CONNOR ADDISON

Tao, Evolution, and the
Collective Unconscious

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Although Jung doesn’t posit an evolutionary origin directly, my guess is that this has emerged from the repetition of ancestral experiences in deep time. So that symbols and their meanings have been etched into the mind as hardware at birth. For example, we have evolved a natural fear of snakes for reasons of physical survival but it extends, symbolically, to much more: In the snake’s venom, we find learning and thus transformation and wisdom. In the snake’s hiding, we find our unconscious and thus the “Shadow” within us. Even if evolution is not literally encoding: “Snake = Hidden growth through pain,” we still have the evolutionary faculty of metaphor to get there.

I find it to be no coincidence that the story of Adam and Eve extracts symbolic significance from our evolutionary home as apes (the tree) with our evolutionary predator (the snake) and features our evolutionary food (fruit). What’s more is that these three symbols are found in almost every system of spiritual thought, irrespective of cross-cultural exchange. These images and their meanings do not belong to any creed, they are borrowed.^✹^{Our ancestral home?
Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Younger (1532)}

But, for those sceptics, I would also posit that the collective unconscious has also emerged out of the objective nature of things in the world. As an artist it has been amazing to discover the undeniable and inescapable meaning inherent in shapes. The circle, for example, is inescapably an expression of wholeness and infinity, yet is also the void and formlessness. To follow its line is an infinate cycle. Its curve offers no heiarchy, a spacial point of differentiation from which to define other points, making it empty. This true nature of the circle is something picked up upon in Taoist philosophy: the circle is both full and empty, suggesting reality is the marriage of opposites and so non-dualistic (Yin-Yang/Taijitu) or that in the circle’s void we find the Dao, the ineffable, unnameable origin of all things: Wu (無) or undifferentiated potential.^✹✹
This early version of the iconic yin-yang diagram visualizes Taoist cosmology—depicting the eternal interplay of opposites: light and dark, activity and rest, being and non-being. More than balance, it illustrates the generative tension of duality, each force holding the seed of its opposite.

Lai Zhide’s Xuanguan Taiji Tu Shuo (玄关太极图说), ca. 1600 CE.

In short, the world offers universal meanings encoded in its objective structure, recognisable across cultures. These meanings are real. They’re not just cultural.

Whether the collective unconscious arises from evolution or the symbolic nature of the world, I propose that systems dealing with the mystical, moral, and irrational—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam—are built upon a secular substrate. They extract universal truths from observed reality (above) and evolutionary human patterns (below). Religion has simply occupied these truths.

Footnotes
✹ : We even see the role of emergent self-consciousness from a state of naked bliss to shame, probably a real gradual event during our evolutionary leap from ape to Homo sapiens. It’s amazing that this was intuited by the ancient Hebrew/Mesopotamians

✹✹ : I find this emergence of the world from a void of undifferentiated potential particularly interesting for its similarity to Quantum Field Theory. The Taoists really know how to intuit deep truths that science has only begun to verify.