THE MASK OF ETERNITY
The Afterlife & Soul's Mystery of Immortality
By Iona Miller, 2016
"This observation, however, does not tell us anything about immortality or life after death. It refers only to the quality of our experience." ~Carl Jung, Conversations with Jung, Pg 13
The Afterlife & Soul's Mystery of Immortality
By Iona Miller, 2016
"This observation, however, does not tell us anything about immortality or life after death. It refers only to the quality of our experience." ~Carl Jung, Conversations with Jung, Pg 13
“Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that ‘I’ cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.” –Alan Watts
"When Professor Jung was eighty years old, one of his former patients, a woman of seventy, came to him in order to ask him what his ideas about death and a possible afterlife were. He answered: "It won't help you, on your death bed, to think about what I believed; you must form your own ideas and conceptions of death." He obviously meant that she should be preoccupied by the problem of death and then watch what the dreams would tell her. She told me this and it stuck in my mind. I have therefore puzzled for many years now about this question myself." --M-L von Franz, "Archetypes Surrounding Death"
The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Such "clear vision", second sight, or anomalous cognition is an acknowledged family trait of the Bloodline, and possibly a product of the entanglement of our psychophysical processes. In search of our own myth we encounter an epochal human story, an "as if" reality in which the preconscious myths form us of the manifold essence of the inner world.
Dear Frau N., 11July1944
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.
A few days before my sister died her face ware an expression of such inhuman sublimity that I was profoundly frightened.
A child, too, enters into this sublimity, and there detaches himself from this world and his manifold individuations more quickly than the aged.
So easily does he become what you also are that he apparently vanishes.
Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are.
"Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time." ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1572.
But in this reality we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and what shall we still know of this earth after death?
The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. Rather does the little finger know itself a member of the hand.
Your devoted, C.G. Jung
"When Professor Jung was eighty years old, one of his former patients, a woman of seventy, came to him in order to ask him what his ideas about death and a possible afterlife were. He answered: "It won't help you, on your death bed, to think about what I believed; you must form your own ideas and conceptions of death." He obviously meant that she should be preoccupied by the problem of death and then watch what the dreams would tell her. She told me this and it stuck in my mind. I have therefore puzzled for many years now about this question myself." --M-L von Franz, "Archetypes Surrounding Death"
The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Such "clear vision", second sight, or anomalous cognition is an acknowledged family trait of the Bloodline, and possibly a product of the entanglement of our psychophysical processes. In search of our own myth we encounter an epochal human story, an "as if" reality in which the preconscious myths form us of the manifold essence of the inner world.
Dear Frau N., 11July1944
What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.
A few days before my sister died her face ware an expression of such inhuman sublimity that I was profoundly frightened.
A child, too, enters into this sublimity, and there detaches himself from this world and his manifold individuations more quickly than the aged.
So easily does he become what you also are that he apparently vanishes.
Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are.
"Since we are psychic beings and not entirely dependent upon space and time, we can easily understand the central importance of the resurrection idea: we are not completely subjected to the powers of annihilation because our psychic totality reaches beyond the barrier of space and time." ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1572.
But in this reality we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and what shall we still know of this earth after death?
The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. Rather does the little finger know itself a member of the hand.
Your devoted, C.G. Jung
Pearly Gates, Io Miller
“To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die,
but he can never know that he is dead.” --Samuel Butler
“The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow — Hope, shining upon the tears of grief.”
--Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Ghosts"
"Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection."
--Carl Jung; Red Book
“To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die,
but he can never know that he is dead.” --Samuel Butler
“The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow — Hope, shining upon the tears of grief.”
--Robert G. Ingersoll, "The Ghosts"
"Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection."
--Carl Jung; Red Book
http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/632/646
When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable. This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty that no discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.
There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go and we are all going to get there.
When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable. This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty that no discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.
There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go and we are all going to get there.
The creative process of birth/death is a strong primordial undercurrent flowing deep within the days, hours and minutes of any process of transformation. When we abandon our destiny on earth, we tend to imagine that we emerge from and return to a non-existent, numinous, transcendent Source -- imminent dwelling within the cosmos.
Do we vacate the temporal for the eternal? Are we related to something infinite? Is there a paradise? Is everything Consciousness? Symbolically, the Absolute is represented as Source, Fountain or Well, the Center, the One, the All or Whole, the Origin (Arche).
This Principle or Primordial Cause is Sacred or Holy, Mystery, the Ultimate. The “original ground” is the concept of an unconditioned reality which transcends limited, everyday existence. We forget our own biography, the illusions of the story, our own identity, our own decay, and take part in the universal breath.
What can we learn from the universities, clinics, academies, religions, and mystery schools? The unconscious bites even its handlers, as Eco notes. Can we free ourselves of the blackmail of certainty? With death, psyche reverts to its undifferentiated primordial condition -- the pleroma.
What we understand is what we want to understand. Does labeling it change how we relate to it? Is it all just emotional engineering? Do we die like Osiris, an Orphic, a Dionysian, a martial warrior, a plaintive Persephone? At death do we assume our place among the ancestors in the World Soul? Does psychic life continue in the collective unconscious? Each life and death is a 'just so' story opening to cosmos.
Death Archetypes
What about death archetypes? Our psychic connection with our ancestors is established in childhood. There is a threshold of perception between the dead and the living. They just go over into a form of existence which we cannot perceive any longer. We come to the paradox of death in life and life in death.
How do we even glimpse the mist-enshrouded utterly unknown country? Our given psychic structure, the mothering matrix of psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes color our beliefs about death and the netherworld. The ancient Babylonians had 36 gods, the most powerful was the Sun god. The 12 houses of the Zodiac each had 3 rooms. These rooms are where the departed spirits would dwell in the afterlife.
A frequent motif is some dead relations or friends come to help and instruct the dying person with the importance of meeting death consciously. Mankind has an age old primitive fear of the ghost of the deceased. The helper is the Self archetype [not a spiritualistic 'ghost'] and may appear as a radiant light; it takes many shapes.
Life after death mirrors a replacement child's search for self. "Many of us may dream about it – but few of us may experience it: life after death. Resurrection. The replacement child – born after another child has died – lives in such an extraordinary constellation. But, in my view, the life of a replacement child is not exactly paradise, especially since the one resurrected is not oneself but the dead other."
Some dreams detach us from the body ahead of time. Jung thought the dead entangle themselves, so to speak, with the physiology (sympathetic nervous system). Entanglement in physics is a good analogy. Another motif alludes to great estrangement of the dead from the realm of the living.
Still another is moving to a new unknown city, as shown in Astral City: A Spiritual Journey (Nosso Lar) , a 2010 Brazilian drama, directed by Wagner de Assis. Andre Luiz narrates his impressions of the spirit world he encounters upon his death. The Brazilian story is set in a spiritual city, a philosophical conception of super-reality.
Dudjom Lingpa speaks of, "Direct Crossing Over.Liberation is swiftly achieved by devoting yourself to the pinnacle of paths,the swift, essential Dharma filled with blessings of clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and miraculous power,the path of direct crossing over to the city of the great transference."
The bridge between matter and the immaterial is another classic image, noted by Jung: "Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge." (J.E.T., Page 95)
American Master artist, Morris Graves, in his 90s with a pacemaker relentlessly beating out his heart rhythm, told this author of a dream he had of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was collapsing as he rode across it on a motorcycle. He died very shortly after, the golden bridge between worlds finally dissolving, His last works were "Instruments for a New Navigation," the last containing a dessicated leaf, echoing his left sense and presaging the inevitable.
Jung said, "the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment." (The Red Book, Pages 229-230.)
Felling of trees, cutting wheat, black holes, and supercelestial fire are symbols of death. Fire is the great transformer in death and resurrection. The coffin is a great death mystery, a form of the tree used widely in initiation rites of death and rebirth. The double or other half is the true self with whom we reunite in death. Anima as soul-guide can represent death as in the film, "All That Jazz," the angel of death is named Angelique, solace of life's bitterness.
The mysterium coniunctionis is the "death marriage," the sacred marriage at the end of life -- the nondual unification of opposites, a syzygy, not a romantic fantasy. The image is the couple. Past, present and future are one in the non-temporal state and dreams.
In Persian religion, "When the dead has reached the beyond he finds the vine of
life or tree of life whose roots are water, whose leaves or fruit are angels, whose branches are light and whose trunk consists of souls. Whoever smells it is vivified. There the dead is clothed in a new garment of light and enters paradise forever."
"...the image of vegetation and of the tree is simultaneously a symbol of transitoriness and of eternal life. From such gnostic sources comes the image of the tree of life, described in Revelation (22:2): "And in the midst ... [of the heavenly Jerusalem] was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations." --M-L von Franz.
"Let's now turn to speculations about a life after death. I am fully aware that spiritualists would look down on what I am telling here; they treat such questions as if they were completely known and they can make descripti0ns of the beyond. I have however, rightly or wrongly, always shunned their doctrines, because they seem to me partly made up from different old religious ideas and not from much personal experience. I have therefore always only stuck to what I have met myself, because dreams, as you know, cannot be made up; they come to us and tell us only what we need to know, not to satisfy any further curiosity." --M-L von Franz.
Is there a universal mystical spirituality beyond philosophical arguments and irresolvable debates? Persephone offered a peaceful afterlife through the revelation of her great Mysteries at Eleusis. We all harbor subterranean irrationality. Are such dreams of cosmic stillness transcendental escapism? Are we just the victims of cosmogonic love, as Jung suggests?
What of mystical physics and astrophysics? Even Jung admitted it was an analogy. In MDR, he admits our conscious represents only a small part of the entire psyche. “He who would fathom the psyche must not confuse it with consciousness; else he veils from his own sight the object he wishes to explore."
Yet, he clings to it: "All the same, every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. … Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being."
Is any of it even relevant? Is there a common core to religious, mystical, and scientific illuminism? Do multiple worlds 'out there' condition our inner world? What is the path from quantum theory to higher consciousness? Do we inhabit a 'participatory universe'?
Dudjom Lingpa speaks of renewal in "the space of the awareness of the quintessences.The initial consciousness emerges as a vision of the clear light, manifesting as a sight for the eye of wisdom. ...With the extinction of appearances and mindsets you cross over into the absolute space of ultimate reality and you awaken as the great transference youthful vase body."
We are part of this inconceivable reality, navigating through it with all kinds of questions. Somehow we are sustained by it no matter how wrong, limited, or misguided our answers may be. Reality bubbles up from the quantum vacuum continuously. The quantum vacuum is a vast plenum (fullness) of spacetime “foam,” beyond which even time, space — and physics — come to an end.
Chopra claims, "Quantum theory has reached the point where the source of all matter and energy is a vacuum, a nothingness that contains all the possibilities of everything that has ever existed or could exist. These possibilities then emerge as probabilities before “collapsing” into localized quanta, manifesting as the particles in space and time that are the building blocks of atoms and molecules. (http://www.chopra.com/articles/what-is-cosmic-consciousness)
Can we transform our consciousness to conform with Consciousness, what Bucke and James called cosmic consciousness? Can the hidden reality be accomplished through the form of prayer, meditation, renunciation, and faith? If not, shall we also ask after Jung in Liber Novus, "but what then is your myth, the legend that you live in?" The 'Grail space' may be the eternal womb of absolute space, from which all phenomena emerges and is contained.
Is it a cosmic con? We don’t need to worship, literalize, or concretize such qualities to recognize their evocative power. All things that arise into existence must descend back into the void. In that silence we find our alert Presence, self-arising primordial awareness -- the unconscious ground that dissolves thousands of years of human conditioning and root of the Tree of Life...unborn awareness that is awareness itself.
Debate continues whether the soul exists and whether it is immortal or dies with the person. This never-ending story that has occupied the minds of great philosophers throughout history. How do our ancestors relate? How do we relate to it?
Ancestral Land
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon assumed a life after death depicted in their art and burial rites. Notions of ‘living’ ancestors and some sort of afterlife permeated the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens. The ancestors seemed to be in the land because they were and are part of the land where the voice of nature speaks.
"The ritual of staging ceremonies for the dead predates even ancient, pagan religions. Thanks to recent archaeological findings, we know that prehistoric people practiced funeral rites. Discoveries in northern Iraq, from as far back at 65,000 years ago, indicate that Neanderthals buried their dead on a bed of flowers. Cro-Magnons left evidence of more elaborate burial practices, even burying bodies in full clothing with intricate, beaded stitching. Experts say that such careful rituals are evidence of religious beliefs, attaching spiritual significance to the transition between life and death, as religions do today."
(Pagan Origin of Funerals by Jonathan Vankin)
Such rituals became more complex in the Stone Age and Neolithic. The hypothesis is that Gobekli tepe is a burial site. The belief remains an assumption about fate after death and immaterial life. Research into primordial societies, cross-cultural burial practices and propitiatory rituals, including sacrificial death, indicates beliefs in a netherworld existence, populated by nature spirits and ancestors.
Shamanic death and resurrection was initiatory. Ritual re-enacts the actions of the ancestors and gods which transformed primordial chaos into the order of the world. Oceanic desire structures ritual behavior in predictable ways. They conform to universal experiences and perceptions, exploring the crux of individual encounter with our own depths.
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.
The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light – the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self – the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which one cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward Heaven…or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and unity.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life – social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence.
They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
Mankind is still prone to clinging to elegant but erroneous hypotheses, including notions of universal mind as an ultimate. The yawning abyss of universal mind remains the great Unknown, from which no traveler is permitted to return.
Universal Mind
The pre-scientific argument was: "There is a single, intelligent Consciousness that pervades the entire Universe - the Universal Mind. It is all knowing, all powerful, all creative and always present. As it is present everywhere at the same time, it follows that it must also be present in you - that it is you. Your mind is part of the one Universal Mind. This is not simply a philosophical ideal passed down to us through the ages."
Universal Mind is called Omniscience (all knowing), Omnipotence (all powerful), Omnificence (all creative) and Omnipresence (always present). As this is our nature, we have access to all knowledge, known and unknown. We have access to an infinite power, the limitless creativity of the One Creator. All these attributes are present within us at all times in their potential form.
The ultimate goal of the Vedic process is moksha, or liberation and the release from samsara, or the continuous cycles of birth and death, otherwise called reincarnation. This liberation is the position of the soul when it regains or reawakens its spiritual consciousness to the fullest extent. When one’s consciousness is purified or completely spiritualized, and when the soul has regained its spiritual position and completely acts on that level, then there is no more need to take birth in a material body for the pursuit of material desires. One then enters back into the spiritual world, which is the natural home of the spirit soul, when the finite living entity returns to the Infinite.
Hindu salvation is known as Self Realization and rising above ignorance. In Vedic philosophy, salvation or liberation means a person realizes they are not the body, but the immortal soul (Atman) within. That is the reason why Hindu salvation is known as Self-Realization or realizing that one is the Immortal self and not the perishable body. This realization is the means of rising above the illusion that keeps us from being free. Real freedom on the Vedic path is freedom from material and sensual desires. Such desire is the basis of what keeps us bound up in earthly existence and in samsara.
Collective Unconscious
In Lament of the Dead, Hillman adds, "it's the weight of human history, the voices of the dead, opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say, not just the deep repressed or the forgotten, it's the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul."
He continues: "Jung calls attention to the one deep, missing part of our culture, which is the realm of the dead. The realm not just of your personal ancestors but the realm of the dead, the weight of human history, and what is the real repressed, and that is like a great monster eating us from within and from below and sapping our strength as a culture."
"It's all that's forgotten, and not just forgotten in the past, but that we're living in a world which is alive with the dead, they’re around us, they're with us, they areas. The figures, the memories, the ghosts, it's all there, and as you get older your borders dissolve, and you realize I am among them..."
Murray Stein says we need to re-vision the dead and to hang on to our dreams and visions of the afterlife, even in a skeptical environment. Can we reverse the wheel of history and cherish in our times the dreams, visions, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors that paid homage to the afterlife?
The ancients spared no means in erecting visible signs of a continued presence of the dead among the living. The vast burial mounds of Neolithic culture, the great pyramids of Egypt, the wooden stretchers of Native Americans were visible signs and tangible embodiments of a continuous universe, inspiring great works of art that survived the ravages of time.
Symbolic rebirth means re-entering the womb of primordial life to complete renewal. Unbound by time the shaman is part of the mythical realm. Repeated death and resurrection represents a transfiguration. They could ascend to heaven to communicate with the gods and descend to the land of the dead.
Resurrection of the soul of the world means a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality -- seeing soul in all natural objects. Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters" in a heightened communication and coordination between the unconscious and conscious. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and radically participatory in this One World.
Nostalgia for Paradise
Trance, hypnosis, and psychoactive plants can produce experiences of a plenum or void, interpreted as a separate reality with spiritual attributes. The nature and locale of such a netherworld and afterlife remains the object of speculation, despite ghostly phenomena. Certainly, thinking does not persist and it is inconceivable how differentiated essence might.
Eliade discerned a pervasive 'nostalgia for origins' in shamanism and many religions -- a primitive ontology. He saw it reflected in science: "One could say that the anxious search for the origins of Life and Mind; the fascination in the 'mysteries of Nature'; the urge to penetrate and decipher the inner structure of Matter—all these longings and drives denote a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original universal matrix. Matter, Substance, represents the absolute origin, the beginning of all things."
Each culture has had its answer throughout the ages. The nondual natural mind is part of nature. Traditional identity depends on participation in a transcendent reality. Jung describes this "kingdom of things that are not. The beginning of the world, the creative point, the origin, is also described by a paradox: a completely empty fullness, or completely full emptiness." (Visions Seminar, Pg 524-525) The transconscious cannot be reduced to the historical.
Such absolute space has been equated with the groundstate of primordial mind and virtual light beyond the phenomenal. The ground of all phenomena is emptiness -- dynamic nondual unknowingness. Ultimate awareness is the source of energy and ground of being. Conceptually empty, this plenitude of possibilities arises from the entire universe arising in mind, in quantum physics. Dudjom Lingpa calls it, "the experience of the conscious awareness of identitylessness." When the self dissolves in timeless truth, the drop merges in the ocean.
Altered states and dreams gave rise to the notion that the stone cold abyss is an underworld of the dead, or an Elysian field. Then, as now, mortuary rituals helped the living endure separation. The afterlife says more about our imaginal and conceptual ideas about it than its literal reality as a physical or transcendental realm. In his Red Book, Jung says, "We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end." (Page 275).
We still speculate on 'life that persists after death' and how or what that might mean, in spiritual, psychological, and scientific terms. This is not mere semantics or metaphysical narrative. A world seen through the lens of divine order is very different from one rooted in self-organizing chaos and complexity. Physical law and divine agency continue to quarrel in our unconscious minds, which retain archaic beliefs. We need to understand the world by making stories of it.
Even if ‘consciousness’ persists as a category or property, which is doubtful, it is not ‘ours’ in any sense, despite theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism. Even if consciousness is a primordial feature of the universe, such proto-conscious bears no resemblance to our individuality. So, our theoretical continuance remains moot, being a return to the profoundly undifferentiated state. The conundrum remains a labyrinth in which we battle with the mortality minotaur.
Our unconscious psyche always retains these more primordial levels of belief. Marie-Louise von Franz notes, "It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death." (1987), ix.
All speculation about after-death conditions remains more philosophical than scientific, even when mired in the philosophy of science or the psychology of scientists. We needn't be atheists, existentialists, or nihilists to notice the phenomenology where we find it. We must distinguish between an ontological afterlife and imaginal fantasies of an afterlife, and the epistemology of such metaphors.
A parade of historical afterlife beliefs demonstrates that old ideas of the hereafter or land of the dead do not die as easily as its presumed inhabitants. Immortality of the soul is still offered as counterpoint to the terrifying reality of death. Many would allege that hell is actually here on earth. For aeons we've been dying to be immortal.
Not content with historical versions of such notions, pop culture continues to mash-up faddish ideas and concoct new notions. Such idiosyncratic ideas are infused with pop science often compounded from contradictory physics theories.
Traditional and iconoclastic ideas clash. We are, in this way, eternally haunted by the dead as we contemplate our own unavoidable future. Some might say it scares the hell out of us, but it may scare the ‘heaven’ in.
Even those in the rational professions are not exempt from irrational ideas. Claims of ‘proof’ are premature at best, and spurious clickbait headlines at worst. But, as they say, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In this sense, we dig our own philosophical grave.
A plethora of theories from consciousness studies and transpersonal psychologies, rooted in eastern and western cultures has compounded the situation, which is not confined to the esoterics of theological discussion. As ever, we are left with more questions than answers, all of which are strongly rooted in worldview, rather than hard facts. Self-indulgent hypotheses abound.
What we do know is humans engage in a wide variety of self-soothing activities to stave off pain, fear of extinction, and insanity. Participation mystique, mystical fusion, is projected beyond death, as well as a living process that is a primitive relic of the original undifferentiated state. It can be an unwitting identification with the idea of a thing -- in this case, the afterlife.
Naturally, there are all sorts of sociopolitcal, power, and authority reasons to promote specific ideas and requirements for admission to the hypothetical afterlife. The afterlife gets wielded as a weapon and reward or commodity in the war for social control, as a mythic not literal reality.
Methods of persuasion range from religion to torture. Paradigm shift is related to worldview warfare. Myth is about the past, things supposed to have happened beyond historical time, but science tries to predict the future based on the past. History is often confounded with mythology, as are the well-springs of human behavior and fundamentals of our psychology.
Cross-cultural Descriptions
The east has its ancestor worship, karma and reincarnation, and Chinese alchemy of immortality in some hypostasized state, recounted in The Secret of the Golden Flower. Special priests and sacred texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead describe the nature of the imaginal journey. The later describes reincarnation as a continuum of human learning.
Kabbalah describes the emanation of all and everything from Three Veils of Negative Existence: Ain, Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur. The Vedas are perhaps the oldest extant cosmological model. Symbolic immortality differs from literal immortality in some inaccessible place. Death is the road to awe.
Such descriptions don't match cross-culturally. We can imagine ancient shamans venturing into the heights and depths of human experience. Drugs, sickness, or trauma ignited the near-death experience from which legends and beliefs grew. Shamans became the mediators of such non-ordinary states, and later were replaced by priesthoods who controlled the narratives on the nature of reality, from the Dark Night of the Soul to Enlightenment.
The ancient Greeks imagined the underworld or Tartarus as dry and windy -- the cold home of Death. Hades was the place of the dead, Tartarus was where ferocious monsters and horrible criminals were banished. The souls who were good went to the Elysian Fields. Psyches in the underworld have no consciousness. Gods and heroes made descents into hell and returned with paradigmatic boons.
The Greeks went to the Necromanteion, "Oracle of the Dead", to talk with their dead ancestors. No one went to heaven, which was reserved only for the gods. The Elysian Fields were the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. It was ruled by Cronus, or time. Wikipedia describes the ceremony:
Ritual use of the Necromanteion involved elaborate ceremonies wherein celebrants seeking to speak to the dead would start by gathering in the ziggurat-like temple[5] and consuming a meal of broad beans, pork, barley bread, oysters, and a narcotic compound.[2][6] Following a cleansing ceremony and the sacrifice of sheep, the faithful would descend through a chthonic series of meandric corridors leaving offerings as they passed through a number of iron gates. The nekyomanteia would pose a series of questions and chant prayers and the celebrants would then witness the priest arise from the floor and begin to fly about the temple through the use of Aeorema-like theatrical cranes.
The Christians imagined hell as unbearably hot and hellish, while heaven was idealized. The imagery is culturally conditioned as near-death experiences show. For example, Hindus are unlikely to meet Jesus in their tunnel of light. But that does not make such visionary states literal reality or more than a metaphor.
Artifacts of out of body experience and the human death process can be misinterpreted and/or idealized. Such disembodied experience can be heavenly or hellish. Todd Murphy describes the role of brain areas in such crises. This glimpse of an afterlife in either a positive or negative light actually says more about their own psyche and cultural conditioning than a netherworld. The limbic system can produce strongly euphoric or dysphoric affective and cognitive states, both verbal and non-verbal.
Murphy suggests that, "the reason why some NDEs are hellish is that the positive affect that usually accompanies NDEs, out of the right temporal neocortex together with the left amygdala, is replaced by negative affect out of the left temporal neocortex together with the right amygdala. If this were so, then it might explain how an NDE can be unpleasant, but not why it is so." He notes, such non-ordinary states can also be healing, mentally and physically.
Anything seemed preferable to consignment to oblivion. The Egyptians and medieval Christians sought to buy their way into heaven by virtuous or ethical behavior, which always remains culturally relative. The Jews, having endured the immortality obsessions of the Egyptians, still tend to leave questions of the afterlife (Olam haBa) to G-d. The Torah contains no clear references to it. Eschatological ideas only arose later, perhaps through syncretism.
Cathar heretics sought the afterlife through Gnostic notions of purification, perfection, and denial of ‘evil’ physical materialism. Eliade noted, "Gnostics past and present sought answers not in the course of outward human events, but in knowledge of the world's beginning, of what lies above and beyond the world, and of the secret places of the human soul."
The alchemists engaged vigorously in a psychophysical process of transfiguration to elevate themselves and matter. All suggest our aversion to the nothingness of nonexistence and yearning for redemption and escaping judgement.
In the Phaedo, Plato presents four arguments for the immortality of the soul and life after death. Soul separates from the body to achieve wisdom and experience the Platonic forms unhindered by the body. Maybe the whole point of such practice is facing our own death and darkness directly, to “die before dying,” as Plato said.
Quantum Physics of the Afterlife
Science is the new religion. Death is the black hole of our existence. Some physicists first claimed that life goes on in the quantum state, then others changed the narrative to the more fundamental domain of the virtual vacuum or pre-spacetime.
But if death is an illusion, it remains the most persistent one. Scientists seek less disreputable theories of forms of persistence. But we must not attribute real identity to a concept, even when couched as hypothesis or theory.
Professor Fred Alan Wolf unpacked quantum physics for an afterlife in vaguely mystical terms. Others have used many-worlds theory, uncertainty, entanglement, and quantum nonlocality to unpack the quantum model of immortality. Now, some speculate the “souls” of the dead reside in dark matter or dark energy, an artifact of string theory that may may not be 'real.'
Such works popularize these notions with the public, whether they actually grasped the science behind them, or not. Their appeal is largely emotional -- a validation of felt-sense and new age intuition. The theory seems to be the body dies but our quantum field lives on. The trail leads through NDE's and speculation on the timeless states of enlightenment. Popularization produces 'good parrots' rather than good science. Ideas about other dimensions are bandied about with little understanding.
In Physics of the Soul The Quantum Book of Living Dying Reincarnation and Immortality (2013), Amit Goswami address several questions from an eastern perspective. Such models are often based on state of the art concepts or technology of a society, which are employed as metaphorical structures for conceptual or spiritual understanding, rather than actual physical laws or ontological realities. The afterlife is one such boundary.
We cannot see beyond that threshold of death, but speculate in modern terms. The story changes as we push on the cognitive boundary digging down into finer realms of nature, but the 'undiscovered country' remains the same. The map is not the territory.
The non-material realm of existence becomes the quantum or sub-quantal domain. Consciousness-researcher David Chalmers suggests that perhaps the universe exists in terms of psychophysical laws, and that consciousness may involve both an information state and experiential state.
“I believe that the findings of quantum physics increasingly support Plato [who taught that there is a more perfect, non-material realm of existence]. There is evidence that suggests the existence of a non-material, non-physical universe that has a reality even though it might not as yet be clearly perceptible to our senses and scientific instrumentation. When we consider out-of-body experiences, shamanic journeys and lucid dream states, though they cannot be replicated in the true scientific sense, they also point to the existence of non-material dimensions of reality.” (Wolf 1998)
Probabilities or superpositions give rise to uncertainty which gives rise to entanglement (which is also the alleged source of the arrow of time). Entangled particles represent a probability distribution. As quantum uncertainty spreads, particles become increasingly entangled. Entangled particles seem to share one big entangled state.
As they become more correlated with one another, the particles become increasingly entangled with one another. Individual particles lose their autonomy entrained to the collective state. When correlations contain all the information of the holistic system of entangled particles, and the individual particles contain none, particles stop changing, having arrived at a state of equilibrium with rare, random fluctuations. Information becomes increasingly diffuse, but never completely disappears.
Seth Lloyd says, “The universe as a whole is in a pure state. But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” A new ontology is implied if the universe is one big entangled object — a conscious universe. Bohm and others contend that each part of the universe contains information about the entire universe.
Information about all systems in the universe exists as a potentiality in every system. But each system in the universe only manifests information in a specific range so it can never manifest all the information that is available to it. Individual human minds have nonlocal aspects.
Our DNA contains all the emotional records of our ancestors. Epigenetics tells us the dead potentially possess the transgenerational ability to psychophysically influence the fortune of the living through biogenetics, modulating mutations, disease, repair, stress response, genetic imprinting, gene expression, healing, even speculative inquiry.
There is simply no separation between ourselves and the primordial ground. It is a subtle but important shift in awareness. We can experience the whole spectrum of non-ordinary states of consciousness, the “heavens and hells” or bardo states of other models. The field patterns of the finest organization of energy and matter also affect the evolution of the cosmos.
As nonlocal quantum field entities we are coherently connected with All. The unfathomable ocean of our virtuality is a dynamic energetic infusion, an expanded sense of NowHere, a leap of faith into the Abyss. We are challenged to fully comprehend the truth of our existence.
The limitless ocean of roiling subspace makes negentropic or syntropic transformations. The quantum vacuum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. We are that nondual dynamic “ocean of active information” in wave form. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe.
The 'Open Sesame' of Subspace
Tom Bearden was among the first to suggest the threshold of death is some sort of return to the sub-quantum vacuum or scalar field of virtual vacuum fluctuation, from which we have never really been separate. We can see no deeper into nature than fluctuating fields of energy, which constitute the constant background motion. All that is, is in motion. But it is sustained by the ground state or “cosmic zero.”
"Passage of an electromagnetic wave through the vacuum leaves an invisible trace. The vacuum "imprints" everything that happens in it. This imprint is electrogravitational; i.e., the imprinting process structures the substructure of vacuum spacetime [the artificial potential of vacuum].” Presumably this 'imprint' constitutes the blueprint of our afterlife 'existence' which is non-existence, fusion with the ground state.
Such arguments for continuance in the virtual states and hyperspaces are supported with notions of EM fields and negentropy, as well as reversal of the process of how nothing becomes something in a 4-D scalar domain. Notions of 'zero-point' were popularized into ideas of a Source Field, from which we arise and to which we return. The empty space, absolute space, was again filled with imagination.
The Void is not devoid. It is void of physical particles. The zero-point field is the ground state energy of all fields in space. Matter is an insubstantial wavefunction (a potential) at the quantum level. The collective potential of all particles everywhere with their individual zero-point energies is one universal zero point field.
Nature has been hiding the zero-point field (zpf) in a blinding light. Since it permeates every atom in our bodies, we are effectively blind to it. It blinds us by its presence. What we do see is all the rest of the light that is over and above the zero-point field.
We cannot eliminate the zero-point field from our eyes. Even with its distinctive pattern of dynamic electric and magnetic fields in continual fluctuation, the vacuum remains the simplest state of nature. Life takes refuge in a single space - absolute space.
Classically, absolute space (not relative space) is considered non-causal in relationship to manifest phenomena. But we are beginning to describe it more accurately as non-linear, non-local and/or entangled with all events and objects of the phenomenal world.
All events emerge from the framework of absolute space. Though insubstantial it has properties, qualities, and ramifications. The study of space supersedes the study of matter in motion.
The Heart Sutra aphorism summed it up: Form does not differ from the void. Buckminster Fuller espoused a similar 'zero-point' philosophy in his geometric model of the Vector Equilibrium Matrix in Synergetics. But such zero-point is not an inhabitable space in any sense we can imagine, though it models the dynamic transforms of matter and energy.
We seem to divinize the boundaries of our consciousness as we push them back from causal, to quantal, to sub-quantal domains. We use the technical discoveries of hydraulics, computers, or holography to amplify such notions. We can be pretty sure, at some level, that the divine is in no way limited to the latest discoveries.
For the reductionist, the Holographic Principle is the ultimate reduction. It applies to the most minuscule level of what we can observe, and beyond. For the universalist, the Holographic Principle gives us the ultimate universal. It extends to the limit of our Universe, the Universal holographic boundary, and beyond. For the phenomenalist, the Holographic Principle gives us the ultimate ground of our phenomenal perception, our grounding in the Universal "now," in the now-present of the Universal holographic boundary, moving outward from now-pasts to now-futures. (Germine)
The concept of One Mind is simpler than that of many minds, and lets us out of the bizarre and counterintuitive idea that there are multiple copies of our own selves, which exist as mere potential, and are thus not actual. There are many possible universes, but there is only One Mind, which determines events on the quantum level, and thus creates our Universe.
The multiverse of all potentials fundamentally supports the single Universe we collectively observe. The multiverse is the wave function of the Universe (Penrose, 2004). The recursive integration of nested hierarchies of holographic surfaces brings out a single actuality in consciousness from a wave function that is unconscious.
Consciousness thus gives us information at a level of experience that is causal. In this sense, we partake in the creation of the Universe. We participate in creation, and this participation, when fully realized, leads us to higher levels of consciousness and of realization.
For Jung, the collective ancestry is indistinguishable from his concept of the Collective Unconscious - an autonomous organizing principle of structure and experience, reflecting the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul, patterns of information. They speak in images.
Physics tell us the dead have a continued existence informationally in the virtual vacuum and energetically in the cosmos. Information is not lost in a holographic universe that is a unitary process. In holographic theory, fragmentation created by boundaries does not exist. Each component is an embedded part of an unbroken whole. Each ancestor is a node in the unfathomably vast field of meaning. Consciousness is the essential core of life—a vast, unbounded, unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena.
Related ideas such as the energy body, field body, and holographic concepts of reality have been grabbed up by new age amateurs and conflated beyond recognition as cultish fantasies of Ascension, rooted in pseudoscience.
Natural philosophy sees mind, life and matter emerging from and returning to the womb-like nature of the vacuum potential, the energy sea that is the primary reality underlying spacetime. Biophysics tells us DNA is not merely a physical molecule; it is also the molecular form of universal creative consciousness, or “torsion” energy, as it self-transforms into what we perceive, belatedly, as the template for our physical bodies. The human being can be modeled as a quantum biohologram, or field body.
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Everything, including life and consciousness emerges from and returns to the vacuum potential.
Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space described by contemporary physics as "The Field", scalar field, luminiferous ether, virtual vacuum, zero point and torsion field. Jung and the Gnostics called it the Pleroma or Plenum. The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy -- an ocean of virtual Light -- that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is μετάνοια metanoia, or repentance, relinquishing material existence and returning to the Pleroma.
Mortality is possibly the hardest fact of all. Are such theories just another ritual of expiation for the inconvenient truth that we simply don’t and cannot know? Is knowledge of immanent death or preparation through meditation or other methods actually relevant or merely consoling in the veil of suffering we call life? We seem to die a more painful death than non-reflective animals. But even animals mourn.
Does nature recognize death as loss or merely compost? Even stars live finite lives and die. Much depends on our notions of linear and cyclic time, binding, and its transcendence. So obviously, the afterlife may remain more a comfort to the private grief of the living than any ‘reality’ for the dead and their regrettable demise. We attempt to magically banish our fear and pain of not knowing.
Thus, we have a potpourri of ideas to accept or reject, none of which can ever be proven but may be re-contextualized or falsified as supporting theories fail. The human mind continues to rebel against the nihilistic notion that physiological arrest is a ‘fade to black’ demise. It is our final condition, despite the facts of energy conservation. The body ceases to be animated by any ‘vital principle.’
Death enters the world with birth, surrounded from pre-history with taboos and fears. In ethno-medicine, retention of seed was one route to immortality. Many paths devised a non-material body as a vehicle for consciousness beyond the grave. Violent, premature, or accidental death is perhaps even harder to accept than a terminal illness or old age. When the vital breath leaves does a great spiritual force break open the skull to another domain of existence?
That is the question. Much depends on what we mean by simple words, such as ‘is’ or ‘be,’ much less questions of damnation, elevation, transmogrification, transmigration, or recyling. It begs the question, what if anything is reborn if ego is one sort of experience and soul another not always included in traditional reincarnation theories. Is it just another egoic control fantasy or palliative?
When it comes to the human psyche, we want to believe and such ideas have driven much of world history and the history of religions. A glorious afterlife has been offered up as a consolation for war and the vagaries of fate and destiny.
Is there such a thing as a ‘good death’ or a ‘bad death’? Who makes that valuation, because it is certainly not the departed. But is ‘a good death’ really voluntarily offering our selves up to the gods, even when conceived as an act of regeneration? If death regenerates life, does regeneration cause death?
Neurological Models
Many phenomena arise as the brain and body dies, as shown in reports of near-death survivors, who claim their consciousness persisted beyond their clinical expiration. They say, "I was THERE." That is, they describe their disembodied consciousness as their experiential reality. Reports have been interpreted, measured, and evaluated from religions such as Tibetan Buddhism to sciences such as neurology and neurotheology.
Michael Persinger's experiments applying magnetic fields to the brain have produced classical states, such as sense of Presence, suspension of time and spatial awareness, hauntings, even alien abduction. Such controlled modulation shows the mechanisms underlying many 'spiritual' experiences. Temporal lobe epilepsy can also mimic such states as the brain misfires in a transient storm of stimulation.
A whole spectrum of non-ordinary experience arises in states of hyper- and hypo-arousal. They were described in the 1970s by Roland Fischer as a taxonomy of states. Stanislov Grof and John Curtis Gowan also produced such taxonomies, many of which have reinforced ancient and modern cultural beliefs in the hereafter.
In Neurotheology, Laurence O. McKinney suggests that many religious experiences are actually neurologically based and that death itself as described many ways in many religions is a peaceful slow fade of consciousness as the mind unwinds… whatever ‘consciousness’ is. He suggests we ‘experience’ eternity in the last ten seconds of life, due to anoxia and molecules such as endorphins that shape our reality.
He claims: “A major insight was that, in normal brain death, the chronology-creating pre-frontals fail first, pitching our last dream into timelessness while the steady return to near fetal consciousness as the brain dies cell by cell will dissolve us into a comforting forever, suggesting why heaven is so similar in all religions. Whether by the laws of God or the laws of cognitive neuroscience, we'll still end up in eternity so why fight about it? God's plan or good luck, it makes no difference.”
Is the dying brain in a heightened or merely altered state, downloading the detritous or debris of fragmenting memory? Such reality is based in the mind itself, a regression to a primal epoch of collective unconsciousness – the ouroboric fusion of undifferentiated infancy, described by Erich Neumann as pre-egoic wholeness. The cyclic serpent biting its own tail is a “feedback process,” a primordial symbol of immortality – the zero that is One.
Short of clinical death, death imagery mimics the therapeutic process of trauma healing. Trauma locks up energies in the body, and the self image can become “frozen” and inhibit growth of the personality. This image can be destructured or liquefied. This eliminates the old holographic pattern, returning all elements to a chaotic state. From this chaos, the new image automatically emerges in regenerated form. This death/rebirth cycle is healing, and may be the mechanism of the placebo effect.
But who can explain the unexplainable with either traditional or contemporary terms? Jung attempted to re-contextualize arguments of the soul by de-literalizing the religious notion and recognizing the middle ground of the imaginal psyche – a non-religious concept of soul as the animating principle.
A religious or hallucinatory experience at near-death is arguably no assurance of noncorporeal persistence upon demise. Not all NDE’s have a positive valence, though negative stories tend to be under-reported in self-validating theories. Such reports tend to become more elaborate over time. That is, the imaginal psyche tends to embroider them to suit our beliefs. In the gray zone, death isn't necessarily permanent, and life can be hard to define,
Ancient and modern psychedelics have been used to assuage fear of death. They demonstrate that imaginal death is really the discorporation of the personality – ego death. Yet ‘ego’ is another mental construct. Such positive or negative experience is strongly correlated with ‘set and setting.’
Theories of mind and death proliferate. One of the classics is Tipler’s Physics of Immortality, with its Omega Point cosmology of singularity, derived from Tielhard de Chardin’s philosophy. Parapsychologists including William Teller and Dean Radin have contributed throughout the years with various theories rooted in yet other theories of consciousness suggested by interpretations of physics.
Really, one must begin by stating the theoretical basis, whether the Standard Model, QFT, Many Worlds, String theory, M-theory, Holographic, Parallel Worlds, transactional, quantum cosmology, pre-spacetime physics, or other theoretical roots. Ontology, epistemology, and percepts remain relevant to those arguments and must be defined, including the human or physical basis of phenomenology experienced by humans.
Most theories are incompatible with one another, and some have proven to relate only to mathematical realities and imaginal dimensions which don't map onto ordinary reality. And we have to keep theoretical operators, such as scalars, dark matter and energy, within their own hypothetical realms.
This proliferation of theories about the immaterial within our own observable reality demonstrates even physics is on shaky ground. We still aim to suspend time in an eternal state in our minds where death has no sting. But science reports that time processing is an artifact of the parietal lobe, which can go offline under certain EM effects, trance, or deep meditation, yielding sensations of timelessness.
Tibetan leader, Dudjom Rinpoche says, “Death: the mingling of the mother luminosity and the child luminosity: When the path luminosity mingles with the ground luminosity itself, at that instant one can free oneself into the absolute clarity…. Great yogis allow the luminosities to arise and mingle in that space, bypassing Bardo projections. They become the light of life itself.”
Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff alleges, “Pure Consciousness is included in fundamental space-time geometry along with the precursors of spin, mass, charge. In fact, everything we see in our real world stems from patterns in the most fundamental level that percolate up to our level which is many, many magnitudes of order higher.”
We are left to draw our own highly conditioned abstractions and self-serving conclusions. Of one thing we remain certain: life after death remains the great Mystery, the Magnum Mysterium, and a matter if not of personal discovery, of self-revelation, should any mote remain to acknowledge the subjective condition of non-existence.
We might concur with Jung: "But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life."
Summary
Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form. It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives. It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness.
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination. Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death. This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities.
Jung himself felt, "What comes after death is something of an indescribable splendor so that our imagination and our sensibility could not conceive even approximately ... Sooner or later, the dead will become one with us; but, in actual fact, we know little or nothing of that way of being. What do we know of this land, after death? The dissolution of our temporary form in eternity does not involve a loss of meaning: rather, we will all feel members of a single body."
When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable. This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty which no discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.
There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go and we are all going to get there.
As Jung said, "We are not in a position to prove that anything of us is necessarily preserved for eternity. But we can assume with great probability that something of our psyche goes on existing. Whether this part is in itself conscious, we don't know either. ...The concept of immortality tells us nothing about the related idea of rebirth or metempsychosis."*
Even if mankind has fantasized about it for two million years, it is not self-evident. We can recognize our own existential finitude and may not benefit by shrinking away from the void of death. Thus, death may be the secret of life.
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It looks as if only those who are relatively close to death are serious or mature enough to grasp some of the essentials in our psychology, as a man who wants to get over an obstacle grasps a handy ladder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 536-537
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 306.
“Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.” ―Kabir, The Bijak of Kabir
Is it the divine will? Or is it the wish of the human heart which shrinks from the Void of death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to ascribe to them the significance of insights. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 312.
I'm inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is in a relatively non-extended and eternal state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 29-30.
I can answer your question about life after death just as well by letter as by word of mouth. Actually this question exceeds the capacity of the human mind, which cannot assert anything beyond itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 561.
Do we vacate the temporal for the eternal? Are we related to something infinite? Is there a paradise? Is everything Consciousness? Symbolically, the Absolute is represented as Source, Fountain or Well, the Center, the One, the All or Whole, the Origin (Arche).
This Principle or Primordial Cause is Sacred or Holy, Mystery, the Ultimate. The “original ground” is the concept of an unconditioned reality which transcends limited, everyday existence. We forget our own biography, the illusions of the story, our own identity, our own decay, and take part in the universal breath.
What can we learn from the universities, clinics, academies, religions, and mystery schools? The unconscious bites even its handlers, as Eco notes. Can we free ourselves of the blackmail of certainty? With death, psyche reverts to its undifferentiated primordial condition -- the pleroma.
What we understand is what we want to understand. Does labeling it change how we relate to it? Is it all just emotional engineering? Do we die like Osiris, an Orphic, a Dionysian, a martial warrior, a plaintive Persephone? At death do we assume our place among the ancestors in the World Soul? Does psychic life continue in the collective unconscious? Each life and death is a 'just so' story opening to cosmos.
Death Archetypes
What about death archetypes? Our psychic connection with our ancestors is established in childhood. There is a threshold of perception between the dead and the living. They just go over into a form of existence which we cannot perceive any longer. We come to the paradox of death in life and life in death.
How do we even glimpse the mist-enshrouded utterly unknown country? Our given psychic structure, the mothering matrix of psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes color our beliefs about death and the netherworld. The ancient Babylonians had 36 gods, the most powerful was the Sun god. The 12 houses of the Zodiac each had 3 rooms. These rooms are where the departed spirits would dwell in the afterlife.
A frequent motif is some dead relations or friends come to help and instruct the dying person with the importance of meeting death consciously. Mankind has an age old primitive fear of the ghost of the deceased. The helper is the Self archetype [not a spiritualistic 'ghost'] and may appear as a radiant light; it takes many shapes.
Life after death mirrors a replacement child's search for self. "Many of us may dream about it – but few of us may experience it: life after death. Resurrection. The replacement child – born after another child has died – lives in such an extraordinary constellation. But, in my view, the life of a replacement child is not exactly paradise, especially since the one resurrected is not oneself but the dead other."
Some dreams detach us from the body ahead of time. Jung thought the dead entangle themselves, so to speak, with the physiology (sympathetic nervous system). Entanglement in physics is a good analogy. Another motif alludes to great estrangement of the dead from the realm of the living.
Still another is moving to a new unknown city, as shown in Astral City: A Spiritual Journey (Nosso Lar) , a 2010 Brazilian drama, directed by Wagner de Assis. Andre Luiz narrates his impressions of the spirit world he encounters upon his death. The Brazilian story is set in a spiritual city, a philosophical conception of super-reality.
Dudjom Lingpa speaks of, "Direct Crossing Over.Liberation is swiftly achieved by devoting yourself to the pinnacle of paths,the swift, essential Dharma filled with blessings of clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and miraculous power,the path of direct crossing over to the city of the great transference."
The bridge between matter and the immaterial is another classic image, noted by Jung: "Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge." (J.E.T., Page 95)
American Master artist, Morris Graves, in his 90s with a pacemaker relentlessly beating out his heart rhythm, told this author of a dream he had of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was collapsing as he rode across it on a motorcycle. He died very shortly after, the golden bridge between worlds finally dissolving, His last works were "Instruments for a New Navigation," the last containing a dessicated leaf, echoing his left sense and presaging the inevitable.
Jung said, "the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge to what is to come. That is the God yet to come. It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning. God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning. The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together. The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end. It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment." (The Red Book, Pages 229-230.)
Felling of trees, cutting wheat, black holes, and supercelestial fire are symbols of death. Fire is the great transformer in death and resurrection. The coffin is a great death mystery, a form of the tree used widely in initiation rites of death and rebirth. The double or other half is the true self with whom we reunite in death. Anima as soul-guide can represent death as in the film, "All That Jazz," the angel of death is named Angelique, solace of life's bitterness.
The mysterium coniunctionis is the "death marriage," the sacred marriage at the end of life -- the nondual unification of opposites, a syzygy, not a romantic fantasy. The image is the couple. Past, present and future are one in the non-temporal state and dreams.
In Persian religion, "When the dead has reached the beyond he finds the vine of
life or tree of life whose roots are water, whose leaves or fruit are angels, whose branches are light and whose trunk consists of souls. Whoever smells it is vivified. There the dead is clothed in a new garment of light and enters paradise forever."
"...the image of vegetation and of the tree is simultaneously a symbol of transitoriness and of eternal life. From such gnostic sources comes the image of the tree of life, described in Revelation (22:2): "And in the midst ... [of the heavenly Jerusalem] was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations." --M-L von Franz.
"Let's now turn to speculations about a life after death. I am fully aware that spiritualists would look down on what I am telling here; they treat such questions as if they were completely known and they can make descripti0ns of the beyond. I have however, rightly or wrongly, always shunned their doctrines, because they seem to me partly made up from different old religious ideas and not from much personal experience. I have therefore always only stuck to what I have met myself, because dreams, as you know, cannot be made up; they come to us and tell us only what we need to know, not to satisfy any further curiosity." --M-L von Franz.
Is there a universal mystical spirituality beyond philosophical arguments and irresolvable debates? Persephone offered a peaceful afterlife through the revelation of her great Mysteries at Eleusis. We all harbor subterranean irrationality. Are such dreams of cosmic stillness transcendental escapism? Are we just the victims of cosmogonic love, as Jung suggests?
What of mystical physics and astrophysics? Even Jung admitted it was an analogy. In MDR, he admits our conscious represents only a small part of the entire psyche. “He who would fathom the psyche must not confuse it with consciousness; else he veils from his own sight the object he wishes to explore."
Yet, he clings to it: "All the same, every science is a function of the psyche, and all knowledge is rooted in it. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. … Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position coequal with the principle of physical being."
Is any of it even relevant? Is there a common core to religious, mystical, and scientific illuminism? Do multiple worlds 'out there' condition our inner world? What is the path from quantum theory to higher consciousness? Do we inhabit a 'participatory universe'?
Dudjom Lingpa speaks of renewal in "the space of the awareness of the quintessences.The initial consciousness emerges as a vision of the clear light, manifesting as a sight for the eye of wisdom. ...With the extinction of appearances and mindsets you cross over into the absolute space of ultimate reality and you awaken as the great transference youthful vase body."
We are part of this inconceivable reality, navigating through it with all kinds of questions. Somehow we are sustained by it no matter how wrong, limited, or misguided our answers may be. Reality bubbles up from the quantum vacuum continuously. The quantum vacuum is a vast plenum (fullness) of spacetime “foam,” beyond which even time, space — and physics — come to an end.
Chopra claims, "Quantum theory has reached the point where the source of all matter and energy is a vacuum, a nothingness that contains all the possibilities of everything that has ever existed or could exist. These possibilities then emerge as probabilities before “collapsing” into localized quanta, manifesting as the particles in space and time that are the building blocks of atoms and molecules. (http://www.chopra.com/articles/what-is-cosmic-consciousness)
Can we transform our consciousness to conform with Consciousness, what Bucke and James called cosmic consciousness? Can the hidden reality be accomplished through the form of prayer, meditation, renunciation, and faith? If not, shall we also ask after Jung in Liber Novus, "but what then is your myth, the legend that you live in?" The 'Grail space' may be the eternal womb of absolute space, from which all phenomena emerges and is contained.
Is it a cosmic con? We don’t need to worship, literalize, or concretize such qualities to recognize their evocative power. All things that arise into existence must descend back into the void. In that silence we find our alert Presence, self-arising primordial awareness -- the unconscious ground that dissolves thousands of years of human conditioning and root of the Tree of Life...unborn awareness that is awareness itself.
Debate continues whether the soul exists and whether it is immortal or dies with the person. This never-ending story that has occupied the minds of great philosophers throughout history. How do our ancestors relate? How do we relate to it?
Ancestral Land
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon assumed a life after death depicted in their art and burial rites. Notions of ‘living’ ancestors and some sort of afterlife permeated the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens. The ancestors seemed to be in the land because they were and are part of the land where the voice of nature speaks.
"The ritual of staging ceremonies for the dead predates even ancient, pagan religions. Thanks to recent archaeological findings, we know that prehistoric people practiced funeral rites. Discoveries in northern Iraq, from as far back at 65,000 years ago, indicate that Neanderthals buried their dead on a bed of flowers. Cro-Magnons left evidence of more elaborate burial practices, even burying bodies in full clothing with intricate, beaded stitching. Experts say that such careful rituals are evidence of religious beliefs, attaching spiritual significance to the transition between life and death, as religions do today."
(Pagan Origin of Funerals by Jonathan Vankin)
Such rituals became more complex in the Stone Age and Neolithic. The hypothesis is that Gobekli tepe is a burial site. The belief remains an assumption about fate after death and immaterial life. Research into primordial societies, cross-cultural burial practices and propitiatory rituals, including sacrificial death, indicates beliefs in a netherworld existence, populated by nature spirits and ancestors.
Shamanic death and resurrection was initiatory. Ritual re-enacts the actions of the ancestors and gods which transformed primordial chaos into the order of the world. Oceanic desire structures ritual behavior in predictable ways. They conform to universal experiences and perceptions, exploring the crux of individual encounter with our own depths.
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.
The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light – the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self – the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which one cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward Heaven…or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and unity.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life – social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence.
They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
Mankind is still prone to clinging to elegant but erroneous hypotheses, including notions of universal mind as an ultimate. The yawning abyss of universal mind remains the great Unknown, from which no traveler is permitted to return.
Universal Mind
The pre-scientific argument was: "There is a single, intelligent Consciousness that pervades the entire Universe - the Universal Mind. It is all knowing, all powerful, all creative and always present. As it is present everywhere at the same time, it follows that it must also be present in you - that it is you. Your mind is part of the one Universal Mind. This is not simply a philosophical ideal passed down to us through the ages."
Universal Mind is called Omniscience (all knowing), Omnipotence (all powerful), Omnificence (all creative) and Omnipresence (always present). As this is our nature, we have access to all knowledge, known and unknown. We have access to an infinite power, the limitless creativity of the One Creator. All these attributes are present within us at all times in their potential form.
The ultimate goal of the Vedic process is moksha, or liberation and the release from samsara, or the continuous cycles of birth and death, otherwise called reincarnation. This liberation is the position of the soul when it regains or reawakens its spiritual consciousness to the fullest extent. When one’s consciousness is purified or completely spiritualized, and when the soul has regained its spiritual position and completely acts on that level, then there is no more need to take birth in a material body for the pursuit of material desires. One then enters back into the spiritual world, which is the natural home of the spirit soul, when the finite living entity returns to the Infinite.
Hindu salvation is known as Self Realization and rising above ignorance. In Vedic philosophy, salvation or liberation means a person realizes they are not the body, but the immortal soul (Atman) within. That is the reason why Hindu salvation is known as Self-Realization or realizing that one is the Immortal self and not the perishable body. This realization is the means of rising above the illusion that keeps us from being free. Real freedom on the Vedic path is freedom from material and sensual desires. Such desire is the basis of what keeps us bound up in earthly existence and in samsara.
Collective Unconscious
In Lament of the Dead, Hillman adds, "it's the weight of human history, the voices of the dead, opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say, not just the deep repressed or the forgotten, it's the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul."
He continues: "Jung calls attention to the one deep, missing part of our culture, which is the realm of the dead. The realm not just of your personal ancestors but the realm of the dead, the weight of human history, and what is the real repressed, and that is like a great monster eating us from within and from below and sapping our strength as a culture."
"It's all that's forgotten, and not just forgotten in the past, but that we're living in a world which is alive with the dead, they’re around us, they're with us, they areas. The figures, the memories, the ghosts, it's all there, and as you get older your borders dissolve, and you realize I am among them..."
Murray Stein says we need to re-vision the dead and to hang on to our dreams and visions of the afterlife, even in a skeptical environment. Can we reverse the wheel of history and cherish in our times the dreams, visions, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors that paid homage to the afterlife?
The ancients spared no means in erecting visible signs of a continued presence of the dead among the living. The vast burial mounds of Neolithic culture, the great pyramids of Egypt, the wooden stretchers of Native Americans were visible signs and tangible embodiments of a continuous universe, inspiring great works of art that survived the ravages of time.
Symbolic rebirth means re-entering the womb of primordial life to complete renewal. Unbound by time the shaman is part of the mythical realm. Repeated death and resurrection represents a transfiguration. They could ascend to heaven to communicate with the gods and descend to the land of the dead.
Resurrection of the soul of the world means a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality -- seeing soul in all natural objects. Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters" in a heightened communication and coordination between the unconscious and conscious. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and radically participatory in this One World.
Nostalgia for Paradise
Trance, hypnosis, and psychoactive plants can produce experiences of a plenum or void, interpreted as a separate reality with spiritual attributes. The nature and locale of such a netherworld and afterlife remains the object of speculation, despite ghostly phenomena. Certainly, thinking does not persist and it is inconceivable how differentiated essence might.
Eliade discerned a pervasive 'nostalgia for origins' in shamanism and many religions -- a primitive ontology. He saw it reflected in science: "One could say that the anxious search for the origins of Life and Mind; the fascination in the 'mysteries of Nature'; the urge to penetrate and decipher the inner structure of Matter—all these longings and drives denote a sort of nostalgia for the primordial, for the original universal matrix. Matter, Substance, represents the absolute origin, the beginning of all things."
Each culture has had its answer throughout the ages. The nondual natural mind is part of nature. Traditional identity depends on participation in a transcendent reality. Jung describes this "kingdom of things that are not. The beginning of the world, the creative point, the origin, is also described by a paradox: a completely empty fullness, or completely full emptiness." (Visions Seminar, Pg 524-525) The transconscious cannot be reduced to the historical.
Such absolute space has been equated with the groundstate of primordial mind and virtual light beyond the phenomenal. The ground of all phenomena is emptiness -- dynamic nondual unknowingness. Ultimate awareness is the source of energy and ground of being. Conceptually empty, this plenitude of possibilities arises from the entire universe arising in mind, in quantum physics. Dudjom Lingpa calls it, "the experience of the conscious awareness of identitylessness." When the self dissolves in timeless truth, the drop merges in the ocean.
Altered states and dreams gave rise to the notion that the stone cold abyss is an underworld of the dead, or an Elysian field. Then, as now, mortuary rituals helped the living endure separation. The afterlife says more about our imaginal and conceptual ideas about it than its literal reality as a physical or transcendental realm. In his Red Book, Jung says, "We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end." (Page 275).
We still speculate on 'life that persists after death' and how or what that might mean, in spiritual, psychological, and scientific terms. This is not mere semantics or metaphysical narrative. A world seen through the lens of divine order is very different from one rooted in self-organizing chaos and complexity. Physical law and divine agency continue to quarrel in our unconscious minds, which retain archaic beliefs. We need to understand the world by making stories of it.
Even if ‘consciousness’ persists as a category or property, which is doubtful, it is not ‘ours’ in any sense, despite theories of panpsychism and panprotopsychism. Even if consciousness is a primordial feature of the universe, such proto-conscious bears no resemblance to our individuality. So, our theoretical continuance remains moot, being a return to the profoundly undifferentiated state. The conundrum remains a labyrinth in which we battle with the mortality minotaur.
Our unconscious psyche always retains these more primordial levels of belief. Marie-Louise von Franz notes, "It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death." (1987), ix.
All speculation about after-death conditions remains more philosophical than scientific, even when mired in the philosophy of science or the psychology of scientists. We needn't be atheists, existentialists, or nihilists to notice the phenomenology where we find it. We must distinguish between an ontological afterlife and imaginal fantasies of an afterlife, and the epistemology of such metaphors.
A parade of historical afterlife beliefs demonstrates that old ideas of the hereafter or land of the dead do not die as easily as its presumed inhabitants. Immortality of the soul is still offered as counterpoint to the terrifying reality of death. Many would allege that hell is actually here on earth. For aeons we've been dying to be immortal.
Not content with historical versions of such notions, pop culture continues to mash-up faddish ideas and concoct new notions. Such idiosyncratic ideas are infused with pop science often compounded from contradictory physics theories.
Traditional and iconoclastic ideas clash. We are, in this way, eternally haunted by the dead as we contemplate our own unavoidable future. Some might say it scares the hell out of us, but it may scare the ‘heaven’ in.
Even those in the rational professions are not exempt from irrational ideas. Claims of ‘proof’ are premature at best, and spurious clickbait headlines at worst. But, as they say, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In this sense, we dig our own philosophical grave.
A plethora of theories from consciousness studies and transpersonal psychologies, rooted in eastern and western cultures has compounded the situation, which is not confined to the esoterics of theological discussion. As ever, we are left with more questions than answers, all of which are strongly rooted in worldview, rather than hard facts. Self-indulgent hypotheses abound.
What we do know is humans engage in a wide variety of self-soothing activities to stave off pain, fear of extinction, and insanity. Participation mystique, mystical fusion, is projected beyond death, as well as a living process that is a primitive relic of the original undifferentiated state. It can be an unwitting identification with the idea of a thing -- in this case, the afterlife.
Naturally, there are all sorts of sociopolitcal, power, and authority reasons to promote specific ideas and requirements for admission to the hypothetical afterlife. The afterlife gets wielded as a weapon and reward or commodity in the war for social control, as a mythic not literal reality.
Methods of persuasion range from religion to torture. Paradigm shift is related to worldview warfare. Myth is about the past, things supposed to have happened beyond historical time, but science tries to predict the future based on the past. History is often confounded with mythology, as are the well-springs of human behavior and fundamentals of our psychology.
Cross-cultural Descriptions
The east has its ancestor worship, karma and reincarnation, and Chinese alchemy of immortality in some hypostasized state, recounted in The Secret of the Golden Flower. Special priests and sacred texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead describe the nature of the imaginal journey. The later describes reincarnation as a continuum of human learning.
Kabbalah describes the emanation of all and everything from Three Veils of Negative Existence: Ain, Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur. The Vedas are perhaps the oldest extant cosmological model. Symbolic immortality differs from literal immortality in some inaccessible place. Death is the road to awe.
Such descriptions don't match cross-culturally. We can imagine ancient shamans venturing into the heights and depths of human experience. Drugs, sickness, or trauma ignited the near-death experience from which legends and beliefs grew. Shamans became the mediators of such non-ordinary states, and later were replaced by priesthoods who controlled the narratives on the nature of reality, from the Dark Night of the Soul to Enlightenment.
The ancient Greeks imagined the underworld or Tartarus as dry and windy -- the cold home of Death. Hades was the place of the dead, Tartarus was where ferocious monsters and horrible criminals were banished. The souls who were good went to the Elysian Fields. Psyches in the underworld have no consciousness. Gods and heroes made descents into hell and returned with paradigmatic boons.
The Greeks went to the Necromanteion, "Oracle of the Dead", to talk with their dead ancestors. No one went to heaven, which was reserved only for the gods. The Elysian Fields were the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. It was ruled by Cronus, or time. Wikipedia describes the ceremony:
Ritual use of the Necromanteion involved elaborate ceremonies wherein celebrants seeking to speak to the dead would start by gathering in the ziggurat-like temple[5] and consuming a meal of broad beans, pork, barley bread, oysters, and a narcotic compound.[2][6] Following a cleansing ceremony and the sacrifice of sheep, the faithful would descend through a chthonic series of meandric corridors leaving offerings as they passed through a number of iron gates. The nekyomanteia would pose a series of questions and chant prayers and the celebrants would then witness the priest arise from the floor and begin to fly about the temple through the use of Aeorema-like theatrical cranes.
The Christians imagined hell as unbearably hot and hellish, while heaven was idealized. The imagery is culturally conditioned as near-death experiences show. For example, Hindus are unlikely to meet Jesus in their tunnel of light. But that does not make such visionary states literal reality or more than a metaphor.
Artifacts of out of body experience and the human death process can be misinterpreted and/or idealized. Such disembodied experience can be heavenly or hellish. Todd Murphy describes the role of brain areas in such crises. This glimpse of an afterlife in either a positive or negative light actually says more about their own psyche and cultural conditioning than a netherworld. The limbic system can produce strongly euphoric or dysphoric affective and cognitive states, both verbal and non-verbal.
Murphy suggests that, "the reason why some NDEs are hellish is that the positive affect that usually accompanies NDEs, out of the right temporal neocortex together with the left amygdala, is replaced by negative affect out of the left temporal neocortex together with the right amygdala. If this were so, then it might explain how an NDE can be unpleasant, but not why it is so." He notes, such non-ordinary states can also be healing, mentally and physically.
Anything seemed preferable to consignment to oblivion. The Egyptians and medieval Christians sought to buy their way into heaven by virtuous or ethical behavior, which always remains culturally relative. The Jews, having endured the immortality obsessions of the Egyptians, still tend to leave questions of the afterlife (Olam haBa) to G-d. The Torah contains no clear references to it. Eschatological ideas only arose later, perhaps through syncretism.
Cathar heretics sought the afterlife through Gnostic notions of purification, perfection, and denial of ‘evil’ physical materialism. Eliade noted, "Gnostics past and present sought answers not in the course of outward human events, but in knowledge of the world's beginning, of what lies above and beyond the world, and of the secret places of the human soul."
The alchemists engaged vigorously in a psychophysical process of transfiguration to elevate themselves and matter. All suggest our aversion to the nothingness of nonexistence and yearning for redemption and escaping judgement.
In the Phaedo, Plato presents four arguments for the immortality of the soul and life after death. Soul separates from the body to achieve wisdom and experience the Platonic forms unhindered by the body. Maybe the whole point of such practice is facing our own death and darkness directly, to “die before dying,” as Plato said.
Quantum Physics of the Afterlife
Science is the new religion. Death is the black hole of our existence. Some physicists first claimed that life goes on in the quantum state, then others changed the narrative to the more fundamental domain of the virtual vacuum or pre-spacetime.
But if death is an illusion, it remains the most persistent one. Scientists seek less disreputable theories of forms of persistence. But we must not attribute real identity to a concept, even when couched as hypothesis or theory.
Professor Fred Alan Wolf unpacked quantum physics for an afterlife in vaguely mystical terms. Others have used many-worlds theory, uncertainty, entanglement, and quantum nonlocality to unpack the quantum model of immortality. Now, some speculate the “souls” of the dead reside in dark matter or dark energy, an artifact of string theory that may may not be 'real.'
Such works popularize these notions with the public, whether they actually grasped the science behind them, or not. Their appeal is largely emotional -- a validation of felt-sense and new age intuition. The theory seems to be the body dies but our quantum field lives on. The trail leads through NDE's and speculation on the timeless states of enlightenment. Popularization produces 'good parrots' rather than good science. Ideas about other dimensions are bandied about with little understanding.
In Physics of the Soul The Quantum Book of Living Dying Reincarnation and Immortality (2013), Amit Goswami address several questions from an eastern perspective. Such models are often based on state of the art concepts or technology of a society, which are employed as metaphorical structures for conceptual or spiritual understanding, rather than actual physical laws or ontological realities. The afterlife is one such boundary.
We cannot see beyond that threshold of death, but speculate in modern terms. The story changes as we push on the cognitive boundary digging down into finer realms of nature, but the 'undiscovered country' remains the same. The map is not the territory.
The non-material realm of existence becomes the quantum or sub-quantal domain. Consciousness-researcher David Chalmers suggests that perhaps the universe exists in terms of psychophysical laws, and that consciousness may involve both an information state and experiential state.
“I believe that the findings of quantum physics increasingly support Plato [who taught that there is a more perfect, non-material realm of existence]. There is evidence that suggests the existence of a non-material, non-physical universe that has a reality even though it might not as yet be clearly perceptible to our senses and scientific instrumentation. When we consider out-of-body experiences, shamanic journeys and lucid dream states, though they cannot be replicated in the true scientific sense, they also point to the existence of non-material dimensions of reality.” (Wolf 1998)
Probabilities or superpositions give rise to uncertainty which gives rise to entanglement (which is also the alleged source of the arrow of time). Entangled particles represent a probability distribution. As quantum uncertainty spreads, particles become increasingly entangled. Entangled particles seem to share one big entangled state.
As they become more correlated with one another, the particles become increasingly entangled with one another. Individual particles lose their autonomy entrained to the collective state. When correlations contain all the information of the holistic system of entangled particles, and the individual particles contain none, particles stop changing, having arrived at a state of equilibrium with rare, random fluctuations. Information becomes increasingly diffuse, but never completely disappears.
Seth Lloyd says, “The universe as a whole is in a pure state. But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.” A new ontology is implied if the universe is one big entangled object — a conscious universe. Bohm and others contend that each part of the universe contains information about the entire universe.
Information about all systems in the universe exists as a potentiality in every system. But each system in the universe only manifests information in a specific range so it can never manifest all the information that is available to it. Individual human minds have nonlocal aspects.
Our DNA contains all the emotional records of our ancestors. Epigenetics tells us the dead potentially possess the transgenerational ability to psychophysically influence the fortune of the living through biogenetics, modulating mutations, disease, repair, stress response, genetic imprinting, gene expression, healing, even speculative inquiry.
There is simply no separation between ourselves and the primordial ground. It is a subtle but important shift in awareness. We can experience the whole spectrum of non-ordinary states of consciousness, the “heavens and hells” or bardo states of other models. The field patterns of the finest organization of energy and matter also affect the evolution of the cosmos.
As nonlocal quantum field entities we are coherently connected with All. The unfathomable ocean of our virtuality is a dynamic energetic infusion, an expanded sense of NowHere, a leap of faith into the Abyss. We are challenged to fully comprehend the truth of our existence.
The limitless ocean of roiling subspace makes negentropic or syntropic transformations. The quantum vacuum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. We are that nondual dynamic “ocean of active information” in wave form. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe.
The 'Open Sesame' of Subspace
Tom Bearden was among the first to suggest the threshold of death is some sort of return to the sub-quantum vacuum or scalar field of virtual vacuum fluctuation, from which we have never really been separate. We can see no deeper into nature than fluctuating fields of energy, which constitute the constant background motion. All that is, is in motion. But it is sustained by the ground state or “cosmic zero.”
"Passage of an electromagnetic wave through the vacuum leaves an invisible trace. The vacuum "imprints" everything that happens in it. This imprint is electrogravitational; i.e., the imprinting process structures the substructure of vacuum spacetime [the artificial potential of vacuum].” Presumably this 'imprint' constitutes the blueprint of our afterlife 'existence' which is non-existence, fusion with the ground state.
Such arguments for continuance in the virtual states and hyperspaces are supported with notions of EM fields and negentropy, as well as reversal of the process of how nothing becomes something in a 4-D scalar domain. Notions of 'zero-point' were popularized into ideas of a Source Field, from which we arise and to which we return. The empty space, absolute space, was again filled with imagination.
The Void is not devoid. It is void of physical particles. The zero-point field is the ground state energy of all fields in space. Matter is an insubstantial wavefunction (a potential) at the quantum level. The collective potential of all particles everywhere with their individual zero-point energies is one universal zero point field.
Nature has been hiding the zero-point field (zpf) in a blinding light. Since it permeates every atom in our bodies, we are effectively blind to it. It blinds us by its presence. What we do see is all the rest of the light that is over and above the zero-point field.
We cannot eliminate the zero-point field from our eyes. Even with its distinctive pattern of dynamic electric and magnetic fields in continual fluctuation, the vacuum remains the simplest state of nature. Life takes refuge in a single space - absolute space.
Classically, absolute space (not relative space) is considered non-causal in relationship to manifest phenomena. But we are beginning to describe it more accurately as non-linear, non-local and/or entangled with all events and objects of the phenomenal world.
All events emerge from the framework of absolute space. Though insubstantial it has properties, qualities, and ramifications. The study of space supersedes the study of matter in motion.
The Heart Sutra aphorism summed it up: Form does not differ from the void. Buckminster Fuller espoused a similar 'zero-point' philosophy in his geometric model of the Vector Equilibrium Matrix in Synergetics. But such zero-point is not an inhabitable space in any sense we can imagine, though it models the dynamic transforms of matter and energy.
We seem to divinize the boundaries of our consciousness as we push them back from causal, to quantal, to sub-quantal domains. We use the technical discoveries of hydraulics, computers, or holography to amplify such notions. We can be pretty sure, at some level, that the divine is in no way limited to the latest discoveries.
For the reductionist, the Holographic Principle is the ultimate reduction. It applies to the most minuscule level of what we can observe, and beyond. For the universalist, the Holographic Principle gives us the ultimate universal. It extends to the limit of our Universe, the Universal holographic boundary, and beyond. For the phenomenalist, the Holographic Principle gives us the ultimate ground of our phenomenal perception, our grounding in the Universal "now," in the now-present of the Universal holographic boundary, moving outward from now-pasts to now-futures. (Germine)
The concept of One Mind is simpler than that of many minds, and lets us out of the bizarre and counterintuitive idea that there are multiple copies of our own selves, which exist as mere potential, and are thus not actual. There are many possible universes, but there is only One Mind, which determines events on the quantum level, and thus creates our Universe.
The multiverse of all potentials fundamentally supports the single Universe we collectively observe. The multiverse is the wave function of the Universe (Penrose, 2004). The recursive integration of nested hierarchies of holographic surfaces brings out a single actuality in consciousness from a wave function that is unconscious.
Consciousness thus gives us information at a level of experience that is causal. In this sense, we partake in the creation of the Universe. We participate in creation, and this participation, when fully realized, leads us to higher levels of consciousness and of realization.
For Jung, the collective ancestry is indistinguishable from his concept of the Collective Unconscious - an autonomous organizing principle of structure and experience, reflecting the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul, patterns of information. They speak in images.
Physics tell us the dead have a continued existence informationally in the virtual vacuum and energetically in the cosmos. Information is not lost in a holographic universe that is a unitary process. In holographic theory, fragmentation created by boundaries does not exist. Each component is an embedded part of an unbroken whole. Each ancestor is a node in the unfathomably vast field of meaning. Consciousness is the essential core of life—a vast, unbounded, unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena.
Related ideas such as the energy body, field body, and holographic concepts of reality have been grabbed up by new age amateurs and conflated beyond recognition as cultish fantasies of Ascension, rooted in pseudoscience.
Natural philosophy sees mind, life and matter emerging from and returning to the womb-like nature of the vacuum potential, the energy sea that is the primary reality underlying spacetime. Biophysics tells us DNA is not merely a physical molecule; it is also the molecular form of universal creative consciousness, or “torsion” energy, as it self-transforms into what we perceive, belatedly, as the template for our physical bodies. The human being can be modeled as a quantum biohologram, or field body.
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Everything, including life and consciousness emerges from and returns to the vacuum potential.
Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space described by contemporary physics as "The Field", scalar field, luminiferous ether, virtual vacuum, zero point and torsion field. Jung and the Gnostics called it the Pleroma or Plenum. The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy -- an ocean of virtual Light -- that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is μετάνοια metanoia, or repentance, relinquishing material existence and returning to the Pleroma.
Mortality is possibly the hardest fact of all. Are such theories just another ritual of expiation for the inconvenient truth that we simply don’t and cannot know? Is knowledge of immanent death or preparation through meditation or other methods actually relevant or merely consoling in the veil of suffering we call life? We seem to die a more painful death than non-reflective animals. But even animals mourn.
Does nature recognize death as loss or merely compost? Even stars live finite lives and die. Much depends on our notions of linear and cyclic time, binding, and its transcendence. So obviously, the afterlife may remain more a comfort to the private grief of the living than any ‘reality’ for the dead and their regrettable demise. We attempt to magically banish our fear and pain of not knowing.
Thus, we have a potpourri of ideas to accept or reject, none of which can ever be proven but may be re-contextualized or falsified as supporting theories fail. The human mind continues to rebel against the nihilistic notion that physiological arrest is a ‘fade to black’ demise. It is our final condition, despite the facts of energy conservation. The body ceases to be animated by any ‘vital principle.’
Death enters the world with birth, surrounded from pre-history with taboos and fears. In ethno-medicine, retention of seed was one route to immortality. Many paths devised a non-material body as a vehicle for consciousness beyond the grave. Violent, premature, or accidental death is perhaps even harder to accept than a terminal illness or old age. When the vital breath leaves does a great spiritual force break open the skull to another domain of existence?
That is the question. Much depends on what we mean by simple words, such as ‘is’ or ‘be,’ much less questions of damnation, elevation, transmogrification, transmigration, or recyling. It begs the question, what if anything is reborn if ego is one sort of experience and soul another not always included in traditional reincarnation theories. Is it just another egoic control fantasy or palliative?
When it comes to the human psyche, we want to believe and such ideas have driven much of world history and the history of religions. A glorious afterlife has been offered up as a consolation for war and the vagaries of fate and destiny.
Is there such a thing as a ‘good death’ or a ‘bad death’? Who makes that valuation, because it is certainly not the departed. But is ‘a good death’ really voluntarily offering our selves up to the gods, even when conceived as an act of regeneration? If death regenerates life, does regeneration cause death?
Neurological Models
Many phenomena arise as the brain and body dies, as shown in reports of near-death survivors, who claim their consciousness persisted beyond their clinical expiration. They say, "I was THERE." That is, they describe their disembodied consciousness as their experiential reality. Reports have been interpreted, measured, and evaluated from religions such as Tibetan Buddhism to sciences such as neurology and neurotheology.
Michael Persinger's experiments applying magnetic fields to the brain have produced classical states, such as sense of Presence, suspension of time and spatial awareness, hauntings, even alien abduction. Such controlled modulation shows the mechanisms underlying many 'spiritual' experiences. Temporal lobe epilepsy can also mimic such states as the brain misfires in a transient storm of stimulation.
A whole spectrum of non-ordinary experience arises in states of hyper- and hypo-arousal. They were described in the 1970s by Roland Fischer as a taxonomy of states. Stanislov Grof and John Curtis Gowan also produced such taxonomies, many of which have reinforced ancient and modern cultural beliefs in the hereafter.
In Neurotheology, Laurence O. McKinney suggests that many religious experiences are actually neurologically based and that death itself as described many ways in many religions is a peaceful slow fade of consciousness as the mind unwinds… whatever ‘consciousness’ is. He suggests we ‘experience’ eternity in the last ten seconds of life, due to anoxia and molecules such as endorphins that shape our reality.
He claims: “A major insight was that, in normal brain death, the chronology-creating pre-frontals fail first, pitching our last dream into timelessness while the steady return to near fetal consciousness as the brain dies cell by cell will dissolve us into a comforting forever, suggesting why heaven is so similar in all religions. Whether by the laws of God or the laws of cognitive neuroscience, we'll still end up in eternity so why fight about it? God's plan or good luck, it makes no difference.”
Is the dying brain in a heightened or merely altered state, downloading the detritous or debris of fragmenting memory? Such reality is based in the mind itself, a regression to a primal epoch of collective unconsciousness – the ouroboric fusion of undifferentiated infancy, described by Erich Neumann as pre-egoic wholeness. The cyclic serpent biting its own tail is a “feedback process,” a primordial symbol of immortality – the zero that is One.
Short of clinical death, death imagery mimics the therapeutic process of trauma healing. Trauma locks up energies in the body, and the self image can become “frozen” and inhibit growth of the personality. This image can be destructured or liquefied. This eliminates the old holographic pattern, returning all elements to a chaotic state. From this chaos, the new image automatically emerges in regenerated form. This death/rebirth cycle is healing, and may be the mechanism of the placebo effect.
But who can explain the unexplainable with either traditional or contemporary terms? Jung attempted to re-contextualize arguments of the soul by de-literalizing the religious notion and recognizing the middle ground of the imaginal psyche – a non-religious concept of soul as the animating principle.
A religious or hallucinatory experience at near-death is arguably no assurance of noncorporeal persistence upon demise. Not all NDE’s have a positive valence, though negative stories tend to be under-reported in self-validating theories. Such reports tend to become more elaborate over time. That is, the imaginal psyche tends to embroider them to suit our beliefs. In the gray zone, death isn't necessarily permanent, and life can be hard to define,
Ancient and modern psychedelics have been used to assuage fear of death. They demonstrate that imaginal death is really the discorporation of the personality – ego death. Yet ‘ego’ is another mental construct. Such positive or negative experience is strongly correlated with ‘set and setting.’
Theories of mind and death proliferate. One of the classics is Tipler’s Physics of Immortality, with its Omega Point cosmology of singularity, derived from Tielhard de Chardin’s philosophy. Parapsychologists including William Teller and Dean Radin have contributed throughout the years with various theories rooted in yet other theories of consciousness suggested by interpretations of physics.
Really, one must begin by stating the theoretical basis, whether the Standard Model, QFT, Many Worlds, String theory, M-theory, Holographic, Parallel Worlds, transactional, quantum cosmology, pre-spacetime physics, or other theoretical roots. Ontology, epistemology, and percepts remain relevant to those arguments and must be defined, including the human or physical basis of phenomenology experienced by humans.
Most theories are incompatible with one another, and some have proven to relate only to mathematical realities and imaginal dimensions which don't map onto ordinary reality. And we have to keep theoretical operators, such as scalars, dark matter and energy, within their own hypothetical realms.
This proliferation of theories about the immaterial within our own observable reality demonstrates even physics is on shaky ground. We still aim to suspend time in an eternal state in our minds where death has no sting. But science reports that time processing is an artifact of the parietal lobe, which can go offline under certain EM effects, trance, or deep meditation, yielding sensations of timelessness.
Tibetan leader, Dudjom Rinpoche says, “Death: the mingling of the mother luminosity and the child luminosity: When the path luminosity mingles with the ground luminosity itself, at that instant one can free oneself into the absolute clarity…. Great yogis allow the luminosities to arise and mingle in that space, bypassing Bardo projections. They become the light of life itself.”
Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff alleges, “Pure Consciousness is included in fundamental space-time geometry along with the precursors of spin, mass, charge. In fact, everything we see in our real world stems from patterns in the most fundamental level that percolate up to our level which is many, many magnitudes of order higher.”
We are left to draw our own highly conditioned abstractions and self-serving conclusions. Of one thing we remain certain: life after death remains the great Mystery, the Magnum Mysterium, and a matter if not of personal discovery, of self-revelation, should any mote remain to acknowledge the subjective condition of non-existence.
We might concur with Jung: "But when we penetrate the depths of the soul and when we try to understand its mysterious life, we shall discern that death is not a meaningless end, the mere vanishing into nothingness—it is an accomplishment, a ripe fruit on the tree of life."
Summary
Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form. It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives. It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness.
This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams and the flow of our imagination. Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death. This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities.
Jung himself felt, "What comes after death is something of an indescribable splendor so that our imagination and our sensibility could not conceive even approximately ... Sooner or later, the dead will become one with us; but, in actual fact, we know little or nothing of that way of being. What do we know of this land, after death? The dissolution of our temporary form in eternity does not involve a loss of meaning: rather, we will all feel members of a single body."
When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable. This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty which no discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.
There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go and we are all going to get there.
As Jung said, "We are not in a position to prove that anything of us is necessarily preserved for eternity. But we can assume with great probability that something of our psyche goes on existing. Whether this part is in itself conscious, we don't know either. ...The concept of immortality tells us nothing about the related idea of rebirth or metempsychosis."*
Even if mankind has fantasized about it for two million years, it is not self-evident. We can recognize our own existential finitude and may not benefit by shrinking away from the void of death. Thus, death may be the secret of life.
_______________
It looks as if only those who are relatively close to death are serious or mature enough to grasp some of the essentials in our psychology, as a man who wants to get over an obstacle grasps a handy ladder. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 536-537
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 306.
“Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain.” ―Kabir, The Bijak of Kabir
Is it the divine will? Or is it the wish of the human heart which shrinks from the Void of death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to ascribe to them the significance of insights. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 312.
I'm inclined to believe that something of the human soul remains after death, since already in this conscious life we have evidence that the psyche exists in a relative space and in a relative time, that is in a relatively non-extended and eternal state. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 29-30.
I can answer your question about life after death just as well by letter as by word of mouth. Actually this question exceeds the capacity of the human mind, which cannot assert anything beyond itself. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 561.
REFERENCES
http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html
Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics
Eliade, Mircea, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p.158
Fischer, Roland (1967); "Biological models of creativity," Journal for the Study of Consciousness, pg. 89-117. First presented Oct. 28-29, 1967.
Germine, Mark, http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2007/holomind.htm The Holographic Principle Theory of Mind
Physics of the Soul The Quantum Book of Living Dying Reincarnation and Immortality (2013), Amit Goswami https://books.google.com/books?id=TRtnJ8tuGhYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hillman, James and Sonu Shamdasani, Lament of the Dead – Psychology after Jung’s Red Book,W.W. Norton
Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
*Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391
C.G. Jung, On Life after Death
Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower
McKinney, Laurence O.: Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century.
Miller, Iona, Neurotheology, http://ionamiller.weebly.com/neurotheology.html
Miller, Iona, My Zer Point, http://photonichuman.weebly.com/zero-point.html
Miller, Iona, Emotional Alchemy http://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html
https://www.god-helmet.com/rebirth.htm
Murphy, Todd, 1999m The Structure And Function Of Near-Death Experiences:
An Algorithmic Reincarnation Hypothesis based on Natural Selection
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton Classics) Paperback – August 24, 2014
Radin, Dean http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2008/01/two-recent-talks.html
Radin, Dean. (1997). The Conscious Universe - The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperCollins.
Radin, Dean. (2006). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. Paraview Pocket Books.
Schwartz, Gary, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death
(Atria 2003)
Tipler, Frank J. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead
http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/Taboos-and-Social-Stigma.html#ixzz42dpYdLTF
~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix. In: Psychological Perspectives A Journal of Global Consciousness Integrating Psyche, Soul and Nature." Vol. 18, Nr. 2, Fall 1987, pp. 375 - 385.
MARIE-LOUISE von FRANZ, Archetypes Surrounding Death, Quadrant is copyright 1968 by the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Tattersall, Ian, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/t/tattersall-human.html
http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html
Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics
Eliade, Mircea, "The Quest for the 'Origins' of Religion", p.158
Fischer, Roland (1967); "Biological models of creativity," Journal for the Study of Consciousness, pg. 89-117. First presented Oct. 28-29, 1967.
Germine, Mark, http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2007/holomind.htm The Holographic Principle Theory of Mind
Physics of the Soul The Quantum Book of Living Dying Reincarnation and Immortality (2013), Amit Goswami https://books.google.com/books?id=TRtnJ8tuGhYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hillman, James and Sonu Shamdasani, Lament of the Dead – Psychology after Jung’s Red Book,W.W. Norton
Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
*Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391
C.G. Jung, On Life after Death
Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower
McKinney, Laurence O.: Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century.
Miller, Iona, Neurotheology, http://ionamiller.weebly.com/neurotheology.html
Miller, Iona, My Zer Point, http://photonichuman.weebly.com/zero-point.html
Miller, Iona, Emotional Alchemy http://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html
https://www.god-helmet.com/rebirth.htm
Murphy, Todd, 1999m The Structure And Function Of Near-Death Experiences:
An Algorithmic Reincarnation Hypothesis based on Natural Selection
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton Classics) Paperback – August 24, 2014
Radin, Dean http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2008/01/two-recent-talks.html
Radin, Dean. (1997). The Conscious Universe - The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. HarperCollins.
Radin, Dean. (2006). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. Paraview Pocket Books.
Schwartz, Gary, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death
(Atria 2003)
Tipler, Frank J. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead
http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/Taboos-and-Social-Stigma.html#ixzz42dpYdLTF
~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix. In: Psychological Perspectives A Journal of Global Consciousness Integrating Psyche, Soul and Nature." Vol. 18, Nr. 2, Fall 1987, pp. 375 - 385.
MARIE-LOUISE von FRANZ, Archetypes Surrounding Death, Quadrant is copyright 1968 by the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Tattersall, Ian, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/t/tattersall-human.html
Constant Montald - The Fountain Of Inspiration 1907
On Life after Death
by C.G. Jung
"WHAT I HAVE to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists
entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which
have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the
latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer
to the question of the interplay between the "here" and the "hereafter." Yet I
have never written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had
to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I
would like to state my ideas now.
Even now I can do no more than tell stories—"mythologize." Perhaps one has to
be close to death to acquire the necessary freedom to talk about it. It is not
that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such
ideas. Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and
without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within
me. I can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are
there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some
prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life.
And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of
superior knowledge. Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with
so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only
have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost
exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they
know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can
see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease
of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be
discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible.
Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is
therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations. In view of all this, I lend
an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at
the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in
with my theoretical postulates.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That
is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly
matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon
all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the
world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions:
our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and
the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He
feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If
we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the
infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for
something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody
that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question
is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.
The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to
the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self; it is manifested in the
experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in
the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness
we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one
and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination--
that is, ultimately limited—we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious
of the infinite. But only then!
In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of living space and
increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge to ask man
to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation. Uniqueness and
limitation are synonymous. Without them, no perception of the unlimited is
possible—and, consequently, no coming to consciousness either—merely a
delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication with large numbers
and an avidity for political power.
It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us,
so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
On Life after Death
by C.G. Jung
"WHAT I HAVE to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists
entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which
have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the
latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer
to the question of the interplay between the "here" and the "hereafter." Yet I
have never written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had
to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I
would like to state my ideas now.
Even now I can do no more than tell stories—"mythologize." Perhaps one has to
be close to death to acquire the necessary freedom to talk about it. It is not
that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such
ideas. Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and
without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within
me. I can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are
there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some
prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life.
And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of
superior knowledge. Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with
so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only
have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost
exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they
know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can
see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease
of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be
discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible.
Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is
therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations. In view of all this, I lend
an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at
the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in
with my theoretical postulates.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That
is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly
matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon
all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the
world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions:
our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and
the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He
feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If
we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the
infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for
something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody
that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question
is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.
The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to
the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self; it is manifested in the
experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in
the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness
we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one
and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination--
that is, ultimately limited—we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious
of the infinite. But only then!
In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of living space and
increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge to ask man
to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation. Uniqueness and
limitation are synonymous. Without them, no perception of the unlimited is
possible—and, consequently, no coming to consciousness either—merely a
delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication with large numbers
and an avidity for political power.
It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us,
so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
Murray Stein says we need to re-vision the dead and to hang on to our dreams and visions of the afterlife, even in a skeptical environment. Can we reverse the wheel of history and cherish in our times the dreams, visions, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors that paid homage to the afterlife? They spared no means in erecting visible signs of a continued presence of the dead among the living. The vast burial mounds of Neolithic culture, the great pyramids of Egypt, the wooden stretchers of Native Americans were visible signs and tangible embodiments of a continuous universe, inspiring great works of art that survived the ravages of time.
Such processes can only be indirectly observed, namely by the Eros consciousness. If one is unconscious of it, spontaneous, non-intentional parapsychological, especially psychokinetic events happen. They are teleological or final; “effects” without any “cause.” The depth psychological aspect of such a change on the level of consciousness consists mostly in an unintentional breakdown of the will-possessed Logos ego (the “conscious king”), and corresponds to Jung’s “night sea journey” of 1913 to 1918. It is the forced transformation into the Eros ego, the “conscious queen.” Later Jung called this principle behind this process the counter-will of the unconscious.
This aspect of the unconscious unio corporalis is demonstrated by the saga of Raymond and Melusina: Exactly in the moment in which Raymond’s life style collapses, in which “all bridges back into the past are broken and there seems to be no way forward into the future” (C.G. Jung), the water-nixie Melusina appears to Raymond as an apparition. (Remo Roth, Self-fertilizing World Soul)
The winged dragon represents the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, which is the sum total of planetary existence -- the holographic blueprint on which form is based, the informational level or primal source of being - Zero Point. It is said that medicine providing the gift of youth can be made from its venom.
The dragon is a healing power. The spiritual food of immortality signifies the ability of the ego to assimilate the previously unconscious aspects of the Self. This is the elixir of youth that creates the immortal body, equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone is kept in the custody of the reawakened Dragon, the Adept who inhabits his or her (subtle body) Body of Light.
Alchemy itself is a triple process of uniting the physical, psychological and spiritual. In Masonry, each line of the triangle itself symbolizes a kingdom of nature -- mineral, vegetable and animal. Psychologically, the dragon is the union of ordinary human reality with the transpersonal Self and a passion for transformation. Some now say it is a symbol of DNA or the kundalini energy. Thus, it is a symbol of the Great Work.
All these "ghosts" are ours: Calculate from your parents and double the number of ancestors for each generation. That comes out to 2 to the nth power. So, when you get to 64 generations back you have something like 18 quintillion ancestors. At 25 generations the number overruns the population of the country to 18 quintillion. So, yes, many of the ancestors have to be the same people. So, you can say we cross many paths many times over.
Being and non-being creates the interplay of the opposites that creates movement. It is the means through which the individual is pulled out of the extroverted life of division and into the introverted life of union and oneness.
The Gnostics felt that procreative power is only a special instance of the procreative nature of the Whole. In the Holy Wedding archetype, the unio corporalis of Hermetic alchemy, the queen and the king create a new world with their union.
Thus, genealogy is an analogy for the recursive self-fertilizing potential of the psyche. In the energetic feedback of psychobiological coniunctio, serving the psyche means being in-formed by it. The essence of life, the world soul, does not need a masculine partner for her creation and incarnation process.
The creative life essence influences also the beyond and its “inhabitants,” the deceased in their essentially timeless and spaceless domain. They seem in some way to be resurrected from death in their afterlife. We observe processes in which physical and/or psychic energy transforms into the magic energy of the unus mundus and re-transforms into physical/psychic energy of higher order. Symbolically, it leads to to the cure of the disease of mankind and the universe -- the panacea. Spontaneous realizations become incarnated in our world; creation by mere observation.
Such processes can only be indirectly observed, namely by the Eros consciousness. If one is unconscious of it, spontaneous, non-intentional parapsychological, especially psychokinetic events happen. They are teleological or final; “effects” without any “cause.” The depth psychological aspect of such a change on the level of consciousness consists mostly in an unintentional breakdown of the will-possessed Logos ego (the “conscious king”), and corresponds to Jung’s “night sea journey” of 1913 to 1918. It is the forced transformation into the Eros ego, the “conscious queen.” Later Jung called this principle behind this process the counter-will of the unconscious.
This aspect of the unconscious unio corporalis is demonstrated by the saga of Raymond and Melusina: Exactly in the moment in which Raymond’s life style collapses, in which “all bridges back into the past are broken and there seems to be no way forward into the future” (C.G. Jung), the water-nixie Melusina appears to Raymond as an apparition. (Remo Roth, Self-fertilizing World Soul)
The winged dragon represents the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, which is the sum total of planetary existence -- the holographic blueprint on which form is based, the informational level or primal source of being - Zero Point. It is said that medicine providing the gift of youth can be made from its venom.
The dragon is a healing power. The spiritual food of immortality signifies the ability of the ego to assimilate the previously unconscious aspects of the Self. This is the elixir of youth that creates the immortal body, equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone is kept in the custody of the reawakened Dragon, the Adept who inhabits his or her (subtle body) Body of Light.
Alchemy itself is a triple process of uniting the physical, psychological and spiritual. In Masonry, each line of the triangle itself symbolizes a kingdom of nature -- mineral, vegetable and animal. Psychologically, the dragon is the union of ordinary human reality with the transpersonal Self and a passion for transformation. Some now say it is a symbol of DNA or the kundalini energy. Thus, it is a symbol of the Great Work.
All these "ghosts" are ours: Calculate from your parents and double the number of ancestors for each generation. That comes out to 2 to the nth power. So, when you get to 64 generations back you have something like 18 quintillion ancestors. At 25 generations the number overruns the population of the country to 18 quintillion. So, yes, many of the ancestors have to be the same people. So, you can say we cross many paths many times over.
Being and non-being creates the interplay of the opposites that creates movement. It is the means through which the individual is pulled out of the extroverted life of division and into the introverted life of union and oneness.
The Gnostics felt that procreative power is only a special instance of the procreative nature of the Whole. In the Holy Wedding archetype, the unio corporalis of Hermetic alchemy, the queen and the king create a new world with their union.
Thus, genealogy is an analogy for the recursive self-fertilizing potential of the psyche. In the energetic feedback of psychobiological coniunctio, serving the psyche means being in-formed by it. The essence of life, the world soul, does not need a masculine partner for her creation and incarnation process.
The creative life essence influences also the beyond and its “inhabitants,” the deceased in their essentially timeless and spaceless domain. They seem in some way to be resurrected from death in their afterlife. We observe processes in which physical and/or psychic energy transforms into the magic energy of the unus mundus and re-transforms into physical/psychic energy of higher order. Symbolically, it leads to to the cure of the disease of mankind and the universe -- the panacea. Spontaneous realizations become incarnated in our world; creation by mere observation.
ANIMA MUNDI
It is indeed a major effort-the magnum opus in fact-to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows."
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life. This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi .
Nell'Anima the world postulated by Plotinus there were also the deities of pagan polytheism and therefore the Greek mythological tradition . These were not seen in contrast with the idea of One, being an expression of the same nature . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy.
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus .
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge. »
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology , that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe , the face of everything. " Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
- ... it was the scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino arendere syntonic his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi with the Christian vision . He understood the fact comeanello junction between the upper and the lower world . Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul , and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center , and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual. For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension . In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae , universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi ."
Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe , understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies , but also as a node of all things , in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula ", ie union , the world itself with the divine - . (taken from the book: La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ).
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan- enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten , and where affiorasse was severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions .
Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit .
The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified .
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious .
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious and especially James Hillman (1926 - 2011) , one of the largest and the original followers of Jung, who re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche as Member of the mind , not as mere rational , but as Anima ( more correct translation of the original meaning of the word Psyche ) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as regards the way they represent the Anima Mundi .
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and , above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance . We share the same Unus Mundus. Eldo Stellucci
Notes to the anima mundi Theo Eshetu (edited by Lucia Porcelli )"The last echo of the soul of the world in the modern age , or the age of its sunset announced the development of the natural sciences , has echoed in Schelling , and in particular in its idealism ' aesthetic ' . Yet the soul of the world , as spirit , breath of life and intercessory power . again the art ... * Kosmos become " ordered universe " only when it is meant a higher "intelligence" universal . language in the pre- philosophical , the word simply meant ' order ' .In the Homeric poems the ranks of soldiers are said to be "en kosmo " simply " in order." In greek thought the ordered universe is also nice, that is balanced , harmonious and clean. In this sense, the Latin translation mundus is twofold: namely ' world ' , but also ' clean ' , sorted .
Kosmos is , in Heraclitus, the shining orderly arrangement of all things . And lightning, fire, sun , and even a child's game . Glowing in the game universe, the universal light of the fire is the force that system and identifies things in the world , and she gives birth and vanish . The universal game has no place in the world, does not occur . It is not " phenomenon " is not placed among the things in the world, because it amounts to give, give in time and place , rather than appearing in the data . The world is not as hard as it could last aWhat in the world , and the world lasts at most as the world itself , I mean the world is not ' object ' in the sense that we have never faced . How then can it be under-stood , conceptualized and , as such , represented ?*
If the world is not an object , then the world can not give any images, especially based on the thought of a relationship between two things in the world . But it happens sometimes that a thing can shine in its inherence in the world and return to the universal whole : a fragment of the world can shine the light of the world, will become clear in the light of the world. In this transparency it is not canceled , but rather leaves look more clearly as a product and work force individuatrice completely universal , where the light suddenly shines . Things ' transparent 'who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth . See the whole thing finished grooming, but not as a reference to another thing in the world.
The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol . So every finite thing can become a symbol , ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it , as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its own image and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art by Theo Eshetu means the art . The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art. "
"What comes after death is something of an indescribable splendor so that our imagination and our sensibility could not conceive even approximately ... Sooner or later, the dead will become one with us; but, in actual fact, we know little or nothing of that way of being. What do we know of this land, after death? The dissolution of our temporary form in eternity does not involve a loss of meaning: rather, we will all feel members of a single body ". (C.G.Jung)
“The soul of the world, life and death. In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes”. (Vincenzo Guzzo).
It is indeed a major effort-the magnum opus in fact-to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows."
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life. This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi .
Nell'Anima the world postulated by Plotinus there were also the deities of pagan polytheism and therefore the Greek mythological tradition . These were not seen in contrast with the idea of One, being an expression of the same nature . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy.
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus .
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge. »
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology , that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe , the face of everything. " Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
- ... it was the scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino arendere syntonic his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi with the Christian vision . He understood the fact comeanello junction between the upper and the lower world . Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul , and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center , and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual. For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension . In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae , universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi ."
Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe , understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies , but also as a node of all things , in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula ", ie union , the world itself with the divine - . (taken from the book: La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ).
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan- enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten , and where affiorasse was severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions .
Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit .
The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified .
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious .
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious and especially James Hillman (1926 - 2011) , one of the largest and the original followers of Jung, who re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche as Member of the mind , not as mere rational , but as Anima ( more correct translation of the original meaning of the word Psyche ) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as regards the way they represent the Anima Mundi .
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and , above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance . We share the same Unus Mundus. Eldo Stellucci
Notes to the anima mundi Theo Eshetu (edited by Lucia Porcelli )"The last echo of the soul of the world in the modern age , or the age of its sunset announced the development of the natural sciences , has echoed in Schelling , and in particular in its idealism ' aesthetic ' . Yet the soul of the world , as spirit , breath of life and intercessory power . again the art ... * Kosmos become " ordered universe " only when it is meant a higher "intelligence" universal . language in the pre- philosophical , the word simply meant ' order ' .In the Homeric poems the ranks of soldiers are said to be "en kosmo " simply " in order." In greek thought the ordered universe is also nice, that is balanced , harmonious and clean. In this sense, the Latin translation mundus is twofold: namely ' world ' , but also ' clean ' , sorted .
Kosmos is , in Heraclitus, the shining orderly arrangement of all things . And lightning, fire, sun , and even a child's game . Glowing in the game universe, the universal light of the fire is the force that system and identifies things in the world , and she gives birth and vanish . The universal game has no place in the world, does not occur . It is not " phenomenon " is not placed among the things in the world, because it amounts to give, give in time and place , rather than appearing in the data . The world is not as hard as it could last aWhat in the world , and the world lasts at most as the world itself , I mean the world is not ' object ' in the sense that we have never faced . How then can it be under-stood , conceptualized and , as such , represented ?*
If the world is not an object , then the world can not give any images, especially based on the thought of a relationship between two things in the world . But it happens sometimes that a thing can shine in its inherence in the world and return to the universal whole : a fragment of the world can shine the light of the world, will become clear in the light of the world. In this transparency it is not canceled , but rather leaves look more clearly as a product and work force individuatrice completely universal , where the light suddenly shines . Things ' transparent 'who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth . See the whole thing finished grooming, but not as a reference to another thing in the world.
The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol . So every finite thing can become a symbol , ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it , as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its own image and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art by Theo Eshetu means the art . The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art. "
"What comes after death is something of an indescribable splendor so that our imagination and our sensibility could not conceive even approximately ... Sooner or later, the dead will become one with us; but, in actual fact, we know little or nothing of that way of being. What do we know of this land, after death? The dissolution of our temporary form in eternity does not involve a loss of meaning: rather, we will all feel members of a single body ". (C.G.Jung)
“The soul of the world, life and death. In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes”. (Vincenzo Guzzo).