Seeing Through the Visible World: Jung, Gnosis, and Chaos

In the author's wide-angle view, the universes within us and without are different orders of a single reality. Singer ( Boundaries of the Soul ), a Jungian psychoanalyst, weaves a unified picture of human experience out of Jungian psychology, the Gnostic gospels and theories of chaos suggested by quantum physics. She uses her own psychological and spiritual journeys and those of two patients to illustrate development in the invisible world of our minds and hearts, observing parallels to Gnostic belief passed on through tradition and described in documents found in Egypt in 1945. She sees a confirming development in modern science where, in a ``paradigm shift,'' uncertainty principles have come to prevail over Newtonian determinism. At ease discussing the work of Stephen Hawking, James Gleik and others, Singer maintains her focus on the individual's efforts to ``discover the invisible world, and to traverse the boundaries between the known and the unknown, and between the unknown and the unknowable.'' (Aug.)