Whatever You Think or Feel, the Universe Says Yes – Part II

The series

Introduction
Part I – The Attitude That Precedes You
Part II – The Scientific Frame: Unus Mundus
Part III – We Are Strange Attractors
Part IV – The Dark Side
Part V – Practical Kairomancy: Working with the Yes

The Scientific Frame: Unus Mundus

In the 1930s, something unusual began to happen in Zurich. Carl Jung, the psychologist who had broken with Freud and was developing his theory of the collective unconscious, struck up a correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the architects of quantum mechanics and a Nobel laureate in physics.

On the surface, they had little in common. Jung trafficked in dreams, symbols, and mythology, i.e., the messy, subjective terrain of the psyche. Pauli worked in mathematics and subatomic particles, the realm of precision and experimental verification. Yet they found themselves circling the same mystery from opposite directions.

Pauli had come to Jung initially as a patient, troubled by disturbing dreams and a psychological crisis. But as their relationship evolved from therapeutic to collaborative, they discovered they were both confronting the same uncomfortable truth: the old divisions weren’t holding. Mind and matter, subject and object, observer and observed, these neat categories that modernity had spent centuries establishing were breaking down. And the breakdown was happening in both psychology and physics simultaneously.

For Jung, the evidence was synchronicity, those meaningful coincidences that couldn’t be explained by cause and effect, where inner states and outer events rhymed in ways that seemed impossible yet undeniably happened. A patient dreams of a golden scarab beetle; the next day, a rare rose chafer (the closest thing to a scarab in Switzerland) taps at Jung’s window during their session. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it kept happening. The more Jung paid attention, the more he noticed these moments when the psyche and the physical world seemed to mirror each other, to participate in a single, unified pattern.

For Pauli, the crisis came from quantum mechanics itself. At the subatomic level, the act of observation changes what is observed. The electron doesn’t have a definite position until you measure it. Consciousness isn’t separate from the experiment. It’s entangled with it. The hard distinction between subject and object, the foundation of classical physics, dissolves at the quantum level. Matter behaves like it’s responsive, even aware.

Together, they reached for an old mediaeval term: unus mundus. “One world.”

Not mind and matter as separate substances that somehow interact. Not psyche and physis as two different realms. One world, one reality, expressing itself through different aspects that we’ve artificially divided.

As Pauli wrote: “Mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality.”¹

Let that sink in. This isn’t mysticism. This is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, one of the founders of modern quantum theory, stating that consciousness and physical reality are not separate things. They’re complementary aspects—like wave and particle, like the two sides of a coin. You can look at the one reality from the angle of subjective experience (mind) or from the angle of objective measurement (matter), but you’re always looking at the same thing.

The implications are staggering. If mind and matter are aspects of one reality, then consciousness isn’t a passive observer locked inside a skull, watching the world like a movie. It’s an active participant in the world’s unfolding. Not separate from matter but woven through it, influencing and being influenced at every level.

This is why high emotions have effects beyond the body that feels them. This is why attitude can shape situations. Not because consciousness reaches out across some magical ether to manipulate physical objects, but because the separation was always an illusion. When you change your inner state, you’re changing one aspect of a reality that is whole. And the other aspects—the ones we call “physical” or “external”—shift in response, the way ripples spread across water when you drop a stone.

Jung and Pauli weren’t the only ones seeing this. The physicist Niels Bohr kept a yin-yang symbol on his coat of arms with the motto Contraria sunt complementa—”Opposites are complementary.” Werner Heisenberg wrote about how quantum mechanics reveals that “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” ²The physicist John Wheeler proposed that we live in a “participatory universe” where consciousness is fundamental, not incidental, to reality’s structure.

And more recently, films like Interstellar have brought these ideas to a wider audience. The notion that consciousness might move through dimensions we can’t see, that love might be a force with geometric properties, and that what we call “supernatural” might just be natural laws we don’t yet understand. As Kip Thorne, the physicist who consulted on the film, explored in The Science of Interstellar, the boundaries between science and the mystical are far more porous than we’ve been taught.

But here’s what Jung and Pauli both insisted on: we don’t need to understand how this works to recognise that it works. We’re not going to solve the hard problem of consciousness or unify quantum mechanics with relativity in these pages. What we can do is pay attention to what happens, develop a practice around it, learn to work with it skillfully.

Moss puts it plainly: “We are less interested in how and why these things work than that they do work, and offer a rich harvest if we work—or rather, play—with them.”

The scientific framework gives us permission to take the phenomenon seriously without requiring us to explain everything. Unus mundus tells us: this isn’t magic violating natural law. This is natural law, deeper than we knew.

Consciousness and world aren’t separate. They never were.

Which means when you walk into that room carrying dread, you’re not just perceiving a neutral situation through a negative lens. You’re bringing dread into the situation as a real force, as actual as any physical object. The situation responds because it’s made of the same substance you are—this one world that is simultaneously mind and matter, psyche and physis, inner and outer.

The universe says yes not because it’s granting wishes from outside. It says yes because you are the universe, consciousness looking at itself, creating itself, response and stimulus woven into a single, seamless whole.

The question isn’t whether this is possible. Quantum mechanics has already shown us that reality is far stranger than common sense allows.

The question is: now that we know, what do we do with it?

The series

Introduction
Part I – The Attitude That Precedes You
Part II – The Scientific Frame: Unus Mundus
Part III – We Are Strange Attractors
Part IV – The Dark Side
Part V – Practical Kairomancy: Working with the Yes

1. “Mind and body could be interpreted as complementary aspects of the same reality” — This quote comes from Pauli’s exploration of complementarity, a concept he helped develop in quantum mechanics. In physics, complementarity means that a phenomenon (like light) can behave as both a wave and a particle depending on how you observe it—not that it switches between the two, but that both descriptions are true simultaneously, complementary aspects of a single reality. Pauli and Jung extended this principle beyond physics: just as wave and particle are complementary descriptions of light, mind and matter might be complementary descriptions of one underlying reality. This wasn’t just philosophical speculation for Pauli—his dreams and inner experiences directly influenced his scientific work, and he experienced firsthand how psyche and matter seemed to mirror and interact with each other in ways classical science couldn’t explain. Their collaboration produced the Pauli-Jung conjecture: that synchronicity represents moments when the underlying unity (unus mundus) becomes visible, when we catch a glimpse of the unified reality beneath the apparent division between inner and outer, subjective and objective. ↩︎
2. Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics, best known for his uncertainty principle, which states that you cannot simultaneously know both the exact position and exact momentum of a particle. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927. This particular quote comes from his philosophical reflections on quantum mechanics, where he grappled with the implications of observer participation in physical reality. In classical physics, observation was assumed to be passive—you could measure something without affecting it. But quantum mechanics revealed that the act of measurement fundamentally changes what’s being measured. The “method of questioning” matters: ask about position, and you get information about position but lose information about momentum. Ask about momentum, and the reverse happens. Nature doesn’t have definite properties independent of observation—it responds to how we engage with it. Heisenberg understood this wasn’t just a technical problem to be solved but a profound insight into the nature of reality itself: subject and object, observer and observed, are not separate. We don’t stand outside nature studying it; we’re participants in its unfolding, and our consciousness plays a constitutive role in what manifests. ↩︎