"But why on earth," you may ask, "should it be necesarry for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?" This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of the real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals exists. From a low hill on the plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this, is. The entire world around me was still in a primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man. ...Every advance, even the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that much to the world.
(Jung, 9-1 CW, par 177)