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psychological safety—the belief that we won’t be punished or ridiculed when we make a mistake—makes us more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent.

Being under the influence of a daimon was to be in a certain state. Just as we distinguish the states of trance and gnosis from the state of the normal waking mind, so the ancient Greeks used the word daimon to indicate a specific state of being that was different from normal everyday consciousness.

Goethe thinks of synchronistic events in the same “magical” way. Thus he says, in his conversations with Eckermann: “We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and ourselves exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike.”53

The water that the mother, the unconscious, pours into the basin belonging to the anima is an excellent symbol for the living power of the psyche (cf. fig. 152). The old alchemists never tired of devising new and expressive synonyms for this water. They called it aqua nostra, mercurius vivus, argentum vivum, vinum ardens, aqua vitae, succus

“Humans are not meant to keep exact time,” the Native poet Sandra Ball once said. “We are meant to live within the confines of seasons, light and dark, and our own body’s rhythms, which are not the same from day to day or from year to year.”