100 books like The Origins and History of Consciousness

Upon my initial reading, this book profoundly impacted me, reshaping my perspective as an emerging psychotherapist and memoirist. Carl Jung, rather than detailing his professional achievements, delves into his personal struggles and inner life, resonating deeply with my own experiences.

I was captivated by his journey from his earliest memories to his later years as he continued to explore his psyche and the collective unconscious. Standing beside him through his narrative, I was struck by his raw honesty, particularly remarkable for an 83-year-old man articulating his deepest emotional truths.

This book inspires me to embrace my dreams and imagination as tools for self-exploration and understanding, highlighting a path to inner discovery and wholeness that is accessible to anyone willing to engage deeply with their inner world.

Campbell, to me, is the dean of writers on myth. I met him once, through a professor at Hollins University who, at her graduation, had awarded Anna, my wife-to-be, the first three volumes of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, as a prize in English Literature (the fourth, Creative Mythology, was yet to be published).

After we met, I learned that Campbell had edited the Penguin Portable Jung – and it is that book that set me on a course of study and writing on myth and literature that I have pursued ever since.

As a final note, Campbell also co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a book that many years later led me into James Joyce’s masterwork, Finnegans Wake – to me, the apotheosis of mythic literature.

At about 10,000 BC, there appeared in Mesopotamia female statuettes, clearly privileging fertility. They came to be associated with the bucranium – the head and horns of the wild bull aurochs, and, over time, the pair took on the unmistakable stamp of a goddess and her consort, a bull.

Jacques Cauvin, who conducted their excavation, was able to link the pair with the birth of agriculture, and in so doing he found that the individual came, for the first time, to stand in a worshipful posture toward an other-worldly existent – bringing about for humanity thereby an entirely new cultural orientation. Indeed, the pair bore “all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominated the oriental pantheon, “right up to the time of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel” (p. 31).

Cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald posited that, at the most fundamental level, humans have a hybrid mind, one that consists of a gene-based mammalian, analogue brain, onto which is grafted a culture-based, symbolic brain. The former, the primitive mammalian brain, is a space where “the lines between consciousness and the mind’s inaccessible unconscious modules are drawn very deep in the sand” (p. 286).

As to myth, Donald noted that virtually all hunter-gatherer societies observed in the modern era have or had elaborate mythological systems, all structured along the same lines, in which myth informs every aspect of life: “myth permeates and regulates daily life, channels perceptions, determines the significance of every object and event in life. Clothing, food, shelter, family – all receive their ‘meaning’ from myth” (p. 215).

This book, more than any other on the subject, surprised and fascinated me.

Its thesis is deceptively simple. It suggests that the two hemispheres of the human brain were “strangers” to each other early in our evolutionary history (three millennia ago). The left hemisphere received the information from the right as a message from an unfamiliar source (an unseen “voice”).

Jaynes proposed that this was the basis for all religious experience. It was our intuitive right hemisphere that supplied the “voices” of the gods. True human consciousness only arose when this bicameral mind “broke down” and the “voice of God” was replaced with what had been speaking to us all along, the other more intuitive half of ourselves.

Jung proposed many fascinating ideas about the inner workings of the mind. His concept of the archetypes and of the collective unconscious are two of his best-known contributions, and both are intimately tied to his conceptualization of dreams. The idea that dreams not only emanate from our personal unconscious, but also from our collective unconscious (a deep stratum of the unconscious common to all humankind) and contain universal patterns, images, and dispositions, has helped countless people develop a deeper understanding of their dreams.

What’s more, this book exposes Jung’s view of dreaming as a wholesome, natural process that can give rise to creative—even transcendent—experiences featuring personal challenges, unmapped potentials, and elements of one’s personality. Not always the easiest of reads, but highly rewarding. 

Marian Woodman has been my shero ever since I attended a workshop of hers. I recall sitting in the audience listening to her speak and blinking my eyes. How could it be that she could shape-shift from a coy flirtatious maiden, into a warm nurturing mother, and then moments later appear as a regal, confident, and sovereign queen and then a deeply wise crone? She clearly understood and embodied the full range of the conscious feminine in its various aspects.

Of her many books, this is the one I love the most because, in this collection of interviews with her, the passion of her speaking voice comes through the written word loud and clear. Her phrasing is so delicious, my tattered copy is underlined throughout.

Although I was familiar with Harvard Business School professor George Serafeim’s research and work on impact weighted accounting before I read this book, I still found it informative and inspiring.

The first half of this book is a primer on ESG and sustainability highlighting societal shifts and why purpose and impact have moved to the forefront. And the second half details how impact and outcomes can be achieved. 

This book is an excellent introduction for people new to purpose – or questioning its real value financially – as well as for those of us who have long been in this space.

Drawing extensively on his research and that of colleagues, Serafeim emphasizes how doing good creates competitive advantage.

I write character-driven fiction and it is always the people and their relationships that most engage me in any story. I found the characters here complex, real, engaging, and, in some instances, foul specimens demonstrating that existence for survival alone is an inadequate way of life for any person. These are fully developed people, though they are mostly unusual individuals; archetypes rather than stereotypes. The people hooked me from the start. I cared what happened to these adventurers. I also cared that those who deserved retribution would receive it.

This book is an incredible reference book. I used it as an actor in one of my favorite acting classes. During rehearsal, we used archetypes to help flesh out and explore our characters. This technique felt groundbreaking.

Since archetypes are essential to character development, and we each possess every archetype within us, this book was a staple for me in my creative development. I will go so far as to say that this book was a portal for me to access the teacher in me and expanded me out of my actor self and into my author self.