ABSTRACT
In this chapter Harald Atmanspacher explores relational and immanent experiences in relation to what he has called the Pauli-Jung conjecture, which is a coherent reconstruction of Pauli’s and Jung’s scattered ideas about the relationship between the mental and the physical and their common origin. It belongs to the decompositional variety of dual-aspect monisms, in which a basic, psychophysically neutral reality is conceived of as radically holistic, without distinctions, and hence discursively inexpressible. Epistemic domains such as the mental and the physical emerge from this base reality by differentiation. Within this conceptual framework, Atmanspacher identifies three different options to address so-called exceptional experiences, that is, deviations from typical reality models that individuals develop and utilise to cope with their environment. Such experiences can be understood (i) as either mental images or as physical events, (ii) as relations between the mental and the physical, and (iii) as direct experiences of the psychophysically neutral reality. These three classes are referred to as reified, relational and immanent experiences.
