Jung loved to repeat a story about a Chinese rainmaker which his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower, told him was a personal experience. Wilhelm was visiting a village devastated by a drought at a time when they sent for a rainmaker. When the rainmaker - who, as was normal in China at the time, was a Buddhist priest - arrived, he was asked what he would require. He asked only for a small hut to live in at the edge of the village. He then retired to that hut. \r\nAt the end of three days, he came out of the hut and it began to rain. While the people of the village scampered in delight, Wilhelm asked the priest how he had brought the rain. The priest said that when he came to the village, he could feel that it was 'out of Tao'; that is, emotionally disturbed. That made him feel 'out of Tao' as well. So he withdrew to the hut until he was once more 'in Tao'. When he did so, the rain came. \r\nThe goal is to experience life simultaneously as both a personal experience and a symbolic act. This is hard to describe, but it can become normal to look at every action in the day, every person we come into contact with, every event we hear about in the world as symbolic. Outer events seem to speak to our inner needs. Personal experience seems to speak to outer events. Out lives seem synchronous with those around us, for better or worse.

• experience
• myth
• taoism
• tao
• symbolic action system
• synchronicity
• balance
• life
• time
• jung

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of the new physics, became deeply involved in the issues of philosophy and humanism. In Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics, he wrote of physicists having to renounce thoughts of an objective time scale common to all observers, and of events in time and space that are independent of our ability to observe them. Heisenberg stressed that the laws of nature are no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles – that is, with the contents of our minds. Erwin Schrödinger, the man who formulated the fundamental equation of quantum mathematics, wrote an extraordinary little book in 1958 called Mind and Matter. In this series of essays, he moved from the results of the new physics to a rather mystical view of the universe that he identified with the “perennial philosophy” of Aldous Huxley. Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary

• heisenberg
• physics
• philosophy
• humanism
• objectivity
• time
• schrodinger
• reference point
• huxley
• hinduism
• quantum
• nature
• knowledge
• perspective
• thought
• mathematics
• tao
• literature
• scale
• body
• matter

William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury) told us a story about Sir Walford Davies, who was then Master of the King's Music.  He had been present on an occasion when Sir Walford was instructing an untrained choral group in hymn-singing.  He started them out with some familiar hymn which they bellowed forth with gusto to impress the Archbishop, and the musical effect was terrible.  But there was also present a small professional choir, and Sir Walford asked them to go through several verses of a completely unfamiliar hymn so that everyone could memorize the tune.  'Now,' he said, 'we're all going to sing this new hymn.  But one thing is absolutely important: you must not try to sing it.  Just think of the tune and let it sing itself.'  The result was such a marked improvement that he turned to the Archbishop and said, 'Isn't that also good theology?

• music
• education
• zen
• theology
• taoism
• tao