Part II was devoted to how brain-and-psyche — as a single entity that can be (a) studied in the laboratory as an object and (b) lived subjectively as ones own self — function in everyday states of consciousness that we familiarly describe as normality and “neurosis.” Part III builds on this foundation an understanding of topics closely associated with Jung’s lifework which stretch the envelope of psychological enquiry and have sometimes led to Jung’s being dismissed as a “mystic.”

          We begin in Chapter 8 by examining altered states of consciousness. The topic of altered states first came up in Chapter 3, as characteristic of Upper Paleolithic humans, who demonstrated their identity as “Modern Homo sapiens ” with elaborate cave paintings that suggest a shamanic basis to their culture. Here we shall examine the nature of such conscious states: their importance for Jung, their ubiquity in human experience, their role in psychological transformation, and the neuropsychology of altered states and transformation.

          Chapters 9 and 10 take up one of the central themes of Jung’s work, the history of consciousness. Contemporary advances in evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology and ethology (the study of animal behavior) enable us to extend the history of consciousness much further into the past than Jung and his disciple, Erich Neumann, were able to do. Using the neuropsychology of ritual as our guide, we trace the evolution of primate consciousness from monkeys to modern humans in Chapter 9.

          In Chapter 10, the history of consciousness continues from the Upper Paleolithic to today, with special emphasis on the transition from hunting-and-gathering cultures to those based on agriculture in the Neolithic. In this transition, we observe the same series of developments occurring twice, first in the Near East and then several millennia later in Western Europe. The general trend of our 40,000 years of consciousness has been steadily away from shamanism and altered states as vital resources for human survival, to ever more complex societies held together hierarchically. Altered states of consciousness are unpredictable and threatening for such top-to-bottom authority structures. In the last 350 years altered states have been thoroughly marginalized by our fascination with objective, empirical science. Something has been lost that we deeply miss, a sense of spirituality and the possibility of psychological transformation.

          Chapter 11 takes up the question of how to master altered states and make them into an effective resource for the twenty-first century. Jung spoke of this project as the next step for Western consciousness, a vital necessity if we are to survive our destructive tendencies. We must learn to integrate the introverted and extraverted sides of our nature. Having mastered the outer world in large measure, it has now become our task to master the inner world. In particular, we must learn how we can make altered states reliable; and for this, shamanism provides a well-described model, which can also be understood neuropsychologically. The shamanism found today in the Upper Amazon has a history of some 4,000 years, strongly resembles the sort of shamanism our Upper Paleolithic ancestors had to have employed, and achieves its altered states largely through the ingestion of psychoactive herbs. Despite the fact that their trance states are biologically enforced, however, Amazonian shamans have learned to control them to effect healings and personal transformations. The chapter ends with a discussion of how meditation has also developed techniques for mastering altered states of consciousness.

          Chapter 12 investigates some of the phenomena related to altered states that have led some observers to postulate transpersonal theories like telepathy and parallel universes. Jung’s much more conservative notion of synchronicity attempts to describe such phenomena without committing us to metaphysical propositions that the advancement of science may soon force us to regret.