Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the succeeding chapters of this book. The book discusses some ideas about the evolution of consciousness. It focuses on the thought of Carl Jung and places it in a non-technical way within a contemporary context. Jung built upon the discoveries of two great precursors: Darwin and Freud. Darwin discovered the evolutionary development of the physical organism. Jung proceeded to develop the concepts of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. Consciousness, he thought, in turn grew out of the collective unconscious. In Jungian theory, the potential for both masculine and feminine is incorporated in every psyche. The book provides some speculations on one path the female hero might take. Jung argued that the materialist model of nature, the hallmark of which is the law of causality, indeed yields in macro events to an acausal operating principle. He calls this principal as "synchronicity".