philosophy of symmetry

Wabi refers to a philosophical construct, a sense of space, direction, or path, while sabi is an aesthetic construct rooted in a given object and its features, plus the occupation of time, chronology, and objectivity.  

Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things. Symmetry reflects a Hellenistic heritage - as opposed to one connected to nature, yet the body is evoked the moment symmetry is imposed on an object.

Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous

http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/aesthetics.html

time space synchronicity

From Metanexus : "Jung’s fascination with physics actually began early in his career as a result of a series of dinners with Albert Einstein between 1909 and 1912. He later wrote that “It was Einstein who first started me thinking about a relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality…years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.” 

"His first public mention of the concept occurred 1928 during a seminar on the interpretation of dreams. Jung noted then that, in addition to the frequent appearance of common mythic motifs, dreams are often connected to coincidences in people’s lives. Taking a phenomenological stance, he said that while it would be “absurd” to consider the conjunction of dream material and life events to be causal, “it is wise to consider the fact that [these coincidences] do happen…The East…considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West.”⁹ In 1930, Jung mentioned the concept again in his speech honoring Richard Wilhelm, a scholar of Chinese philosophy who had died earlier that year. In this address (later published as part of his commentary on Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower), Jung said “the science of the I Ching is based not on the causality principle but on one which-hitherto unnamed because unfamiliar to us-I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle.” He concluded that “the causality principle” cannot explain “psychic parallelisms” that must somehow be connected but are not causally related.¹⁰ In 1935, he referred once again to the idea during lectures given in London. This time he equated synchronicity with the Chinese Tao and described it as “a peculiar principle active in the world so that things happen together somehow and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not.”¹¹ It was to be many years before Jung would write about this concept again, and when he did, his focus would shift from the empirical and phenomenological aspects of synchronistic phenomena to the ontological and archetypal nature of such events.¹² This shift was the outcome of his long term relationship with Wolfgang Pauli, which began in 1932, when Pauli sought help during a period of intense psychological distress.

This “crisis of his life”, as Pauli would later call the period between 1927 and 1932, was stimulated by his mother’s suicide, his father’s quick remarriage to a woman Pauli’s age, and the end of his own brief marriage to a cabaret singer, all complicated by his own meteoric rise in the world of physics. Pauli’s father suggested he seek treatment with Dr. Jung, and the two great men had their first meeting in January, 1932. By the time of this encounter, Pauli had already written a critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity so perceptive that Einstein later said Pauli was perhaps the only physicist who truly understood his work."

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10913/Default.aspx

layers

from Jung's Red Book

 "I am haunted by waters" 
   Norman Maclean A River Runs Through It

Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

Our fear of breaking surfaces/skin is a life saving instinct yet in dreams we breathe underwater

“In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&em