Musical Wind Chimes and the Collective Unconscious of Carl Jung
There is that inexplicable something about wind chimes – they recommend something other-worldly.
Why should this be?
It isn’t something we are aware of, and even when we stop to consider it we can’t quite put our finger on what it is that’s taking place, exactly, that makes them grab our interest so.
There is this curious quality about wind chimes, and part of it surely is related to the point that noise is being made…by something hidden.
It is not even simply noise, in fact, but musical tones – indeed, if it were just noise it would not seem so uncanny.
But that they should produce what sounds like the beginning of something musical is errie, almost like from somewhere a whisper is struggling to come out, the whisper of music, something practically musical but not quite, not just yet – like a whisper of which we are not even certain we’ve heard!
Therefore it is with wind chimes, how they move and make noise that is more than noise, as if an invisible pair of hands should rummage through a piano keyboard, searching for agreeable, music-sensible notes.
The “invisible pair of hands,” obviously, is but the wind – yet the wind itself bears magical qualities, lent to it by millennia of human creativity.
And so the conjunction where the two should meet, where mythological wind and glass, stone, or even wood conspire to produce semi-musical tones – this combination is our collective unconscious.
It is from this collective unconscious of Jungian psychology that updates our subtle shudder at the musical notes generated by the wind chime, our unspoken emotional knowledge of the chime as an instrument for voices beyond the world.
Whether it’s a literal spirit dominion or something much more intricate, regarding the very birth and nature of human consciousness itself, such sounds remind us that there is more to the world than you would think – or ear.