barwell, January 2025
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