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Chapter 1. The Past and Future of Jung
The popular image of Jung as guru of the New Age obscures what he actually intended to do • The state of knowledge regarding evolution at the start of the twentieth century • Jung’s relationship to evolutionary thinking • Jung attempted to build a psychology which would be at the center of the social and biological sciences • not a closed theory like psychoanalysis but open to and in communication with the sciences of life and culture.
Part I: Evolution and the Archetypes
Chapter 2. Language: A Model Archetype
Language is a human universal with cultural variants that has been deeply studied and understood • Innate capacity enables children to acquire vocabulary and grammar rules at lightning speed • It evolved out of communicative and socializing behaviors in primates, especially grooming and mother-child interactions • Like all universals, it takes on cultural variations (English, Arabic, Hindi) • It precisely illustrates what Jung had in mind with his concept of archetype.
Chapter 3. Hundred Percent Primate
Through stories of apes, monkeys, beavers, bees, and humans, the stages of evolution are illustrated • Three archetypes are traced backward from humans: sociality, grasp of the fundamental laws of physics, and grasp of the natural world of living beings • When human language freed itself from its original role as gossip (verbal grooming), it occasioned the Cultural Explosion of the last Ice Age • Advances in tool-making and hunting techniques overshadowed by cave paintings • Modern human consciousness was born • and with it, the capacity to employ altered states of consciousness (shamanism, vision quest, etc.).
Chapter 4. The Cultural Archetypes
Most of Jung’s discussion of archetypes concerns patterns that have distinctive cultural variants • Cultural experience actually constructs neural networks from the moment a child is born • first through interactions with care-givers, and then by all relationships • Building upon in-born propensities to learn some things rather than others, all cultural archetypes are variations on human universals.
Chapter 5. Brain, Mind and Consciousness
Our naive folk psychology postulates a Cartesian distinction between soul (or mind or psyche) and body, where psyche is a spiritual substance and body a material substance • Both modern biology and Jung postulate a psyche that is human experiencenot substance but process • The neural substrate of the brain makes psyche possible, and psychic capabilities depend upon brain development.
Chapter 6. Ego, Self and Individuation
Psychic process, for Jung is individuation, the cultivation of a running dialogue between ego and self • Self is the unconscious center of one's entire organism • It is organismic process, the principle by which all the parts of every living being, from the protozoa on up, work together for the good of the whole • Ego is reflective process, whereby one constructs a narrative me which knows only part of the wholeness of its own organism • Individuation is the process which arises from the tension between self and ego • The neurobiological foundations of these phenomena are described • The physiology of dreaming is singled out as a case in point.
Chapter 7. Complex, Neurosis and Healing
Healthy psychic process (individuation) can be blocked by repetitive habitual actions that are emotion-driven • Jung calls them complexes • Their neural foundation resides in automatic responses that remember similar instances from the past, thereby enabling immediate, thoughtless responses to save the organism from dangers • They are the product of natural selection • But the capacity to criticize complex reactions is also built into the wiring of the brain • How psychotherapy facilitates such flexibility is described in terms of neurobiology.
Chapter 8. Archetypes and Altered States
Modern Humans burst onto the world scene with cave paintings that imply altered states of consciousness (ASCs) • The importance of ASCs for Jung • The variety and ubiquity of altered states even today • The use of altered states to bring about psychological transformation • The neurobiology of unitive/transformative states.
Chapter 9. The History of Consciousness (I): Primate Rituals
Jung’s views on the history of consciousness have been central to his work since 1911 • Today the history of consciousness can be traced backwards into our primate relatives as it could not in Jung’s day • Using documented ritual behavior as a connecting thread, we trace the development of consciousness and the use of ASCs from monkeys to Modern Humans.
Chapter 10. The History of Consciousness (II): Building an Ego
The history of consciousness continues from the Upper Paleolithic to the present • Neolithic architecture and the origin of agriculture: parallel developments in the Near East and in the British Isles • The general trend over 40,000 years has been steadily away from shamanism and ASCs • Today, our fascination with objective, empirical science leaves no room for valuing spirituality or the possibility of psychological transformation • Jung stands for a return the polyphasic consciousness practiced by our hunter-gatherer ancestorsnot a regression but a new integration it with the achievements of modern Western mentality.
Chapter 11. Shamanism and the Mastery of Altered States
Shamans do not merely induce ASCs, they learn to use them with discrimination • Mastering ASCs parallels in the inner realm our scientific achievements in the outer world • An account of the skills a shaman needs to make in managing and controlling shamanic states of consciousness • First extended example: ayahuasca use by shamans in the Upper Amazon • Second extended example: mastering meditative states of consciousness.
Chapter 12. Synchronicity and Mutuality
The previous eleven chapters have shown that Jung’s theories are harmonious with modern biology’s materialist perspective • Now we consider well-documented phenomena that seem to call materialism into question, especially the realm of parapsychology • There is no doubt that twentieth-century developments in science, particularly quantum mechanics, have seriously undermined our sense of scientific certainty • Philosophical idealism, quantum non-locality, and process metaphysics all suggest solutions • Jung’s theory of synchronicity appears to be the most cautious and reasonable proposal