Unraveling Consciousness

Picture a serpent curled into a circle, swallowing its own tail. No head without a tail, no beginning without an end. It’s called the uroboros, and versions of it turn up in ancient Egypt, in India, in Africa and elsewhere.

Erich Neumann, a student of Carl Jung, opens and closes his book The Origins and History of Consciousness with that image. The book came out in German in 1949 and in English in 1954, with a foreword by Jung himself.

It isn’t easy reading. My notes on it are half vocabulary list. But one idea in it changed the way I think about God, and I want to pass it along. I’ll sketch Neumann’s big claim, give you that one idea, and tell you why I think it matters for anyone whose picture of God has changed.

Each of us relives the story

Neumann’s central claim is bold. He argues that human consciousness developed in stages, and that our myths are the record of those stages. Then he goes further: every individual, growing up, passes through the same stages humanity did. In other words, each of us has to walk the road humanity walked before us.

The stages read like a table of contents for the world’s mythology. First the uroboros: everything whole, undivided, at rest, before there’s any “me.” Then creation, and the Great Mother, the vast thing that holds and shelters us. Then the separation of the World Parents, where light is split from dark and a self starts to stand apart. Then the hero, who has to fight his way out. Then transformation.

Neumann observes that creation, nearly everywhere, appears as the creation of light. A Latter-day Saint doesn’t have to look far for an example: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Read Neumann’s way, that line is about a cosmos and also about a mind waking up.

He also notes that even if we decided the question “Where did I come from?” can’t be answered, the psyche keeps asking it anyway. Every person meets that question as soon as they become aware of themselves. That’s worth knowing. The big questions aren’t a malfunction. They’re built in.

Secondary personalization

Here’s the idea that stuck. Neumann calls it secondary personalization.

Some forces in our lives are bigger than any person: birth, death, order, chaos, the pull toward growing up. Neumann calls them transpersonal. Our minds have a habit of turning those forces into persons. We give them faces, names and personalities. That habit is where myths and fairy tales come from. It’s also why, as children, we project those enormous forces onto our parents.

It’s not a flaw. It’s how we get a handle on something abstract: we make it concrete.

Neumann then says that one step eventually needed for consciousness to keep developing is to experience the gods as contents of the human psyche.

The church taught me a God with “a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22), a Father in the most literal sense. I do not suspect that such a God physically exists. But I didn’t lose what that God stood for. There seems to be a spark of divinity in us, though not from the Mormon God. There is the collective unconscious. There is instinctual knowledge. There is the archetype of our souls.

We give the biggest forces in our lives a face, so we can talk to them.

I hold this as a way of seeing, not a proof. Neumann was working inside Jung’s framework, and you can’t put a psychic stage under a microscope any more than you can a soul. But as a lens, it has helped me keep scripture as something sacred instead of something to fight about.

The frontier, and its cost

One more thread from the book, because it touches the church directly.

Neumann notes that some people seem to have a stronger, more independent consciousness than those around them, and that in stagnant cultures those people get branded as antisocial. He warns that religious and political totalitarianism can block the creativity of consciousness.

My own note in the margin was this: we’re on the frontier of psychological evolution. In the West, individuality is held up as an ideal. Many cultures don’t tolerate it, or brand it as antisocial.

I don’t think the church is a totalitarian state, and I won’t pretend it is. Its structure has been very useful for many people, including me for most of my life. But I do think about how a community treats the person whose thinking outgrows the model. Is that person a problem to be fixed, or a sign that something is developing? That’s a question worth asking, and it’s part of why I keep arguing for dignified dissent.

Back to the circle

The uroboros swallows its own tail. Neumann puts it at the beginning of the story and again at the end. I take that to mean you come back around to where you started, but you’re not the same when you get there.

That’s been my experience with the old stories. I’ve come back to Genesis, to Jonah, to the Atonement, and found them again from the other side of the circle. They’re less literal and more alive.

For more on how these patterns live in us, read Archetypes. For the archetype Neumann ends with, transformation, read From the Ashes.