​A few months back I read Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness. It is an incredible book, and in my mind fundamental to understanding the psycho-social and emergent nature of human consciousness and hence, human experience. To that end I will be writing a series of articles exploring my understanding of his ideas, my thoughts on them, and how they inter-relate to other relevant streams of thought. Particular works that come to mind are Peterson's Maps of Meaning, Ong's Fighting for Life, Booker's Seven Basic Plots, and Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. I also wonder how much of a parallel can be drawn to theories of generational archetypes (see The Fourth Turning), as societies do seem to oscillate between polarities of archetypes (I use the word here more generally, not specifically referring to Jungian archetypes, though my suspicion is that they are in some way related) and gradually move towards a resolution of those polarities with an expansion of consciousness. That's the plan, at least, to go through all that. We will see how much I accomplish at the end.

For today, I will content myself with setting the stage for the Neumann's book with a general orientation and framework for navigating the world of archetypes, images, mythopoetic substructures, and depth psychology. Neumann was a Jungian depth psychologist who, in his body of work, systematized and expounded upon the often fragmentary and unorganized ideas of Jung. As brilliant as Jung was, if he was hacking a path through the forest, it was up to his students to actually make a real road out of his rough path through the brush. 

​We do, however, have everything we need within us to complete this quest. Whatever is most alive within us in each moment, especially the tension we feel, is our compass pointing the way.

An emergent system that has found an equilibrium between two polarities or opposing tensions naturally operates cyclically. Action and reflection. Day and night. Summer and winter. Youth and old age. Work and rest. Creation and consumption. The ebb and flow of an ecosystem. We only see these cycles interrupted in systems that have lost their equilibrium. Ruined or disrupted by an excess of either concentration or dispersion, they must undergo a period of sterility or chaos, respectively, to find a new equilibrium, oftentimes less complex and less rich than the one before. New levels of complexity emerge from that sterility, of course, but slowly. The extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammal life to predominate. The collapse of the Roman Empire laid the seeds for modern western civilization. Yet it is not entirely accurate to say that an equilibrium, even as it oscillates, is oscillating about a fixed point. ​