Humanity did not Create Religion, it Revealed Religion Through Explaining the Unconscious

Reviewing Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious Mind, Part 4: Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

Gemini image of myth and religion sprouting from the unconscious mind.

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious is not something I can summarize in a short essay, so I decided to create bite-sized chunks of what I’m getting from it.

In the same way that you and I evolved to develop ten fingers and ten toes, we both evolved to have similar contents in our unconscious minds.

“primitive figures of phantasies and religious myths streaming up from the unconscious.” — pg. 455

The way Jung describes mythology and religion is as if our conscious minds are explaining, through symbols and stories, the content of our unconscious minds. We dream, have visions, and then explain those dreams and visions. We evolve those reflections on the unconscious mind from mere symbols, to stories, as we attempt to narrate these dreams and visions which produce the narratives of religious ideas.

A religion is simply a narrative that our conscious mind uses to communicate the contents of our unconscious minds. It is an advanced result of our attempts to rationalize, explain, and understand the majority of what our…