I was too young to remember when the New Age began. But somewhere between the love and peace of Woodstock in 1969 and the strange cheeriness of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” in 1984, spirituality in America took a left turn. The consciousness-raising doctrines of the 1960s went through their own kind of transmutation and showed up refashioned in the 1980s, custom made for a decade that was a little less grit and a lot more gloss. And one book captured the New Age zeitgeist perfectly—published with a name that must have been a marketer’s dream, perfectly tailored for a generation of boomers who had grown older, wiser, and richer but were still driven by a desire to change themselves and the world. Called The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, it was both a book and manifesto, the “handbook of the New Age” as USA Today called it. The author was Marilyn Ferguson, a popular science writer who had spent most of the 1970s exploring breakthrough research and ideas in a diverse range of subjects and translating them for the lay reader.

What made Ferguson’s work so influential was the sheer scope and breadth of her network. She was connected to a great number of leading individuals across various fields of study, and through them she seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the future. In fact, in the late nineties, the editorial staff of this magazine briefly considered interviewing Ferguson on precisely that topic—the future—almost twenty years after her manifesto hit the stands. It was in the process of doing research for that issue that I came across a fact that I never forgot—an obscure bit of information that struck me deeply at the time and has continued to affect me as I consider the nature of the new century that humanity has embarked upon. It seems that Ferguson, as she gathered material for her opus, asked everyone she interacted with—all of the hundreds of scientists, philosophers, researchers, academics, mystics, and others on the leading edge of their fields—which person had been most prominent in shaping their work and ideas. The individual who came in second among all those cited is not likely to surprise anyone—eminent psychologist Carl Jung. But the person who came first certainly surprised me—Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Almost three decades have passed since Ferguson’s work, and in the intervening years, the New Age movement has enjoyed its fifteen minutes on the stage of history and receded from prominence. But as our global society hurtles toward the second decade of this young century, the influence of Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is arguably more significant than ever. Like stone guardians standing at the gates of the future, Jung and Teilhard continue to subtly and profoundly shape the voices and perspectives that are defining the leading edge of our contemporary culture. And those voices are, in turn, influencing our collective perception, understanding, and most important, our response to the challenges of the new century. This raises an interesting issue, because these two prolific and creative thinkers represent distinct and seemingly contrasting visions of life and reality.

Jung, the great master of the human psyche, taught us to look inward and downward as we never had before, showing us the extraordinary breadth and depth of the human psyche and revealing the mythical, archetypal, and impersonal forces that are operating in the hidden caverns of our consciousness. Teilhard, the great prophet of evolution, taught us to look forward and upward with new eyes, unveiling the vast evolutionary context in which the drama of human life is unfolding, reviving our faith in the future and restoring a powerful sense of meaning and purpose to human consciousness. Both of them forever changed our conceptions of what it means to be human, and both offer fresh ways of looking at the unique challenges that confront our postmodern society. Both did the bulk of their work in the worst part of the twentieth century, forging their visions out of the unlikely raw material of two world wars and a world gone partially mad. Both sought to provide answers to the chaos and a new direction for the survivors, hoping to give humans in the coming decades the tools to reshape society. And both have provided key ideas that are shaping several of the most significant contemporary attempts to fashion a new worldview.

Indeed, it occurs to me that these two unusual visionaries are, in some sense, the twin fathers of the twenty-first century, with different, and often contradictory, ideas about how to raise their precocious child. In fact, after spending time exploring the work of each individual and reflecting on their influence, I have come to believe that the distinctive orientations of these two father figures, and of those who have followed in their footsteps, represent one of the great fault lines of our time, and that ultimately we must make a choice as to where our allegiance lies. The stakes are high. In this time of postmodern alienation, extreme individualism, environmental crisis, civilizational conflict, technological triumph, massive globalization, and spiritual confusion, we have not yet formed a worldview that can knit our hyper-diverse and fragmented society together and shepherd it safely into a thriving new millennium. So to whom do we turn for answers? To the brilliant insights of a self-described Swiss “witch doctor” or to the visions of an unlikely Catholic revolutionary? In order to more clearly perceive the choice that confronts us as we face the challenges of the coming decades, we must first better understand these two unique figures and the nature of the revolutions in thought that they helped set in motion.

Carl Jung

Suddenly I had the overwhelming experience of having just emerged from a dense cloud. I knew all at once: Now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back, and behind that wall there was not yet an “I.” But at this moment I came upon myself. Previously I had existed too, but everything had merely happened to me. Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now: now I exist.

Carl Jung, describing an experience at age 12

If you wanted to be part of the cutting edge of culture in 1875, then somewhere near Zurich, Switzerland, was not a bad place to be born. The German-speaking world, then the height of human intellectual activity, had already seen a number of important revolutions in thought pass through its collective mind during the course of the nineteenth century, and was about to see one more in the early twentieth before it would start its slow descent into self-inflicted madness. Carl Gustav Jung was born a country parson’s son not far from Zurich that same year, and though he would end up spending most of his life in his native Switzerland, by the end of it he was known the world over. Along with Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and others, Jung sought to pull back the curtain on the human psyche, giving birth to what came to be known as depth psychology. With no maps to guide them, these “psychoanalysts” dove into the uncharted waters of the psyche, driven by a passion to understand what makes up the complex nature of the subjective self. And what they found transformed how we see ourselves and our world. Beneath the seemingly straightforward motivations of the conscious self, they mapped an entire underworld of hidden desires, half-conscious motivations, and unconscious conflicts that were shaping the destiny of the self and, by extension, our entire society. For those of us born in the latter part of the twentieth century, it is perhaps hard to appreciate just how pioneering were these Magellans of the inner world. Their words—introvert, extrovert, shadow, inferiority complex, repression, ego, projection, archetype, free association—are sprinkled throughout our lexicon, bearing witness to how much our self-knowledge and self-awareness have been impacted by the revolution these men began.

In some respects, Jung was the most unconventional of these unconventional explorers. His dissatisfaction with the psychiatry of the day drove him forward and kept him intellectually mobile. He became a passionate supporter of Freudian theory, finding in Freud a friend and mentor who shared his passion for transforming their field of study. “We met at one o’clock in the afternoon,” Jung says, describing their first encounter, “and talked virtually without pause for thirteen hours.” But Freudian theory eventually began to trouble Jung as well, with its singular emphasis on personal sexual complexes as the root of human neurosis. Indeed, his curious and philosophically oriented mind felt hemmed in by the boundaries of Freud’s theories, and he began to suspect that there was much more going on in the psyche than could be explained by recourse to unconscious sex and power drives rooted in individual history. He began to suspect that there were profound, impersonal, collective forces operating in the unconscious, currents of meaning that connected the psyche with deeper, more symbolic modes of existence. And he had a name for these mysterious and influential forces. He called them archetypes, and the place where they existed, the collective unconscious. “In the course of analyzing a vast range of psychological and cultural phenomena,” writes scholar Richard Tarnas in his acclaimed book, The Passion of the Western Mind, “Jung found evidence of a collective unconscious common to all human beings and structured according to powerful archetypal principles.”

These two concepts, the collective unconscious and archetypes, are perhaps the primary ideas that really sum up Jung’s contribution to our time. Of course, that summation hardly does justice to Jung’s prolific thought. His intellectually adventurous mind roamed far and wide, and his ideas about primitive cultures, his interest in mythology, his study of the ancient science of alchemy, his breakthrough work on meaningful coincidences, or “synchronicity,” his fascination with psychic phenomena, and his conception of the “shadow” aspect of the unconscious mind have all been influential. He even wrote one of the first books on UFOs. However, it is the collective unconscious and archetypes that seem to be the more foundational ideas, reflecting the radical nature of Jung’s psychology. His work suggested that human consciousness was inextricably bound up and constantly interacting with a deeper substratum of reality—the collective unconscious—that had its own brand of intelligence and that far transcended the boundaries of the isolated individual. Whispering in dreams and intuitions of a world full of depth, mystery, symbolism, synchronicity, and, some would say, soul, the collective unconscious was not confined by the abstract and limited language of the modern ego.

By expanding the boundaries of our inner lives, Jung opened up the interior universe for exploration, giving it a significance that was more than therapeutic. Where some saw personal neurosis, Jung found deeper collective patterns and influences. And where some saw fantasies and meaningless images, Jung discovered powerful archetypes and numinous energies. In a post-traditional world desperate for meaning, here was a powerful source, one that seemed to reveal the hidden structures that mediate human experience. Jung was convinced that through getting a handle on archetypes, those subtle architects of the collective unconscious, we could begin to get a handle on ourselves and our unconscious inner world and discover a more integrated sense of individuality.

But what exactly is an archetype? Trying to pin down Jung’s own definition is, as with much of his thinking, like trying to hit a moving target. (One reviewer is said to have found thirty different definitions in a single volume of his work.) Initially, he referred to archetypes as “forms of instinct.” For example, the experience of falling in love has a powerful instinctual component. And because of this, very specific forms of human behavior are associated with that experience the world over, and probably always have been. Therefore we could say that falling in love is an archetypal experience.

One of the best definitions of archetypes comes from eminent Jungian psychologist James Hillman. He writes:

Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. . . . There are many other metaphors for describing them . . . patterns of instinctual behavior like those in animals which direct actions down unswerving paths; the genres and topoi in literature; the recurring typicalities in history; the basic syndromes in psychiatry . . . the worldwide figures, rituals, and relationships in anthropology. . . .

By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God. . . . All psychic reality is governed by one or another archetypal fantasy, given sanction by a God. I cannot but be in them.

This association of archetypes with the gods of antiquity also helps explain why certain mythological images can appear in contemporary dreams and fantasies even though they may have little or nothing to do with one’s personal history. Jung himself was struck by how certain symbols could arise in the psyches of his patients seemingly out of nowhere, unconscious and unbidden. In fact, Jung himself experienced a number of such instances, leading him to what he called “the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.”

This simple but powerful recognition had a galvanizing effect on psychological thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. In a scientific world that was increasingly giving weight to the external, physical dimension, here was a validation of the inner universe that went way beyond Freud. Here in the inner life were psychic relics that spoke of our collective past, powerful archetypal energies that seemed to have an almost spiritual character, surprising synchronicities that revealed hidden patterns influencing reality, and exciting evidence that human consciousness is connected in much deeper ways than the modern mind had yet conceived. And no PhD was required to explore this inner terrain, just a little courage and curiosity. Depth psychology came of age in the wake of these revelations, and a number of thinkers and theorists, names too numerous to mention, set about exploring the territory Jung had pioneered.

“The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind,” wrote early-twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson. How prescient his words turned out to be. Depth psychology’s impact has been not only profound, but ubiquitous. Your local bartender likely knows more about the structure of his own psyche than almost anyone in the world did a couple hundred years ago. Today, the collective unconscious has become a household term, dream analysis is practically a national pastime, and Jung’s thought has helped to inspire a resurgence of interest in ancient mythologies and pre-Christian spiritual traditions. Moreover, his fascination with the concept of synchronicity has spilled out onto the bestseller lists, thanks to wildly popular authors like Deepak Chopra and James Redfield, and his work has turned “masculine” and “feminine” into words that most often designate not sex differences but gender archetypes. And whenever one hears the words “shadow” or “shadow work,” Jung’s influence can surely be felt.

But the success of psychology in the last hundred years has also brought new problems. We are probably the most self-aware, self-analyzed, and self-actualized generation of adults that has ever existed on this planet, and yet if many cultural critics are to be believed, we may also be the most self-involved and self-obsessed as well. And despite our unprecedented self-knowledge, the problems and challenges of our young century—political, environmental, economic, cultural, and technological—seem to have far outstripped our capacity to effectively respond to them. In the West, we enjoy the most pluralistic, diverse societies on earth, where the freedoms and liberties of the individual have reached unheard-of proportions. Yet the fragmentation of our age is also profound, and the search for meaning intense and unabated. Postmodernism was not a word much in use when Jung was thinking his thoughts of archetypes and the unconscious. But today we know that the defining characteristics of our postmodern age, an era that was being born even as Jung lay dying, are its lack of a coherent worldview and its hostility toward any larger vision or “metanarrative” that could help unify our society and give us the energy and perspective to respond to the problems and potentials of our time in history. If we were to name the task that lies before us in our current century, as Bergson did for our last, I think it would be to form a powerful, coherent worldview that can allow us to thrive in a complex, globalizing, rapidly changing planetary culture.

Raised in an intellectually adventurous family, I knew something about depth psychology and the work of Jung by the time I was a teenager. His name and ideas were simply too omnipresent in the culture to be missed—even by a boy in a small Midwestern town. I had an aunt who was seeing a Jungian analyst, a mother who would analyze her dreams at breakfast, and a brother talking about the collective unconscious and experimenting with meditation. In contrast, I knew hardly anything about the work of Teilhard de Chardin until I was almost thirty. This is, in part, simply because Teilhard’s work was a good deal more controversial than Jung’s and encountered more resistance, and unlike the celebrated psychologist, Teilhard never achieved widespread recognition for his ideas while still alive. But it is also because Jung’s timing was perfect. In a Western world that had so recently seen the evils of fascism and was now concerned with communism, individualism was in ascendance. The term Jung used to describe the goal of analysis was individuation, a maturation process by which one achieves greater freedom and self-actualization by becoming increasingly aware of and responsible for the contents of one’s own consciousness and unconscious. In depth psychology and its successor fields, the postwar generations found a path of self-development that celebrated and explored individuality, one in which the goal was to become, as the song goes, ever more “free to be you and me.”

Teilhard De Chardin

There lay matter and matter was calling me, to me in my turn as to all the sons of man; it was speaking as every generation hears it speak; it was begging me to surrender myself unreservedly to it and to worship it.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, describing his experience as a young man

If Jung’s timing was fortuitous, then Teilhard de Chardin’s could not have been more disastrous. Here was a Jesuit priest who had the audacity to hold up science and evolutionary theory as the key to the future of Christianity at the very moment when the Church was under attack by science and was surrounded by the growing popularity of atheism and the rejection of religious doctrine. Here was a philosopher who had the unfortunate timing to be holding aloft the flag of progress—claiming that man was at the pinnacle of evolution and that there was a direction to the unfolding tide of history—at the very moment when two of the most prominent champions of such a position were Hitler and Lenin. Teilhard should perhaps have simply counted himself lucky to be alive in the twentieth century, when his work was merely banned, and not the seventeenth century, when he might have been burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, another European who had the misfortune to assert heretical thoughts about the cosmos.

Born in 1881 among the verdant, wooded hills of Auvergne, France, Teilhard’s first years were spent just a few miles from the distinctive marker of that region, the massive and beautiful Puy-de-Dôme volcano. And though the fire of this long dormant natural wonder had grown cool over the last ten thousand years, the energy of the land began to nurture in Teilhard’s young heart and mind a different kind of “crimson glow”—what he later called the “divine radiating from the depths of blazing matter.” It was this unusual passion for the creative energies and potentials contained in nature that characterized Teilhard’s temperament from the start. He loved nature, but not with the aesthetic sensibility of a Romantic. No, he intuited a deeper dimension to the natural world; he sensed that contained in matter was a powerful latent potential that was somehow in process—moving, developing, and building to some future culmination. And even though he was brought up in a devout Christian family, and shaped and molded by the otherworldly emphasis of Catholicism, he never relinquished that original longing to divine the truths of this world by understanding the secret evolutionary impulses of matter.

To understand the impact of Teilhard de Chardin, it is necessary to understand the historical context out of which his evolutionary vision arose. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, religion, science, and philosophy were all going through massive changes. Religious consensus was breaking down, as traditional notions of God appeared ever more implausible and science itself proved more and more capable of explaining the natural world. Moreover, science had embarked upon a compelling creation story, challenging religious doctrine with an evolutionary account of human origins that was widely accepted and hotly debated. Philosophy, which had once done so much to drive human progress through the Enlightenment, now appeared listless. Unable to fill the void of meaning left by the retreat of religion, it backed away from grand metaphysical speculations and confined itself to narrower and narrower spheres of inquiry.

Into this void stepped a number of courageous thinkers, individuals like Bergson, who published a book called Creative Evolution in 1907, becoming one of the first to explicitly use the insights of evolutionary theory in a philosophical context that far transcended Darwinism. Teilhard read Creative Evolution when he was thirty years old, and the book had an enormous impact: “I can now see quite clearly that the . . . effect that brilliant book had upon me was to provide fuel at just the right moment . . . for a fire that was already consuming my heart and mind.” Over the next four decades, Teilhard would follow in the footsteps of Bergson and present a comprehensive vision of human life that was part science, part philosophy, part theology, and all evolution.

While Jung was delving into the secrets of the unconscious amid the high society of Zurich, Teilhard’s tumultuous life took him halfway around the world to China, where he would pen his most famous manuscript, The Phenomenon of Man, as well as a host of essays and meditations. And while Jung sought for fossils in our psychic past, Teilhard would make his mark on paleontology by seeking fossils of a more tangible kind, helping to make the then-heretical case that evolution was not the bane of the church but its savior. Frowned on by the Vatican and rarely welcome in his home country of France, where his thoughts and lectures tended to stir up too much excitement to suit the Jesuit hierarchy, Teilhard was initially known more for his scientific work than his spiritual thought, and this remained true up until the time of his death in 1955 in New York City. Almost half a century later, I was attending a conference on science and spirit in the same city and noticed his name kept coming up in the presentations. Curious, I paid a visit to my local library and started reading the first book I found. It was The Future of Man, a collection of essays that was, like all of Teilhard’s works, published posthumously. It began with the following lines:

The conflict dates from the day when one man flying in the face of appearance perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow of a tremendous tide—the day on which a first voice rang out, crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth, “We are moving! We are going forward!”

It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle, that of Mankind divided to its very depths into two irrevocably opposed camps—one looking toward the future and proclaiming with all its newfound faith, “We are moving!” and the other without shifting its position obstinately maintaining, “Nothing changes. We are not moving at all.”

I’ve read a great deal of Teilhard’s writings over the subsequent years, but I still come back to this passage as capturing the essence of his insight into the human condition. For Teilhard, the discovery of evolution changed not just biology or anthropology or philosophy, but everything. “Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow,” he famously wrote, and proceeded to peer into the nature of the human life with that as his guiding principle. What he found was a new way of perceiving life that placed human beings in the context of a vast, evolutionary cosmos that is moving forward, at all levels, from matter to life to mind, and then onward to greater and greater heights of suprahuman consciousness. Teilhard foresaw an eventual grand unification of human consciousness in an evolutionary godhead or “omega point”—a term for which he has become widely known. As scholar John Haught writes, Teilhard was “the religious thinker who, more than anyone else, has explored how evolution should impact our views of God and creation.”

For Teilhard, the “phenomenon of man,” or the “human phenomenon,” as the phrase has more accurately been translated, is the extraordinary fact of the appearance of self-reflective beings in the universe. It is an event whose significance, he felt, we have hardly begun to appreciate. “The importance of the human milieu escapes us because we are immersed in it,” he wrote. “Born in it and breathing nothing else, we have difficulty in getting a just impression of its dimensions, of sensing its extraordinary qualities.” Like Jung, he lamented that science had neglected the human in its rush to explore the external universe, but rather than exploring the content of man’s interior life, Teilhard was more concerned with placing the human phenomenon in its proper context. Our self-reflective minds, he concluded, are the extraordinary achievement of millions and millions of years of evolution, the pinnacle of a long process of development that has produced something altogether novel in nature as far as we know—a primate capable of reflecting upon nature and its own place in it. We are “evolution become conscious of itself,” to quote Julian Huxley, one of Teilhard’s friends and contemporaries, and we barely realize the potential latent in a human species awakening to its role in an evolutionary cosmos.

Teilhard’s impact is similar to Jung’s in that it can be seen everywhere, but his fingerprints are much less noticeable on the evidence. His “Law of Complexity-Consciousness,” which states that in the evolutionary process, increasing complexity of outer form correlates with increasing depth of interior consciousness—all the way from rocks to plants to animals to human beings—is influential in the new field of integral philosophy, as well as in the increasingly popular field of consciousness studies. He coined the term “noosphere,” which he described as the “thinking layer” that surrounds the planet like a thin, invisible envelope of collective consciousness, representing the sum total of humanity’s interior life. In fact, his ideas about global consciousness and collective consciousness have been extraordinarily prescient and have helped inspire technology visionaries as they consider the implications of the internet. Some have even characterized Teilhard’s noosphere as a sort of collective mind, one that preceded, and in some sense predicted, the emergence of the internet by almost half a century—making Teilhard a favorite of techno-futurists the world over. Indeed, the contemporary idea of a “global brain,” the notion of collective intelligence, the term “global village,” and the idea of “cyberspace” are all partially inspired by his thoughts about the evolution of the noosphere.

If Jung helped to give weight, depth, profundity, and even spiritual import to the revolutions that were taking place in psychology, Teilhard helped to give weight, depth, profundity, and spiritual import to the revolutions that were taking place in evolutionary theory. As much as anyone, he foresaw the changes in science, philosophy, spirituality, and so many other fields that are still unfolding today as a result of the discovery that we live in a vast and creative universe, billions of years old. Of course, he was not the only thinker of the early twentieth century attempting to use an evolutionary worldview to integrate consciousness, culture, and cosmos. Alfred North Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo are perhaps Teilhard’s two most prominent contemporaries who were pursuing much the same goal, each with his own unique approach. Indeed, the mystical power, beauty, and spiritual depth of Aurobindo’s more Eastern-oriented evolutionary philosophy may well be unmatched in our time. And the extraordinary subtlety and precision of Whitehead’s thinking may far outstrip Teilhard’s in its philosophical sophistication. But neither equaled the visceral passion and power of Teilhard’s writings, and his capacity to inspire, uplift, and communicate the essence of how an evolutionary worldview could radically transform one’s perspective on life.

In most cases, the changes Teilhard foresaw are just picking up steam as we head into the twenty-first century. Indeed, while Jung’s ideas achieved a sort of cultural saturation during the last fifty years, at least in Western culture, Teilhard’s impact has remained more or less underground. But times are changing, and the evolution revolution Teilhard helped set in motion is likely to prove much more significant in the next hundred years than it was in the last. The evidence is all around us. In a recent New York Times op-ed column, for example, commentator David Brooks heralded the arrival of a new evolutionary worldview:

These days, historians hate . . . unifying grand narratives, and the idea that history is a march of progress upward to the present. . . . [But] it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere. . . . Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior. . . . The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs.

Teilhard would likely be surprised and thrilled if he were still alive to read such words in the most respected newspaper in the United States only a half-century after The Human Phenomenon was published. However, it must be noted that Brooks is describing an evolutionary perspective that is based on scientific materialism. It includes only matter in its calculations, and for Jung and Teilhard that means it would be metaphysically stillborn, reducing to insignificance the interior world of consciousness that they so strongly championed. But the seed is sown, and the momentum for a larger evolutionary embrace of life is growing as new generations of thinkers embrace evolution as a metanarrative for life. Perhaps they will remember that while Teilhard loved science, the essence of his message was a mystical one, a religious revelation that came in a form the modern world had yet to conceive.

“One might say that a hitherto unknown form of religion—one that no one could as yet have imagined or described, for lack of a universe large enough or organic enough to contain it—is burgeoning in the heart of modern man, from a seed sown by the idea of evolution,” declared Teilhard near the end of his life. “Far from being shaken in my faith from such a revolution, it is with irrepressible hope that I welcome the inevitable rise of this new mysticism and anticipate its equally inevitable triumph.”

Eros, Cosmos, and Psyche

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
Carl Jung

Almost two decades ago, I was traveling in Asia when I had one of the most powerful spiritual breakthroughs of my life. I don’t remember many details of this event, which lasted about a week, but I do recall staying up late at night, speaking with friends on the roof of a rented house looking out over the central Indian plains, and experiencing a sense of conviction and excitement about life that was unlike anything I had experienced before. I remember feeling as if I were tapping into some current of energy in myself, not exactly physical, but a deeper sense of freedom, as if the very core of my being had dissolved and in its place was a powerful surge of consciousness, welling up from within the depths of my own psyche like a fountain of liberated potential. And I also remember quite clearly a dream I had at the time.

In the dream, I was walking along a path, somewhere high up in the mountains. It was a scenic walkway, built to follow a mountain ridge, and I slowly followed the path until it began to ascend a series of steps etched into the mountain. As I approached the summit, I turned to look at the view, and spread out across the periphery of my field of vision was the vast and majestic Himalayan mountain range. I was transfixed. These pristine natural wonders were clear as crystal, their snowy peaks reaching up into the atmosphere, gleaming and sparkling in the sunlight, and I was overwhelmed by a liberating sense of beauty, power, and freedom as I contemplated this incredible vista. Eventually the dream faded, but the image has remained burned into my memory—not just the extraordinary picture of the mountains themselves, but the feeling of having climbed temporarily into rarefied air and glimpsed a vision so pure and exquisite that the only possible human response was awe.

Now the interesting thing about experiences, even the most profound, is that what we make of them largely depends on how we interpret them. And how we interpret them depends on our psychological and metaphysical conclusions about life. This was the great insight of philosopher Immanuel Kant, who pointed out that while experiences can certainly affect our conclusions about life and reality, it usually works the other way around. Our concepts and beliefs about life and reality, what he called our a priori convictions, tend to condition our experience. Indeed, these convictions help form powerful interpretive frameworks, worldviews that reflect our deepest conclusions about the nature of ourselves and the universe we live in. And because these worldviews are so primary, so fundamental, they affect everything else—how we think about family, community, politics, economics, religion, even spiritual experiences like the one I just described. Now the perspectives associated with the work of Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin represent two powerful interpretive frameworks, based on two different conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality. And if we take a moment to look through Galileo’s telescope, so to speak, to peer through the lens of the worldview represented by each of these great figures, we can glimpse how the human experience—including my spiritual experience in Asia—looks and feels from these distinct perspectives. And in so doing, we can perhaps gain a better sense of the unique way in which each point of view contextualizes consciousness and culture today.

If, for example, we temporarily adopt a Jungian perspective and examine my spiritual experience from that point of view, certain aspects would immediately stand out. First of all, the numinous quality and symbolic language of the dream would likely be striking to anyone, and definitely to Jungians. We could say that the mountain peaks symbolically represent spiritual heights or “peak” experiences. Mountains, in this sense, might be seen as archetypal images for attainment, for human aspiration and spiritual yearning, and for achieving a new perspective from which to look out upon the world. According to Jungian thought, however, it is not just the mountain that is an archetype. I was not just a spiritual seeker having an archetypal experience; I was entangled in the archetype from the start, captured by a whole network of archetypal structures—the “hero’s quest,” the “seeker after truth,” the “search for enlightenment”—all time-honored activities that have been part of the human experience for thousands of years. In my unconsciousness, I might have thought that I was a young American pursuing enlightenment in the year 1991, with personal goals and aspirations, creating my own life one step at a time. Yet from a different point of view, I was simply an embodiment of an ancient structure already in place, walking down a path whose fundamental contours had long been set, choosing the particular forms of my experience, even as those experiences were being conditioned by an impersonal substratum of influences pulling strings in my unconscious, subtly but powerfully shaping my destiny.

“We are never only persons,” writes Jungian analyst and theorist James Hillman. “We are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties. Titans and Demons and Magnificent Goddesses have ruled our souls for thousands of years; Aristotle and Descartes did their best, and the analytical minds that followed them are still at it, but the mythic forces have not been slain.”

For Jung and those who have followed in his wake, the idea that we are never only persons—that individually and collectively we are always in relationship with psychological forces larger than ourselves—is foundational. Indeed, there is a fundamental orientation in Jungian thought toward unearthing and understanding those deeper archetypal forces of the past. In the introduction to his recent book, Cosmos and Psyche, the Jungian-influenced Richard Tarnas describes this as the “critical need, on the part of both individuals and societies, for a deeper insight into those unconscious forces and tendencies, creative and destructive, that play such a powerful role in shaping human lives, history, and the life of the planet.” The answer to the problems of our time, a Jungian perspective suggests, is not to be found in the discovery of some new and higher level of consciousness but rather in bringing to these deeper causal factors to light. “Perhaps we must not only go high and far,” writes Tarnas later in the book, “but down and deep.” As Jung himself famously remarked, “Enlightenment is not found through imagining figures of light, but through making the darkness conscious.”

Now, what happens if we change the interpretive lens of our worldview and examine my experience in Asia through an evolutionary framework, one more influenced by Teilhard’s thought and by those who have continued his work? This changes the landscape significantly. In this perspective, I would see my own spiritual yearning not as an archetypal impulse but as an evolutionary one. I would begin to recognize that my own consciousness is an expression of a vast process of development that extends all the way back to the beginning of time. I could recognize that contained in my own psyche are the sediments of millions of years of biological evolution and thousands of years of cultural evolution. I would be able to appreciate that for the first time in that multimillion-year process, human beings have the capacity, the awareness, and the knowledge to reflect on the nature of the evolutionary dynamics that created them. I might even begin to realize that the surge of consciousness I was experiencing was fundamentally a creative impulse, welling up out of the depths of my own psyche, but also out of the depths of the cosmos itself, urging me forward to greater and greater heights of freedom, increasing my capacity for self-reflection and awareness.

Seen in this light, the spiritual impulse becomes an expression of a different type of ancient force, one that Teilhard contemporary Alfred North Whitehead called Eros, the creative force driving the universe toward higher and higher expressions of novelty and divinity. For Teilhard himself, ever the committed Christian, it was the deepest manifestation of the energy of Christ in the world, what he called the “motive force of evolution.” It is what What Is Enlightenment? founder Andrew Cohen refers to as the evolutionary impulse or “an ecstatic surge that compels one toward the future.”

Both of these distinct perspectives, the archetypal and the evolutionary, have much to offer the postmodern world. Both provide depth and meaning to the human experience and place it in a much larger context. Both liberate the self from a small, personal world of isolation and separation and connect it to deeper and higher impersonal forces. And both have the potential to overcome the postmodern sense of alienation, narcissism, and hyper-individualism by recognizing that there are much greater energies and powers at work in the human psyche than the modern ego. But that’s where the similarities end. A Jungian perspective orients our attention toward the past, connecting it to deeper archetypal forces active within the psyche, while a Teilhardian perspective orients our attention toward the future, connecting it to the immense evolutionary forces active within the cosmos.

A Creative Cosmos

“Gloriously situated by life at this critical point in the evolution of humankind, what ought we to do? We hold Earth’s future in our hands. What shall we decide?”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have spent a good deal of time reflecting on the differences between Jung and Teilhard, between the archetypal and the evolutionary, and the distinct ways in which they orient us toward the challenges of the twenty-first century. And while I have no doubt that there are innumerable ways to look at this issue and contrast these points of view, I found myself coming back again and again to one basic idea that is absolutely essential to our moment in history—creativity. Any new worldview that is going to be equal to the tremendous tasks of our century must be flexible, adaptable, and creative enough to respond to a global society that is highly diverse and enormously complex. It must inspire a new faith in human potential and help us to envision a better future, both for ourselves and for the planet we live on. And it must help us to liberate human ingenuity, allowing us to respond with tremendous passion, resourcefulness, and dynamism in order to bring that vision to fruition.

It is on this count that an evolutionary worldview really proves its merit. Teilhard’s writings describe a universe that is not static or unchanging or at rest, but is in process, in motion, constantly evolving—always creating higher structures of consciousness and new, more complex forms. In this sense, creativity is built into an evolutionary cosmos, right down at the foundations of life and reality. An evolutionary worldview places humanity at the evolving edge of a universe filled with Eros, oriented toward the future with all of its unknown potentials and possibilities. In contrast, an archetypal perspective, for all of its richness and depth, is almost by definition more oriented toward the patterns and structures that have come to us from the past. After all, the root of archetype is arche, which literally means “first principle.” Archetypal associations tend to orient us toward the mythological, the mythic, the archaic—not toward the new, the novel, or the unknown.

“Archetypes deemphasize the emergence of the genuinely new, whether new behaviors or new ways of constituting the world,” declares scholar Dennis Ford, author of the recent book The Search for Meaning , in a chapter discussing Jungian archetypes. “Is there nothing—no technology, social arrangement, or level of consciousness—that is genuinely new?”

The more I understand the nature of worldviews, the more Ford’s statement makes sense to me. Worldviews are constructed out of our deepest conclusions about the nature of reality, and archetypes are generally associated with conceptions of reality that come to us from earlier, mythological times. This is reflected in the work of many Jungian thinkers, who tend to incorporate into their work an unusual mix of the contemporary and the mythological. Perhaps this stems from Jung himself, who was fascinated by alchemy and mythology and spent years studying primitive cultures. Tarnas’s recent book is primarily dedicated to resuscitating the ancient science of astrology. And Hillman’s writings are filled with gods and goddesses and numerous mythological references applied to contemporary issues. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this, except for the fact that the concepts of evolution and even creativity were largely absent from the premodern cosmologies that Jungian thinkers hark back to. This does not mean that we should discard the idea of archetypes altogether. In fact, let’s assume for a moment that everything Jung discovered about archetypes and the collective unconscious is true. Is there a way of accepting that basic premise without reverting to a pre-evolutionary cosmology? Is there a way of integrating the essential insights of both Jung and Teilhard, without compromising the fundamental truths of either?

I believe that there is. In fact, these core insights of Jung can actually be explained and understood using an evolutionary context—and in some ways, they become even richer.

For example, many scholars have noted that Teilhard’s “noosphere” bears a rather striking resemblance to Jung’s collective unconscious. The concept of the noosphere might be more contemporary, but they both communicate the same fundamental idea—that there is a collective interior dimension to the human psyche.

Then there is the issue of archetypes themselves. Jung’s ambiguity about archetypes has encouraged endless speculation over how they should be defined. But one way to define them is simply as interior structures in consciousness—complex amalgams of ideas, thoughts, and actions that have accumulated over time and which form powerful impressions in the noosphere. They can be understood as ancient patterns that have formed over thousands of years of repeated experience, patterns that have their own semi-autonomous existence, independent of any one person’s psyche. This definition fits remarkably well within the context of some of Jung’s own thinking. Remember that he originally described archetypes as “forms of instinct.” And later in his life he suggested that they are “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.” In a forthcoming book called Evolution and Archetype, scholar John Haule points out that the way in which Jung often spoke left “no doubt” that he was “sincerely trying to align his incipient concept of archetype with the process of evolution.”

Seen in this new light, archetypes are no longer rigid, eternal, pre-existing forms associated almost entirely with the mythic past, but they are swept up into the creativity of an evolutionary cosmos, becoming pliable, malleable structures in consciousness that can evolve, adapt, and change as the world evolves and changes.

This point has been echoed by scholars such as process philosopher David Ray Griffin. He notes in his book Archetypal Process that an evolutionary understanding of archetypes “makes them historical, contingent, and capable of transformation, whereas Jung and Hillman, although sometimes speaking of them as rooted in history, often treat them as eternal.” And then Griffin goes one step further and notes that this change of context also changes our conception of God. “The divine in Jung and Hillman is a conservative force,” he notes, whereas in an evolutionary worldview God also becomes “a force introducing novelty into the process.”

So what kind of universe do we live in? The answer to that question will determine a great deal about how we see our own lives and how we view the tremendous tasks at hand in the twenty-first century. It will help define the visions we hold for our individual and collective future and inform how we build a new world based on those visions. In a sense, worldviews are also origin stories. By telling us where we have come from, they tell us who we are and where we are headed. And what more extraordinary origin story could there be than the emerging recognition that we live in a dynamic, creative cosmos? Consciousness and matter have been on a shared evolutionary journey for billions of years, eventually resulting in the complex mammals that walk upright today in our post-industrial society, trying to fathom the universe and their role in it. That is a story of novelty and creativity of the highest order. Science itself, hemmed in by its own metaphysical straitjacket, finds it hard to perceive the immense significance of this story, but that should not deter us. In fact, it should give us the courage and inspiration to create a postmodern, post-traditional, post-mythological worldview, one that is flexible enough, adaptable enough, and most important, creative enough to respond to the challenging dynamics of a globalizing world that is careening into the future. It may be a worldview founded in an evolutionary cosmos, but it will likely include a great many of the essential insights of both an eccentric Swiss psychologist and an unconventional Jesuit priest. Indeed, though they gave birth to two distinct visions of the world, it’s hard to imagine that Jung and Teilhard themselves would not have insisted that their work is largely complementary.

The two men never met, though Teilhard was certainly aware of Jung and appreciative of his work. An acquaintance of Teilhard’s who encountered him at a dinner party during the last years of his life later recounted that they struck up a lively conversation and spent several hours discussing psychology. He remembered being “impressed by [Teilhard’s] wide knowledge and appreciation of Jung’s theories” and recalled that he “made a sharp distinction between the theories of Freud, Adler, and Horney, and the theories of Jung, with which his own thought had something in common.” Jung, for his part, outlived Teilhard by several years, and we know little about his thoughts regarding the great Jesuit, except for one obscure but revealing passage from a book by a close colleague, Miguel Serrano. Serrano describes visiting the eminent psychologist about three weeks before his death in June 1961:

On the small table beside the chair where Jung was sitting was a book called The Human Phenomenon by Teilhard de Chardin. I asked Jung whether he had read it. “It is a great book,” he said. His face was pale, but seemed strangely illuminated by an inner light.