Carl Jung once had a strange dream.
He was walking along a hilly road when he came to a small chapel. Inside, there was no crucifix and no image of the Virgin on the altar, only flowers. On the floor in front of the altar sat a yogi, in lotus posture, deep in meditation. Jung looked closer and saw that the yogi had his own face.
He woke up with one thought: this man is meditating me. He is dreaming, and I am his dream. When he wakes up, I will no longer exist.
Jung told this story in his memoirs, published almost four decades before The Matrix reached cinemas.
So it is a fair question. Did the man who mapped the unconscious discover that we are living inside a simulation, a kind of video game?
The short answer is no
Jung proved nothing of the sort, and I want to say so clearly, because this topic attracts a lot of exaggeration.
The word "simulation" in its modern sense does not appear in his work. He died in 1961. The simulation argument as we know it comes from the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who published it in 2003, and even Bostrom does not claim we are in a simulation. He argues that one of three possibilities must be true, and that this is one of them.
Many of the comparisons you will find online, Jung and the NPCs, Jung and the glitch in the Matrix, are modern metaphors. Some are brilliant. But they are ours, not his.
So why write about it? Because Jung did reach a conclusion that matters more than the headline: what you experience as "reality" is not the raw world. It is something your psyche is actively building, all the time.
What Jung actually wrote
In Psychological Types, Jung made a claim that still sounds radical a century later: "The psyche creates reality every day."
He was not talking about manifesting. He was describing something closer to how you experience life. You never meet the world directly. You meet it through images, meanings, memories, and expectations. Two people can walk through the same event and come out having lived two different realities.
Late in his career, he went further. In his essay On the Nature of the Psyche, he reasoned that mind and matter exist in one world and are in constant contact. He concluded that they may well be two aspects of a single underlying thing. Notice how careful he was. He called it fairly probable, not proven.
That single underlying thing is what he later called the unus mundus, the one world, the old alchemists' term I mentioned in my previous article on Jung. And he did not get there alone.
The physicist who knocked on his door
In early 1932, Wolfgang Pauli was in trouble.
He was one of the most brilliant minds of quantum physics, and he would later receive the Nobel Prize for the exclusion principle. He was also falling apart. His marriage had collapsed and his personal life was in crisis. He turned to Jung, who was famous by then.
Jung did not take him on directly at first. He sent him to an assistant, so that the material would stay as pure as possible. What came out of that work was extraordinary: hundreds of Pauli's dreams, more than 400 of which Jung went on to study. They fed directly into his book Psychology and Alchemy.
It was the beginning of a dialogue that lasted about twenty-five years. In 1952, the two men published a book together, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Jung's part introduced synchronicity. Pauli's part explored how archetypal images had shaped the scientific thinking of Kepler.
Think about what that means. One of the founders of quantum physics was asking whether the images deep inside the psyche shape the way scientists see the universe, and whether physics and psyche could one day be described together.
There is also a lighter side. Colleagues joked about the "Pauli effect": experiments supposedly failed when Pauli walked into the room. He and Jung discussed it in their letters, half amused, half intrigued.
What quantum physics says, and what it does not
This is where most articles on this subject go wrong, so let me separate the two.
Quantum physics: the honest version
What it does say. Heisenberg pointed out that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to the way we question it. And the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics rewarded experiments showing that entangled particles can behave as a single unit, even when they are separated.
What it does not say. It does not say your thoughts control matter. It does not prove consciousness creates the world. It does not prove we are in a simulation. Physicists still debate what all of this means.
What physics does offer is humility. The solid, simple, common sense world is not the final layer. Something stranger is going on underneath, and that was already enough for Pauli to take Jung seriously.
Maya: the oldest name for the simulation
Long before computers, India already had a word for this: Maya. The veil. The power that makes one reality appear as many, and makes the appearance feel like the whole truth.
Jung knew the idea well. In Aion, he asks what it is in us that projects our inner images onto the world. His answer points East, to Maya, the spinning woman who creates illusion through her dance. For Jung, the veil is not out there. It is woven from inside the psyche.
He was not the only one. Erwin Schrödinger, another founder of quantum physics, was deeply influenced by Vedanta and treated the plurality of minds as an appearance, rather than the final truth.
Today, the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman offers a modern version. He argues that evolution shaped our perception for survival, not for truth. What you see works like the icons on a computer desktop: useful, but not the actual machinery. His theory is debated. The image is still a powerful one.
Maya, the unus mundus, the interface, the simulation. The vocabulary changes with each era. Each era uses its most advanced technology as a metaphor. Ours happens to be the video game.
That is exactly why the game is useful: not as a fact about the universe, but as a way of seeing.
The game manual
If you take the game as a metaphor, Jung becomes surprisingly practical. This translation is mine, not his, but each concept is his.
Jung, translated into the game
The persona is the avatar. The character you built so the world would accept you.
Complexes are the loops. Scenes that replay until you see what they are made of.
Projections are the NPCs. Old figures from your past, placed on real people.
The shadow is the locked zone. The dangerous part of the map, and also the one holding the treasure.
Archetypes are the character classes. Hero, mother, trickster, wise elder. Patterns far older than you.
Synchronicity is the clue in the scenery. A detail that seems placed there for you.
Individuation is the main quest. Everything else is a side mission.
The Self is the player. The one holding the controller, whom the avatar has forgotten.
In Reality Architecture, this is Level 2, The Universe: the principles through which life unfolds, and the mind that perceives them. Seen as a game, reality has rules you can learn to recognize, instead of feeling played by them.
Three signs you are playing on autopilot
01
You believe you are the avatar
Your job, your role, and your reputation feel like all of you. When the character is criticized, you feel as if your existence is under attack.
02
The same level keeps coming back
New city, new partner, new company, same scene. You are not unlucky. The level has simply not been completed yet.
03
You treat people like NPCs
You react to a past figure rather than to the person in front of you. Your boss becomes your father, and your partner becomes your mother.
None of this means you are doing anything wrong. It means the game has been running without a conscious player.
How to play differently
You do not need to believe life is a simulation for this to work. You only need to change where you are standing.
- Name the avatar. When you feel attacked or small, ask: which character just got hit? You will create a little distance between you and the role.
- Treat the repeat as information. When a scene returns, stop asking why it keeps happening to you. Ask what this level is trying to teach you.
- Read the clues without worshipping them. When a striking coincidence appears, do not treat it as a sign from the universe that guarantees anything. Treat it as a question: what does this touch in me right now?
That last point matters. Jung did not ask anyone to believe in signs. He invited us to take meaning seriously, and to remain honest.
Who is playing?
So, did Carl Jung prove we live in a simulation? No.
He did something more useful. Alongside one of the great physicists of his century, he showed that the line between the inner and the outer world is far less solid than it looks. And he left us a map for those who want to stop sleepwalking through their own life.
But the real power of this story is not in the question "is this a game?" You may never answer that one. Nobody has.
The real question is the one Jung met in that small chapel, when he saw his own face on a meditating yogi.
If you are not the avatar, then who is playing?
That is where Reality Architecture leads, down to Level 1, The Source: the awareness underneath every character you have ever played.
The game does not change when you discover that. The player does.