Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2

Shankar Vedantam· Host0:00

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. About a century ago, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was treating a young woman. He sat with his back to a window listening to his patient. [instrumental music] She told him about a dream she'd had. In it, she was given a piece of jewelry modeled after a beetle long considered sacred in Egyptian culture. The scarab beetle was associated in ancient Egypt with a divine force that moved the sun. Intricately carved scarab jewels were sometimes placed on the hearts of the dead to assist them in the afterlife. The young woman told the psychiatrist that in the dream she was given a golden scarab. As Jung listened to the story, he heard a tapping behind him. He turned to see a flying insect knocking [insect fluttering] against the windowpane. It was a beetle. In a monograph on what he calls synchronicity, Carl Jung wrote, "I opened the window [window opening] and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analog to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment." Scientists have debated Jung's theory for decades. Many