Neumann is pointing at something that the sign-world around us systematically obscures: the difference between a fixed meaning and a living one. A sign exhausts itself in its referent — stop means stop, and once you know it, there is nothing left to circle. The symbol refuses this. It keeps the gap open. It names something that cannot be fully named, which is why consciousness cannot simply learn it and move on; it returns, orbits, meditates — the circumambulatio — not from failure of understanding but because the symbol contains more than any single encounter can extract.

What Neumann calls the spiritual side, the "principle sui generis," is the formative pressure working upward through the image. Spirit appears in the psyche as instinct — not as doctrine descending from above, but as an organizing urgency already moving in the depths. This matters because the temptation is always to settle the symbol too quickly: to interpret it once, to fix its meaning, to convert the living thing into a useful allegory. The moment that happens, the circulation stops. What drew consciousness back again and again — the irreducible surplus, the unsettlement — is gone. The circumambulatio is not a ritual decoration. It is the sign that the symbol is still alive, still formulating something the experiencing consciousness has not yet metabolized.