I’m often asked who is on the cover of III. Starting left to right, that’s Milton Klonsky, a New York Village poet/critic/wiseman, who appears in this book only after he’s dead.
Then at the top, the psychologist Carl Jung, founder of depth psychology and the serious study of images, fairytales, psychological types, and other topics that bear his stamp.
Next is Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was fascinated with his own dreams and used them as a way to expand his consciousness and understand his “whole” self better. Jung and Pauli exchanged thoughts, going into quantum physics and depth psychology together in a fascinating correspondence.
Pauli thought he dreamed for collective reasons as well as personal – that his dreams were representative of archetypes and that his exploration of them with Jung helped society. Jung thought the same and discussed these dreams in books, without identifying Pauli. The number 137 haunted Pauli, being mysteriously associated with his scientific studies and himself personally. Pauli was so synchronistic that the moment he realized he was in hospital number 137, though he was only 58 years old, he felt sure he would never leave there alive.
Indeed, that was the room in which he died. As Wikipedia puts it, “In 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max Planck medal. In that same year, he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. When his last assistant, Charles Enz, visited him at the Rotkreuz hospital in Zurich, Pauli asked him: “Did you see the room number?” It was number 137. Throughout his life, Pauli had been preoccupied with the question of why the fine structure constant, a dimensionless fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137. Pauli died in that room on 15 December 1958.”
