Unus mundus, Latin for “one world”, is the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.
The idea was popularized in the 20th century by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, though the term can be traced back to scholastics such as Duns Scotus and was taken up again in the 16th century by Gerhard Dorn, a student of the famous alchemist Paracelsus.
The striving for me was to dig deeper into our very natures. It always the quest to understand the patterns that reside in us. The very idea for me was that in this quest to unify, the objective world(matter) with the world that resides in a center place. To me that place was the source from which all things manifest.
Jung, in conjunction with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, explored the possibility that his concepts of the archetype and synchronicity might be related to the unus mundus – the archetype being an expression of unus mundus; synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence”, being made possible by the fact that both the observer and connected phenomenon ultimately stem from the same source, the unus mundus.
So while there was this objective striving to see how such formations emerged as materiality of such expression, was a final construct that existed in that external world. For me this was something no one could quite explain to me, yet, as I moved forward I began to find such correlates as to others who tried to map that expression.
It was this psychoid aspect of the archetype that so impressed Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Embracing Jung’s concept, Pauli believed that the archetype provided a link between physical events and the mind of the scientist who studied them. In doing so he echoed the position adopted by German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Thus the archetypes which ordered our perceptions and ideas are themselves the product of an objective order which transcends both the human mind and the external world.
This as the idea emerged, I looked for what emergence might mean, as an example of a beginning, and the subsequent model that may emerge from that source. This then became know as the “arche,” and the tendency to form”(type)” as a movement forward in the solidifying of that expression. This was a matter bound expression, fully recognizing the need for a spiritual recognition of this opposition as a struggle in with consciousness to seek balance with materiality. Polarity, as the world of the real.
|One of Duchamp’s close friends Man Ray (1890–1976) was also one of Duchamp’s collaborators. His photograph ‘Dust Breeding’ (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes) from 1920 is a document of The Large Glass after it had collected a year’s worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York. See:
Dust Breeding (Man Ray 1920)
Such histrionically values were tied to such expressions to have found that the inner world and the outer-world were extremely connected. The observance not seen until it was understood that this psychology was topological interpreting itself from an inductive/deductive stance, as to the question, and with regard to the nature of the question.
Jung interpreted the practice of alchemy as the symbolic projection of psychic processes. In Psychology and Alchemy and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56), Jung’s empirical exploration and rediscovery of the objective psyche led him to recognise that the basis of the alchemist’s endeavour was the archetypal union of opposites by means of the integration of opposing polarities: conscious and unconscious, reason and instinct, spiritual and material, masculine and feminine. In the last summaries of his insights on the subject, influenced in part by his collaboration with the Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the old Jung envisions a great psycho-physical mystery to which the old alchemists gave the name of unus mundus (one world). At the root of all being, so he intimates, there is a state wherein physicality and spirituality meet. See:Reflections On Duchamp, Quantum Physics, And Mysterium Coniunctionis
This would place myself in the position of questioning this causal nature to have said that “will” was deeply connected to our psyche, to have not understood this deeper perception of a reality connection. Also, that such unification was deeper embedded in this practice of unification, so as to strive to form, as a example of an idea into expression.
|Betrayal of Images” by Rene Magritte. 1929 painting on which is written “This is not a Pipe”|
This alchemy valuation of that work toward expression was based on a fundamental reality of joining the objectified world with the nature of the source. This forming process, the constructs, as a fundamental structure of the reality given.