Beyond Jung 2024 – Four Shillings and Sixpence: Synchronicity and Poetry

As a working poet, Richard Berengarten is interested, both theoretically and practically, in how Jung’s theory of synchronicity—with all its connections of specificity in time and place—is entangled in our ideas and experiences of inspiration, imagination, discovery and creativity. This means that he’s interested in how Jung’s theory is intervolved in both the sciences and the arts, and as much in our day-to-day experiences and dream-life as in, say, religious and visionary experience. To explore his themes and ideas, and to broach some questions arising from them, he’ll read a small selection of his own poems connected with synchronicity, which he’ll open for discussion. He aims, too, to broach some conjectures about the fractal geometries and symbolic configurations of both four (as in the Christian cross and the quaternity favoured by Jung) and six (as in the hexagonal forms that often occur in nature, in the hexagrams of the I Ching, and in the Star of Solomon), and the ways in which configurations such as these connect with synchronistic experience.