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Jung and the evolution of consciousness

Article  in  Psychological Perspectives · March 1996

DOI: 10.1080/00332929608405729

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 Jung and the Evolution of Consciousness1

Allan Combs2 and Stanley Krippner3

Jung's idea was that the aim of evolution on this planet seems to be to create more
consciousness.

Marie-Louis von Franz

Complexity provides a benchmark for evaluating the direction of evolution.. To

contribute to greater harmony, a person’s consciousness has to become complex.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Carl Jung was both a mystic and a scientist. It is as if he had two minds, a soft spiritual one and a
hard rational one. While he honored the soft mind and refused to abandon its truths to cold
analysis, he also took considerable pride in being a scientist who reported his findings as
objectively as he could. Perhaps the greatest sadness of his life was the failure of the orthodox
scientific community to embrace his work.

The irony in all this is that not only was Jung scientifically minded, but in fact his understanding
of the psychology of the psyche was far ahead of the vast majority of his "scientific"
contemporaries. Unlike Freud, who took pride in maintaining a linear, essentially Victorian
theory of the psyche, Jung's views can best be characterized as profoundly postmodern. While
Freud's classic theory is reminiscent of J.J. Thomson's turn-of-the-century model of the atom,
with electrons orbiting around the nucleus in predictable trajectories like the planets of the
Newtonian solar system, the inner world that Jung discovered was much richer. In it are found
archetypes which, like the electrons described by quantum theory, hold no fixed location in time
or space. They cannot be predicted, but only described in global terms, and present themselves
according to probabilities rather than unwavering rules. In this conception Jung was without
doubt influenced by the young quantum physics, and by his friend, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli,
for whom the Pauli exclusion principle was named--the discovery that only one electron at a
time can inhabit each energy level, or "orbit," of the atom. Interestingly, Pauli was the center of a
cloud of coincidences, or synchronicities, many of which were troublesome and upon close
examination appeared to be the fruit of much unresolved material in his own psychic shadow.
Especially complex scientific equipment seemed to break down whenever he came into view.
This was so common that it jokingly came to be known as the Pauli effect.

While Jung was influenced by this new physics, much of his personal training in medicine had
been directly connected to the field of biology. During Jung's early years fascinating
developments were coming out of biology, not the least of which was Darwin's powerful theory

1
The original version of this article was published in Psychological Perspectives, 33, pp.60-76; 1996.
2
CIIS; CCS@CIIS.EDU
3
Saybrook Unniversity; skrippner@saybrook.edu
 Jung and evolution
2
of evolution. At the turn-of-the-century no scientist could ignore evolution's implication of a
continuity between the human species and other animal life and, as important, a continuity
between modern humans and their less developed evolutionary predecessors. Now, if such a
continuity holds for the body, then it holds for the brain; and if it holds for the brain then it holds
for the psyche. Freud and Jung both recognized the importance of this insight, but Freud saw it
largely in terms of implications for the animalistic roots of the contemporary psyche, while Jung
understood its implications for an ongoing process of evolution in which the modern person is
not the final product.

Histories of Consciousness

Jung viewed the evolution of the psyche as following a similar course to the developmental
unfolding of the mental life of the individual. This is a path of widening consciousness from
infancy through adulthood as the center of the conscious life, the ego, expands to gather
increasing elements of experience, gaining control and balance within its expanding domain. In
other words, the rise of consciousness in the individual, and the evolutionary advance of
consciousness in the humankind, follow the same course.

Jung was not the only great theorist of his age to think about the development of consciousness
in an evolutionary context. Others included the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the
anthropologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the European historian of
consciousness Jean Gebser, the Indian sage and yogin Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Each made
substantial contributions to our understanding of evolution and consciousness.

Bergson believed that the cutting edge of evolution is propelled by a subtle nonmaterial force
which asserts a subtle but insistent influence on organic matter. He referred to this force as a vital
impetus, or élan vital, that operates to maximize evolutionary creativity and nudge organic
matter ever forward toward diversity that gives birth to higher and more complex forms. The
essential nature of this vital impetus, according to Bergson, is not hard to find, for it is
consciousness itself. He associated consciousness with an organism's power of choice, and thus
with the breadth of freedom that is accessible to it. Consciousness, he believed, operates in
evolution as a pressure, gradually forcing its way to higher levels of expression. He wrote:

Consciousness, even in the most rudimentary animal, covers by right an enormous field,
but is compressed in fact in a kind of vise: each advance of the nervous centers, by giving the
organism a choice between a larger number of actions, calls forth the potentialities that are
capable of surrounding the real, thus opening the vise wider and allowing consciousness to pass
more freely.1
The direction and purpose of evolution, then, is to free up consciousness from the strictures of
organic matter. This is achieved by the development of large, flexible, nervous systems. Bergson
believed evolution to be a truly universal process that operates throughout the cosmos. At home,
however, consciousness clearly reaches its highest expression in the human being.

Teilhard de Chardin worked out his evolutionary concepts several decades after Henri Bergson
 Jung and evolution
3
had published his major work, Creative Evolution, but the progression of ideas developed by
these two men dovetail to a remarkable degree. Henri Bergson for instance, had suggested that
consciousness influences the organic process of evolution by "insinuating" itself into the
chemistry of matter. This is good rhetoric, but does little toward getting us down the road to a
concrete understanding of what actually happens when this subtle inner force asserts its influence
on the material events of a real organism. Teilhard de Chardin's thinking on this matter, however,
was very clear, and is as interesting today when he first conceived it.

The key to this problem, Teilhard de Chardin realized, is that very small amounts of energy can
go a long way toward the creation of complex form. In Teilhard's own words, "a highly perfected
arrangement may only require an extremely small amount of work." This notion, which seems
illogical on first nod, is in fact quite true. Many processes in nature start on a very small scale,
one that may readily be influenced by the most minute quantities of energy. Consider, for
example, the creation of a snowflake. The geometry of the first few water molecules that form
the seed of the snowflake could be altered by very small influences. Once these first molecules
are in place, however, the unique shape of the snowflake begins to form about them. One might
even argue that the configuration of the initial molecular structure is, in fact, more a matter of
probability than of energy. It would certainly seem to be the case that snowflakes differ not in
energy levels, but in the profusion of complex shapes that to take.

A similar argument can be made in terms of embryonic development. The initial molecular
events in the growth of, say, a lily, differ in form but not in energy from those of a rose. At this
early stage in development it is not a matter of energy so much it is of information. The genetic
code for the rose contains unique information that is different from than that of the lily. And, as
demonstrated by precisely these molecular codes, a very small amount of work or energy can
represent a very large amount of information.

For Teilhard de Chardin, the small amount of work that makes the critical difference in the
evolution of organic complexity is supplied by what he called radial energy. The term points to
the idea that such energy emerges radially, as it were, from the inner center of the living
organism. The effect of radial energy on evolution is to draw it "towards ever greater complexity
and centricity--in other words, forwards."

Teilhard de Chardin believed that the cosmos presents us with two faces. One is the exterior,
material, reality of conventional science, and the other is an interior reality, or inner
consciousness. He thought this to be true of all levels of material existence, from the single atom
through complex chemical structures and simple living organisms such as bacteria, on up to
highly complex organisms, leading in a direct line to humankind. "The exterior world," he wrote,
"must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one." Thus, a progression is established
in the exterior world running from the simple to the vastly complex, and simultaneously, in the
interior world of consciousness, from the separate and elemental to that which is large and rich in
quality.

Such notions, while contrary to the conventions of the reductionistic science of Teilhard de
 Jung and evolution
4
Chardin's day, are not unknown to many of today's physicists and biologists, as well as
philosophers. Moreover, their emphasis the on idea of complexity at the very center of the
evolutionary process was far ahead of its time.

Another major contributor to our understanding of the nature and history of consciousness was
Jung's junior contemporary, the European student of human nature, Jean Gebser. He described an
evolutionary sequence of core processes that he termed structures of consciousness. By these he
meant the ways people have interpreted reality in different periods of history. On the basis of a
vast survey of archeology, history, linguistics, art, and so on, he argued that these dominant
structures have changed over the course of history. This means that the worlds of human
experience have changed as well. Gebser identified five such structures of consciousness. Since
old structures continue to exert an influence on the modern human psyche they are much more
than historical curiosities, but color our everyday lives, each by adding its own individual
richness. Thus the modern individual experiences the world in through several structures at once,
or may alternate between them.

The total spectrum described by Gebser includes five structures of consciousness that emerged
and dominated human experience historical succession. All are animated to a greater or lesser
degree by the origin, Gebser's term for the original impulse of life, perhaps best characterized as
the essence of consciousness itself. They include the oldest, or archaic structure of
consciousness, which configured the experience of our proto-human ancestors. Our distance
from those ancestors, in terms of both history and evolution, makes it difficult to directly
appreciate this structure, and indeed, Gebser did not try to describe it in detail. Next to develop,
and the first truly human structure of consciousness, was the magical structure, which interprets
the world in terms of magical forces. This structure does not yet experience space and time as
wholly articulated. For instance, it is possible to experience events and places that in reality are
at a distance. This in fact is the essential nature of real magic even today.

Third to appear was the mythical structure of consciousness, with its emphasis on understanding
the world through myth. This structure allowed a rich outpouring of the imagination in stories
and images. It emerged with great force during the Neolithic agricultural revolution, bringing an
almost universal ascent of the Mother Goddess, and later the great patriarchal mythologies of the
ancient world. From Gebser's point of view it is the mythic structure, still alive and well in the
modern psyche, that fashions the dreams of our sleeping lives, and brings to us the whispering
archetypal influences that so deeply influence our waking life. Interestingly, Gebser regarded
Jung very highly, both the man and his work, but believed there to be a certain danger that one
can become too invested in mythic consciousness. The "cure" for this, be once commented, is to
be fully awake in the reality of the moment. This is a reference to his most advanced (integral)
structure of consciousness, described below.

The fourth structure, and the dominant one today, is the mental structure of consciousness, with
an emphasis on understanding the world through reason and thought rather than through magic
or mythic narrative and images. Gebser believed this structure in some ways to be a major
advance, but ultimately destructive because of the tendency of discursive reason to wrangle and
 Jung and evolution
5
nit pick at everything, till nothing is left. He laid the widespread psychological alienation of our
age at the doorstep of the mental structure of consciousness.

Gebser believed that the hope of the world is in the fifth structure, which he termed integral
consciousness. He felt that this form of consciousness is on the rise in the world today, and can
be seen in art, poetry, and science in many quarters. Examples include the paintings of Pablo
Picasso and Paul Klee, where multiple viewpoints appear simultaneously as integral wholes, and
in the timelessness of the poetry of Rilke and T.S. Eliot. This structure fosters wholeness of
perspective, and a release from the constraints of logic that binds the mental structure. In the
integral structure reality takes on a diaphanous quality, infused with the light of the origin, while
paradoxically the world is experienced as more solid and real because we exist in the living
moment, and not in abstract absorption in the future or past.

Many readers with an active interest in the field of transpersonal psychology—the study of
higher states of consciousness and ultimate human potentials—may recognize Gebser's ideas in
the writings Ken Wilber. The latter follows Gebser's sequence of structures of consciousness up
through the egoic structure, but then departs in favor of a series of developmental structures
modeled roughly after the subtle levels of being described in Indian Vedantic philosophy. One of
the present writers, Combs, now follows a similar course, viewing integral conscious as a
composite of several advanced developmental stages.

Evolution Soup

Given the range of ideas about how evolution works, both during Jung's lifetime and since, it is
not surprising that the whole topic can sometimes be confusing if not downright bewildering. In
fact, there seem to be at least three basic notions that people often have in mind when they speak
of evolution. These are frequently confused with each other in casual usage. We might call the
first of these Darwinian evolution. It is simply Darwin's original idea of evolution, the gradual
transformation and proliferation of biological species which usually takes place across long
spans of time. This idea, with its emphasis on the variation within each generation of, say, a bird
or a plant, and the additional imperative that some survive, carrying their genetic heritage on to
the next generation, while others do not, is clearly not what people mean when they talk of their
own personal evolution, or even of the evolution of the human mind, or consciousness, through
history. This is not to deny the evolution of the brain or to belittle the principles of natural
selection; comparative psychologists as well as biologists and physiologists have made
provocative contributions in this area.

However, what most people seem to mean by personal evolution, or the evolution of
consciousness, is an informal idea of growth or development—consciousness advancing toward
increasing adequacy or wholeness. In a similar fashion one might speak of the growth or
evolution of an idea, or of a civilization. Most concepts of personal spiritual evolution are of this
general nature. It is one of those familiar ideas like quality, that we easily recognize but have the
greatest difficulty defining in sure terms. Here we term this concept historical evolution because
of its emphasis on experience and time. Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary spirituality, for example, is
 Jung and evolution
6
of this type. It is founded on traditional Indian ideas of a progress of the spirit through many
incarnations, leading toward increasing identification with subtle levels of being.

One wonders how Sri Aurobindo came to frame so many of his ideas, clearly rooted in tradition,
in the language of evolution. It seems likely that he recognized in traditional Indian concepts
something that looked very much like evolution, at least in the historical sense, above. During his
years as a student in England he may well have read Hegel, with his concept of the historical
unfolding of the Spirit. He certainly was familiar with Darwin's writings. The fact of the matter
was that educated people all over the world were talking of Darwin and evolution. So it is not
surprising that he would see something familiar in the general notion of evolution as growth or
ascendance, though strictly speaking this was not part of Darwin's original conception. Indeed,
this way of thinking was consistent with the common notion in those days, even among
biologists, that evolution was at root a process of ascendance toward higher and better forms of
life.

Like Sri Aurobindo, contemporary theorists such as Ken Wilber, Jenny Wade, and the present
writer, Allan Combs, see the evolution of consciousness as following a path toward a progressive
identification with subtle levels of being. In line with modern work in developmental
psychology, the latter also see this evolutionary progression as involving increasingly complex
structures, not unlike the structures of intelligence in Piaget's theory, or the increasing
sophistication of moral judgments in Kohlberg's theory of moral growth.
Now, Gebser and Jung were historical evolutionists, as was Sri Aurobindo. All regarded the
development of the modern psyche as a product of time and experience. Gebser saw this as a
kind of unfolding of the potential of the spirit, the origin, through human history, each new
structure of consciousness representing another aspect of the origin expressing itself in human
life. Gebser himself was influenced by Neoplatonism and the idea that the One exfoliates its
infinite potential through time down into the world of human life. Were Gebser alive today it is
likely that he would also find an ally in quantum physicist David Bohm's notion of the implicate
order, a virtually infinite formative potential lying hidden behind the ordinary physical world,
which "explicates" its possibilities into our human world of experience through the vehicles of
time and space.

Jung, unlike Gebser, however, was as fascinated with the long-span implications of Darwinian
evolution as with the chronology of human history alone. He recognized the truth of biological
evolution, and was intrigued by apparent similarities between the development of the human
embryo prior to birth and morphological changes seen over the long course of evolutionary
history. In certain phases of development, for example, the unborn fetus exhibits the gills of a
fish, and a two-chambered heart that transforms into a human four-chambered heart only at birth.
Thus comes the famous phrase, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," suggesting that individual
development follows along the track of species evolution. Jung found evidence that this
recapitulation was true for the psyche as well as for physical morphology, writing:

According to phylogenetic law, the psychic structure must, like the anatomical, show
traces of the earlier stages of evolution it has passed through. This is in fact so in the case
 Jung and evolution
7
of the unconsciousness, for in dreams and mental disturbances psychic products come to
the surface which show all the traits of primitive levels of development, not only in their
form but also in their content and meaning.2

Jung did not meant, however, that dreams embody psychic elements from reptiles and fish, or
other primitive ancestors of the modern homo sapiens sapiens. In essential agreement with
Gebser, he was pointing out the similarity between modern psychic productions such as dreams
and psychotic delusions, and ancient mythic motifs such as the Earth Mother, or the eagle of
Zeus.

We will return to Jung, but first let us say a few more words about Henri Bergson and Teilhard
de Chardin. Like most intellectuals of their age, they were also influenced by the mystique of
evolution. But in a strikingly modern turn of thought, they placed their emphasis on the central
role of complexity in evolution. This led them, in spirit at least, to anticipate the third type of
evolution, the growth of complexity and creativity in self-organizing systems. Considering the
role of the brain and the consciousness which it supports, Bergson wrote:

The more complicated the brain becomes, thus giving the organism greater choice of
possible actions, the more does consciousness outrun its physical concomitant.3

In an even more articulate statement along the same lines, Teilhard de Chardin was later to write:

Whatever instance we may think of, we may be sure that…a richer and better organized
[physical] structure will correspond to the more developed consciousness.4

The emphasis on complexity put Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin far ahead of their time, and
indeed marks them, like Jung, as genuinely postmodern thinkers.

The recent rise of the sciences of complexity has led to an understanding of the amazing capacity
of certain complex systems to evolve toward greater levels of complexity, and on the way to
achieve increasing competence, flexibility, and creativity. Philosopher and systems theorist Ervin
Laszlo has termed this third type of evolution the grand evolutionary synthesis because it brings
so many kinds of complex growth processes together under a single conceptual roof. In a
nutshell, the basic notion is that certain complex systems have the capacity to organize
themselves into flexible and dynamic patterns of activity. They are said to be "self-organizing,"
and over time certain of them can grow in complexity through transformations of their own
internal structures, leading to further increases in flexibility and complexity. An ecology is such
a system. Its complexity evolves over time leading to increasing richness and diversity. The
living cell is also such a system. During individual growth and across the span of evolution, the
internal metabolic process of living cells engage in the cooperatively creation of hypercomplex
interactive cycles between individual metabolic activities, leading to increasing
complexification, flexibility, and competence. Evidently, the human psyche is also such a
complex self-organizing system.
 Jung and evolution
8
Coming to understand just how this boot-strapping of complexification brings itself about in
complex systems is one of the most exciting scientific enigmas of our time. It is the subject of
study in entire fields of mathematics, physics, and more recently in biology. It also holds
generous possibilities for the understanding of the psyche. For several years now psychologists
such as the present writers have been fascinated with the idea that the human psyche may itself
be a self-organizing system of exquisite richness and complexity.

Psyche and the Sciences of Complexity

Jung's fascination with the new quantum physics, his associations with Pauli, Einstein, and other
preeminent physicists of his day, as well as his interest in the new science of evolution, were all
consistent with his remarkably creative and forward-looking orientation toward the investigation
of the psyche. It is likely that, were he alive today, he would be very much aware of another,
now familiar, scientific revolution, the sciences of complexity.

It is difficult to say exactly how Jung himself would have utilized the concepts of these
revolutionary sciences toward better understanding the human mind, but certain ideas from them
are of very broad scope and certainly would be involved in any revisioning of the psyche from
the point of view of complexity.

First is the idea of attractors. An attractor is the condition that a system seeks of its own nature.
For instance, a marble tossed into a shallow bowl rolls about and eventually comes to rest at the
bottom. The situation with the marble at the bottom of the bowl is known as a point attractor for
the marble and bowl system. It is the state that the system is drawn toward if it is not already
there.

Alternatively, if the ball were attached to a length of string and set to swinging, thus making a
pendulum, it would continue for a while in rhythmic motion. Were it not for the friction of the air
and the string the pendulum would go on swinging indefinitely. The interesting thing about a
pendulum, though, is that it swings in a precise rhythm stipulated only by the weight of the ball
and the length of the string. This is why pendulums are used for clocks. They are highly reliable.
The cause of this reliability is that if the pendulum is slowed or accelerated the least bit by an
external agent, it soon finds its way back to the original rhythm. This rhythm, inherent in the
system, is the attractor for that pendulum system. Systems that have clear rhythms, such as
pendulums, the electrical circuits of watches, the cycles of the planets, and roughly speaking, the
pulsatile rhythm of the human heart, are said to exhibit fixed cycle, or rhythmic attractors.

Most interesting, however, are processes that are only partially cyclic. The weather is like this. In
the daytime it is warm and in the evening it is cool. The pattern is identifiable, but not entirely
reliable. Some days are cool and some evenings are warm. Our moods follow similar rhythms.
When we feel down or depressed it is a pretty good bet that before long we will feel better. When
we feel better, it is likely that before too long we will feel worse. It is a rhythm, but not an
entirely reliable one. Strictly speaking, it is not a rhythmic but a chaotic attractor—very roughly
cyclic, but not predictable in the precise sense that was so important to pre-complexity science.
 Jung and evolution
9
Here, the term chaos takes on a special meaning, not indicating the absence of order but,
paradoxically, suggesting the presence of a higher order of complexity.

Moods are an obvious example. But careful examination of the mind will show it to be
comprised of many processes such as thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and memories, each of
which comes and goes in complex and unpredictable ways, but certainly not random ones. Over
a hundred years ago William James observed that consciousness is composed of such processes,
always in motion, always changing, and never quite repeating themselves. He referred to the
entire flow of the subjective life as the stream of consciousness.

A few decades ago psychologist Charles Tart, approaching the mind from a systems point of
view, realized that processes such as these—functions he called them—configure themselves into
overall gestalt-like patterns, which he termed discrete states of consciousness. These patterns are
different in ordinary waking consciousness, for example, than they are in dreaming sleep, in
marijuana intoxication, or during deep meditation. The processes themselves change in different
states as well. For instance, marijuana intoxication is marked by a heightening of the auditory
sense, a feeling of relaxed heaviness in the body, and a marked decrease in short term memory.
At the same time intuitive processes are, if anything, heightened. The result is the kind of silly,
intuitive, humor so characteristic of the marijuana experience.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when Tart came up with the idea of states of consciousness as
coherent patterns of the mind, he did not have the advantage of the modern sciences of
complexity. Now it is apparent that what he was talking about are attractors, natural
configurations into which consciousness tends to relax of its own accord. Waking reality, dream
sleep, non-dream sleep, various contemplative, drug states, and more, are all examples of states
of consciousness, and evidently there are many more. One is reminded of William James' famous
observation in The Varieties of Religious Experience that:

Our normal waking consciousness...is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all
about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their
existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are all there in all their
completeness.5

However, the number of such states is probably not unlimited. This is suggested by the fact that,
as Tart observed, states of consciousness tend to be discrete. In other words, you are either in a
state of consciousness or out of it; there is no half-way. For example, one is either dreaming or
one is not. If we understand states of consciousness as attractors then we can see that this must
be the case—the marble, once in the bowl, rolls right down toward the bottom. But we also can
see that before the marble is actually in the bowl—if, say, it is rolling about on the flat surface of
a tabletop with indentations, or "bowls," carved into the wood—then the system of the marble on
he table is in an indefinite state until caught by the pull of an attractor, or one of the bowls. This
indefinite state, a state of liminality, is like being drowsy. We are not awake, nor are we asleep.
If something in the outer world attracts our attention we wake up, but if we are in a comfortable
 Jung and evolution
10
chair or bed we may drift right off into sleep.

The idea that there are not an unlimited number of states is also supported the important work of
British biologist and systems theorist Brian Goodwin. He has shown both through the
investigation of natural biological forms and with sophisticated computer modeling that in nature
form is not unlimited, but only certain patterns are viable. This is because only certain attractors
hang together as coherent processes while others do not. It is roughly like saying that only
certain patterns of sound make music, while others simply amount to noise. For instance, of the
more than 250,000 species of higher plants found throughout the world, there are only three
basic distributions of leaves around the stems. Moreover, a single form, the spiral, accounts for
80% of all these. Goodwin makes a compelling case that this is not due genetics so much as to
the existence of a few basic patterns, attractors, in the growth processes that produce the leaf
buds on the stems. Only certain viable patterns are available. Here the role of genetics is no more
than to steer development into the right region of an extended growth space, as it were, and
natural self-organizing mechanisms take over. It would seem that "there is an inherent rationality
to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility and historical
accident."

This "inherent rationality of life" is nowhere more apparent than in the makeup of our own
psyches. There is an ordering principle, a logos, to the human soul that develops through
childhood and on to the adult personality. It is almost palpable in the effortless wisdom and
spontaneity of a fully mature person. Marie-Louise von Franz speaks of the natural ease of this
level of maturity, reminding us of the old Zen sage,

He has forgotten the gods, he has even forgotten his enlightenment. Quite simply he goes
to the market place begging, but wherever he goes the cherry trees blossom.6

Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness

It is difficult to know just how Jung would have related to all of this. It is indeed tempting,
however, to think of the archetypes of the collective unconscious in terms of attractors, and he
may very well have done so were they understood during his lifetime. It is in the nature of every
attractor to exist in a basin, topologically speaking. That is, there is space about every attractor
that calls out to the system, luring it into the attractor itself. Drowsiness, for instance, is at the
edge of the basin of the sleep attractor. We are pulled by it toward sleep. If archetypes are also
attractors, then they too have a kind of gravitational field, a basin, that reaches out to the
personality, pulling it in a particular direction. Michael Conforti’s work with archetypal fields
suggest the presence of exactly such gravitational regions in the space of the personality.

As Jung pointed out, however, archetypes are unconscious. We can never enter into them
entirely, and indeed, if we are drawn to orbit too near one we can pay the very price of our
sanity. For archetypes are collective and their depth is fathomless. To be drawn into one is like
being drawn into a vortex at sea. So we must hold the light of the conscious ego dearly.
 Jung and evolution
11
But the ego, and indeed, the entire conscious personality, can come under the gravitational
traction, the field, of an archetype, feeling its pull and influence, without being drawn helplessly
into it. This happens, for example, when we fall in love. It also happens when are moved to a
great task, called by forces deep within ourselves. At such times the exquisite process fabric of
which the psyche is constructed becomes stressed under the influence of the archetype. However,
we are not passive beings, but always a braid of living processes, and those processes, our
thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions, do not react passively, but respond in dynamic
and sometimes even intelligent ways. Paradoxically, though archetypes are collective, their
influences are unique and individual to each of us, as we react to their presence.

What are archetypes in the final analysis? Jung himself did not have a final answer to this
question. In his early writings he suggested that they amount to structural patterns in the brain,
inherited over many generations of common, or collective, experiences. In his later life he seem
to come to view them as much larger, and indeed their collective nature, their dynamic effects—
different for each person—and their involvement with phenomena such as synchronistic dreams,
visions, and coincidences, all suggest their connection to some profound aspect of reality. Jung
indeed came to believe that they touch the unus mundus, or "one world," beyond all separations
of subjective and objective reality.

This line of thinking takes us beyond psychology into metaphysics. There are indeed those who
feel that Jung's system of thought, taken in its entirety, is metaphysical. But Jung himself was
more interested in science than metaphysics, and so it seems unlikely that he would view this
suggestion in a friendly way. Rather, he would be interested in finding some way in which
contemporary science might shed light on the nature of archetypes. And, it may well be the case
that Jung's own fascination with quantum physics will pay off in this respect. Over the past few
years the prominent systems theorist, Ervin Laszlo,mentioned above, has been working out the
details of a theory that would explain archetypes as highly complex process structures in the
quantum fabric of the cosmos.

The details of Laszlo's theory are very complex, but the essential idea is that holographic-like
structures behind ordinary space and time encode patterns of information that, in turn, read out
their influences on both inanimate and living matter in very specific ways. Rupert Sheldrake has
been pursuing similar ideas for some years under the term morphic fields, or fields that influence
the development of form. Laszlo has gone further in outlining the nuts and bolts of how such
fields might come about. He terms them quantum vacuum zero-point fields. An interesting thing
about the zero-point field, however, is that it evolves actively, with information read into it form
the ordinary world of human experience. Thus, like archetypes, which Jung believed to be the
fruit of millennia of human experiences, zero-point fields likewise complexify, evolving in
richness with time and the experience of the world.

Thus it may finally be that Jung's fascination with the interior forces of the atom, and its promise
for an understanding of the human psyche, may have been very well placed.
 Jung and evolution
12

ALLAN COMBS teaches psychology at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the
Saybrook Graduate School, and the Assisi Conferences. His publications include Synchronicity:
Science, Myth, and the Trickster with Mark Holland, Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life
Sciences, edited with Robin Robertson, and The Radiance of Being: Understanding the Grand
Integral Vision; Living The Integral Life.

STANLEY KRIPPNER is the Alan W. Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook Institute in

San Francisco. He is the author of Dreamworking, co-author of Personal Mythology,
Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, Varieties of Anomalous Experience:
Examining the Scientific Evidence, and the editor of Dreamtime and Dreamwork and eight
volumes of Advances in Parapsychological Research.

Recommended readings.

Allan Combs. (2002; 2nd Ed.) The Radiance of Being: Understanding the Grand Integral Vision;
Living The Integral Life. Paragon House.

Allan Combs and Stanley Krippner, S. (1999). Spiritual growth and the evolution of
consciousness: Complexity, evolution, and the farther reaches of human nature. The
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 18(1), 9-19.

Michael Conforti. Archetypes & Strange Attractors: The Chaotic World of Symbols (Studies in
Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, No 75). Spring Publications, 1999.

Brain Goodwin. How the Leopard Got its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity. Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1994.

Stanley Krippner and Joseph Dillard. Dreamworking: How to use Your Dreams for Creative
Problem Solving. Bearly Ltd, 1988.

Ervin Laszlo. The Whispering Pond. Element Books, Fall 1996.

Stanley Palombo. The Emergent Ego: Complexity and Coevolution in the Psychoanalytic
Process. International Universities Press, 1999.

Ernest Rossi. The Symptom Path to Enlightenment: The New Dynamics of Hypnotherapeutic
Work. Palisades Gateway. Summer 1996.

Charles Tart. States of Consciousness. E.P. Dutton, 1975.

John Van Eenwyk. Archetypes & Strange Attractors: The Chaotic World of Symbols (Studies in
Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, No 75). Inner City Books. 1997.
 Jung and evolution
13
Marie-Louise von Franz. Alchemical Active Imagination. Spring, 1979.

Jenny Wade . Changes of mind: A holonomic theory of the evolution of consciousness. State
University of New York Press, 1996.

Ken Wilber. Integral Psychology. Shambhala, 1998.

Endnotes:
1
Bergson, H. (1907/1983). Creative evolution. (A. Mitchell, Trans.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America;
p.179.
2
Vol.15 of the Collected Works; p.97.
3
Bergson, H. (1907/1983). Creative evolution. (A. Mitchell, Trans.). Lanham, MD: University Press of America;
p.80.
4
Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959/1961). The Phenomenon of Man. New York, Harper & Row; p.72.
5
James, W. (1902/1929). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Modern Library; p.378.
6
von Franz, Marie-Louise. (1979). Alchemical active imagination. Dallas: Spring; p.83.

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