DEATH
Taboo & Mysterium Magnum
Taboo & Mysterium Magnum
But when you die, nobody else will die for you or instead of you.
It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair.
That has been expected of you through your whole life, that you live it as if you were dying.
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people.
They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived.
~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
https://books.google.com/books?id=er51k0Ie6CMC&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=laurence+o.+mckinney,+death&source=bl&ots=84jLiALqIH&sig=z0s4NPPgJgjeyARkh33IyWhl9U4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuw9ee8JHNAhWFQCYKHQmkBUsQ6AEIODAE#v=onepage&q=laurence%20o.%20mckinney%2C%20death&f=false
With or Without God, Life's Mysteries Continue, Ruminations on God, Life ...
By Sondlo Leonard Mhlaba, PhD
*
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don't want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357.
We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance.
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 797
You may call me death-death that rose with the sun. I come with quiet pain and long peace.
I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death.
I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease.
~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.
But the way is my own self my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 292.
Death is a faithful companion of life and follows it like its shadow. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 34.
We have still to understand how very much wanting to live = wanting to die. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 34.
Yes, it is true, such a death and such suffering seem to be pointless if one assumes that this life is the acme of all existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
I have seen quite a number of people who died when they had reached the most they could. Obviously then the measure of their life was fulfilled, everything said and everything done and nothing remained. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
Perhaps other centuries will, in which case I am thankful to the Creator that man doesn't live for 200 years, otherwise he would suddenly find himself in an age in which he would choke to death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 114-115
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 357-358
If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272
I have seen quite a number of people who died when they had reached the most they could. Obviously then the measure of their life was fulfilled, everything said and everything done and nothing remained. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
You can succeed in going away from your problems, you need only to look away from them long enough. You may escape, but it is the death of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 90.
"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)
It will be entirely and exclusively your own affair.
That has been expected of you through your whole life, that you live it as if you were dying.
So it will happen to you as it happens to most people.
They die in exactly the same ways as they should have lived.
~Carl Jung to J. Allen Gilbert, Letters Volume 1, Pages 422-423.
https://books.google.com/books?id=er51k0Ie6CMC&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=laurence+o.+mckinney,+death&source=bl&ots=84jLiALqIH&sig=z0s4NPPgJgjeyARkh33IyWhl9U4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuw9ee8JHNAhWFQCYKHQmkBUsQ6AEIODAE#v=onepage&q=laurence%20o.%20mckinney%2C%20death&f=false
With or Without God, Life's Mysteries Continue, Ruminations on God, Life ...
By Sondlo Leonard Mhlaba, PhD
*
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don't want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357.
We are so convinced that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance.
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 797
You may call me death-death that rose with the sun. I come with quiet pain and long peace.
I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death.
I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease.
~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.
But the way is my own self my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 292.
Death is a faithful companion of life and follows it like its shadow. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 34.
We have still to understand how very much wanting to live = wanting to die. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 34.
Yes, it is true, such a death and such suffering seem to be pointless if one assumes that this life is the acme of all existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
I have seen quite a number of people who died when they had reached the most they could. Obviously then the measure of their life was fulfilled, everything said and everything done and nothing remained. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
Perhaps other centuries will, in which case I am thankful to the Creator that man doesn't live for 200 years, otherwise he would suddenly find himself in an age in which he would choke to death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 114-115
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 357-358
If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 272
I have seen quite a number of people who died when they had reached the most they could. Obviously then the measure of their life was fulfilled, everything said and everything done and nothing remained. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 127
You can succeed in going away from your problems, you need only to look away from them long enough. You may escape, but it is the death of the soul. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 90.
"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 dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
What seeks to distance you from Christianity and its holy rule of love are the dead, who could find no peace in the Lord since their uncompleted work has followed them. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 297.
Not one title of Christian law is abrogated, but instead we are adding a new one: accepting the lament of the dead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 187.
But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.
The lamentations of the dead filled the air at the time, and their misery became so loud that even the living were saddened, and became tired and sick of life and yearned to die to this world already in their living bodies. And thus you too lead the dead to their completion with your work of salvation. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.
Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.
A: "I ask you, was this [Logos] a concept, a word? It was a light, indeed a man, and lived among men. You see, Philo only lent John the word so that John would have at his disposal the word 'Logos' alongside the word 'light' to describe the son of man. John gave to living men the meaning of the Logos, but Philo gave Logos as the dead concept that usurped life, even the divine life. Through this the dead does not gain life, and the living is killed. And this was also my atrocious error." ~Ammonius to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 269.
The number of the unredeemed dead has become greater than the number of living Christians; therefore it is time that we accept the dead. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 297.
The scarab is a classical rebirth symbol. According to the description in the ancient Egyptian book Am-Tuat, the dead sun God transforms himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and as such mounts the barge at the twelfth station, which raises the rejuvenated sun into the morning sky ~Carl Jung, CW 8, §843.
Great is the need of the dead. But the God needs no sacrificial prayer. He has neither goodwill nor ill will. He is kind and fearful, though not actually so, but only seems to you thus. But the dead hear your prayers since they are still of human nature and not free of goodwill and ill will. ~Unknown woman to Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 339.
The "Invisibles" further assert that our world of consciousness and the "Beyond" together form a single cosmos, with the result that the dead are not in a different place from the living. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 315.
The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 524-525, Para 856.
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
At least sixteen hours out of twenty-four we live exclusively in this everyday world, and the remaining eight we spend preferably in an unconscious condition. Where and when does anything take place to remind us even remotely of phenomena like angels, miraculous feedings, beatitudes, the resurrection of the dead, etc.? It was therefore something of a discovery to find that during the unconscious state of sleep intervals occur, called “dreams,” which occasionally contain scenes having a not inconsiderable resemblance to the motifs of mythology." ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 66.
The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 39; Para 72.
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. 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? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.
I was grieved for him. Now he has vanished and stepped outside time, as all of us will do after him. Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 485.
Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. .. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 483.
The West is the land of the dead, the sun sinks in the West, it is there that the day, and life itself, sink, so to speak, into eternity. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 210.
These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilising Mercury). ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
I do not think that so-called personal messages from the dead can be dismissed in globo as self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.
The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 38
One shouldn’t attach the dead to the living, otherwise they both get estranged from their proper spheres and are thrown into a state of suffering. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 53
“All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick.…a chameleon, a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard… I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light…” --Jung 2009: 277
Man goes through analysis so that he can die. I have analyzed to the end with the end in sight—to accompany the individual in order that he may die. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Its inevitability has been a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement throughout history. Humans, being the only species consciously aware of the inescapability of death, have sought from time immemorial to cope with this unique insight. In Western society the traditional patterns of death were shaped by an ancient attitude informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance.
The experience was public; that is to say, a caring community of family and neighbors ministered to the dying person. In the traditional context, death was conspicuously visible throughout society and people went to great lengths to remind themselves of how fragile life is. Reminders of mortality were everywhere, whether they be in literature, paintings, oral traditions, or the cemeteries and churches where the physical remains of death intersected with the daily activities of the community. In this convergence, death held sway over the imagination of individuals, and was a source of elaborate ritual known as the ars moriendi. In these ceremonies that characterized the traditional patterns of death, acceptance and openness were the most important qualities.
Traditional Views of Death Give Way to New Perceptions
Throughout the ages particular rituals, along with their participants and meanings, may have varied. Nonetheless, death, dying, and grieving in the traditional model were an important part of everyday cultural practices. And the rituals they spawned connected dying and grieving persons to a broader community and set of meanings. In this way, the ordeal of dying was never just personal, it was communal. These great ceremonies, along with their deep religious and social meanings, accompanied dying persons into their deaths. They provided a sense of strength for the broader community that was being threatened by the loss of one of its members. Additionally, these traditional rituals were a healing balm to dying persons and their intimates, offering strength and comfort to both.
In the twentieth century, the social and psychological landscape was transformed, redefining American cultural, social, and personal experiences of death. The result of this transformation is that dying, once an integral and meaningful part of social life, has become a source of terror and thus largely vanquished from public visibility. Herman Feifel has argued that this change has produced the American "taboo on death." Four major social trends are responsible: (1) the abdication of community to a pervasive sense of individualism; (2) the replacement of a predominantly religious worldview with one that is secular; (3) the sweeping power that materialism holds on the values, interests, and behaviors in modern society; and (4) the influential place of science and technology in daily life.
As individualism, secularism, materialism, and technicism have become driving forces in modern American culture, the experience of dying and its meanings have been dramatically recast. Specifically, as individualism replaces community in daily life, community presence and support is withdrawn from the dying and grieving processes. Secularism as a way of life offers many opportunities and great pleasures, but is ultimately unable to offer meaning and comfort at the end of life. Like secularism, materialism poorly equips individuals and societies to grapple with the mystery of death. In addition, technological achievement and dependence have enabled humanity to actively fight against dying, thus forestalling death for countless numbers of individuals. In this technological framework, dying is no longer a natural, necessary, and important part of life. Rather, it is as if it has become an enemy. Success lies in its control and defeat; failure becomes defined as the inability to turn it away.
The New Model of DeathThese social changes have given rise to a new model of death, wherein dying and grieving are atomized and disconnected from everyday pathways of life, leading to their social isolation. As the historian Philippe Ariès astutely observes, in this context, dying has become deeply feared and a new image has replaced the traditional patterns of acceptance: the ugly and hidden death, hidden because it is ugly and dirty. As death has become frightening and meaningless, a culture of avoidance and denial has correspondingly emerged. Specifically, it has led to widespread pretense that suffering, dying, death, and grief do not exist. When individuals are forced to confront these inevitable experiences in their personal lives, they typically do so without social support and the comfort of participatory rituals or shared meanings. A pattern of death entirely unfamiliar in the traditional era has hence emerged. It is rooted in a sense of separation from the dominant culture and profound feelings of shame, both of which exacerbate the suffering inherent in the experience of dying and grieving.
As the legitimation and comfort of traditional ways of dying have given way to meaninglessness, isolation, and shame, stigma has become attached to suffering, dying, death, and grief. The stigmatization of death, wherein the experience of dying has become shameful, has helped to create an environment in which comfort at the end of life is scarce, and where suffering rages uncontrollably against dying individuals and their loved ones.
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/Taboos-and-Social-Stigma.html#ixzz42dpYdLTF
"When I use the word death and bring it into connection with dreams, I run the risk of being misunderstood grossly, since death to us tends to mean exclusively gross death—physical, literal death. . .That love and death could be metaphorical is difficult to understand. . . Death is not the background to dreamwork, but soul is. Soul, if immortal, has more to it than dying, and so dreams cannot be limited to attendance upon death. The psychic perspective is focused not only on death or about dying. Rather, it is a consciousness that stands on its own legs only when we have put our dayworld notions to sleep. Death is the most profoundly radical way of expressing this shift in consciousness."
--Hillman, Dream and the Underworld, 64-66
Man goes through analysis so that he can die. I have analyzed to the end with the end in sight—to accompany the individual in order that he may die. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Its inevitability has been a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and puzzlement throughout history. Humans, being the only species consciously aware of the inescapability of death, have sought from time immemorial to cope with this unique insight. In Western society the traditional patterns of death were shaped by an ancient attitude informed by simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance.
The experience was public; that is to say, a caring community of family and neighbors ministered to the dying person. In the traditional context, death was conspicuously visible throughout society and people went to great lengths to remind themselves of how fragile life is. Reminders of mortality were everywhere, whether they be in literature, paintings, oral traditions, or the cemeteries and churches where the physical remains of death intersected with the daily activities of the community. In this convergence, death held sway over the imagination of individuals, and was a source of elaborate ritual known as the ars moriendi. In these ceremonies that characterized the traditional patterns of death, acceptance and openness were the most important qualities.
Traditional Views of Death Give Way to New Perceptions
Throughout the ages particular rituals, along with their participants and meanings, may have varied. Nonetheless, death, dying, and grieving in the traditional model were an important part of everyday cultural practices. And the rituals they spawned connected dying and grieving persons to a broader community and set of meanings. In this way, the ordeal of dying was never just personal, it was communal. These great ceremonies, along with their deep religious and social meanings, accompanied dying persons into their deaths. They provided a sense of strength for the broader community that was being threatened by the loss of one of its members. Additionally, these traditional rituals were a healing balm to dying persons and their intimates, offering strength and comfort to both.
In the twentieth century, the social and psychological landscape was transformed, redefining American cultural, social, and personal experiences of death. The result of this transformation is that dying, once an integral and meaningful part of social life, has become a source of terror and thus largely vanquished from public visibility. Herman Feifel has argued that this change has produced the American "taboo on death." Four major social trends are responsible: (1) the abdication of community to a pervasive sense of individualism; (2) the replacement of a predominantly religious worldview with one that is secular; (3) the sweeping power that materialism holds on the values, interests, and behaviors in modern society; and (4) the influential place of science and technology in daily life.
As individualism, secularism, materialism, and technicism have become driving forces in modern American culture, the experience of dying and its meanings have been dramatically recast. Specifically, as individualism replaces community in daily life, community presence and support is withdrawn from the dying and grieving processes. Secularism as a way of life offers many opportunities and great pleasures, but is ultimately unable to offer meaning and comfort at the end of life. Like secularism, materialism poorly equips individuals and societies to grapple with the mystery of death. In addition, technological achievement and dependence have enabled humanity to actively fight against dying, thus forestalling death for countless numbers of individuals. In this technological framework, dying is no longer a natural, necessary, and important part of life. Rather, it is as if it has become an enemy. Success lies in its control and defeat; failure becomes defined as the inability to turn it away.
The New Model of DeathThese social changes have given rise to a new model of death, wherein dying and grieving are atomized and disconnected from everyday pathways of life, leading to their social isolation. As the historian Philippe Ariès astutely observes, in this context, dying has become deeply feared and a new image has replaced the traditional patterns of acceptance: the ugly and hidden death, hidden because it is ugly and dirty. As death has become frightening and meaningless, a culture of avoidance and denial has correspondingly emerged. Specifically, it has led to widespread pretense that suffering, dying, death, and grief do not exist. When individuals are forced to confront these inevitable experiences in their personal lives, they typically do so without social support and the comfort of participatory rituals or shared meanings. A pattern of death entirely unfamiliar in the traditional era has hence emerged. It is rooted in a sense of separation from the dominant culture and profound feelings of shame, both of which exacerbate the suffering inherent in the experience of dying and grieving.
As the legitimation and comfort of traditional ways of dying have given way to meaninglessness, isolation, and shame, stigma has become attached to suffering, dying, death, and grief. The stigmatization of death, wherein the experience of dying has become shameful, has helped to create an environment in which comfort at the end of life is scarce, and where suffering rages uncontrollably against dying individuals and their loved ones.
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Sy-Vi/Taboos-and-Social-Stigma.html#ixzz42dpYdLTF
"When I use the word death and bring it into connection with dreams, I run the risk of being misunderstood grossly, since death to us tends to mean exclusively gross death—physical, literal death. . .That love and death could be metaphorical is difficult to understand. . . Death is not the background to dreamwork, but soul is. Soul, if immortal, has more to it than dying, and so dreams cannot be limited to attendance upon death. The psychic perspective is focused not only on death or about dying. Rather, it is a consciousness that stands on its own legs only when we have put our dayworld notions to sleep. Death is the most profoundly radical way of expressing this shift in consciousness."
--Hillman, Dream and the Underworld, 64-66
Carl Jung answer to: “,,can we assume that individual consciousness continues after death?”
QUESTION 4: Since our consciousness is one of the contents of the self, can we assume that individual consciousness continues after death? Do you know any modern dream material which would corroborate such an assumption? Does the concept of eternal life mean the preservation of individual consciousness, or that the human soul enters into other forms and configurations, thereby losing its individuality?
Carl Jung: You realize that this is very difficult to answer.
To put it briefly, it's a question of conscious immortality.
This is a question our Lord Buddha was asked twice.
For his disciples it was naturally a matter of great concern whether the karma that passes from one generation to another by metempsychosis is personal, and represents a personal continuity, or whether it is impersonal.
In the latter case it's as though there were an unconscious karma suspended somewhere, which is seized upon in the act of birth and is reincarnated with no awareness of any personal continuity.
That is one aspect.
The other aspect is that this karma is by nature, conscious, having a subjective consciousness, and when this is reincarnated it becomes potentially possible to remember one's previous births because of this karma's transcendent self-awareness.
Both times Buddha evaded the question, he didn't go into it, although he himself asserted that he was aware of his previous births, about 560 incarnations in all conceivable forms, plant, animal, and human.
So you see that in those times, when people were not exactly sparing with metaphysical assertions, there being as yet no theory of knowledge, Buddha rejected this question as useless.
He thought it much more useful to meditate on the nidana chain, the chain of cause and effect, consisting of old age, sickness, and death, than to speculate about immortality.
And in a sense such speculation is sterile, because we are never in a position to adduce any valid proofs in this respect.
If we could eventually adduce any proof it would be of a man, say, appearing as a ghost one year or two years or ten years or maybe even twenty years after his death.
But we still cannot prove that this ghost is identical with this dead man.
There is thus no possibility whatever of furnishing proofs, because even if the ghost of a dead man were to reveal something that only he had known in his lifetime and no one else—and there are such cases, well authenticated cases—the question would still remain as to how that was related to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.
The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental.
It is something we cannot grasp at all, for we are not yet eternal and consequently can say nothing whatever about eternity, our consciousness being what it is.
These are transcendental speculations, which may be so or may not be so.
Hence for epistemological reasons it is absolutely impossible to make out anything with certainty in this matter.
On the other hand, the question of immortality is so urgent, of such immediacy, that one ought nevertheless to give some kind of answer.
So I say to myself, Well then, if I am up against a question I cannot answer and yet ought to answer for the peace of my soul, for my own well-being, I can be so disquieted by this question that an answer is
absolutely imperative.
At any rate I ought to try to form an opinion about it with the help of the unconscious, and the unconscious then obliges and produces dreams which point to a continuation of life after death.
There is no doubt of that, I have seen many examples of this kind.
Now of course you can say these are only fantasies, compensating fantasies which we cannot hinder, which are rooted in our nature—all life desires eternity—but they are far from being a proof.
On the other hand, we must tell ourselves that though this argument is all right as far as it goes, we have irrefutable evidence that at least parts of our psyche are not subject to the laws of space and time, otherwise perceptions outside space and time would be altogether impossible— yet they exist, they happen.
All cases of telepathic clairvoyance, predictions of the future—they exist.
I have been able to verify this from countless experiences, not to mention Rhine's experiments, which can't be refuted unless you stand the whole theory of probability on its head.
This has actually been proposed, a whole new probability theory should be invented, though how this could be done without violations of logic is completely beyond me.
At any rate we have at present no means of contesting Rhine's results, quite apart from the numerous instances of prediction, nonspatial perception, and the like.
This offers the clearest and most incontrovertible proof that our conceptions of space and time, as seen from the causal, rationalistic standpoint, are incomplete.
To get a complete picture of the world we would have to add another dimension, or we could never explain the totality of the phenomena in a unified way.
That is why rationalists maintain through thick and thin that no such experiences as clairvoyance and the like exist, because the rationalistic view of the world stands or falls with the reality of these
phenomena.
But if they do exist, our rationalistic view of the world is untenable.
You know that in modern physics the possibility that the universe has several dimensions is no longer denied.
We must reckon with the fact that this empirical world is in a sense appearance, that is to say it is related to another order of things below it or behind it, where "here" and "there" do not exist; where there is no
extension in space, which means that space doesn't exist, and no extension in time, which means that time doesn't exist.
There are experiences where space is reduced by 20 per cent, or time by 90 per cent, so that the time concept is only ro per cent valid.
If that is so—and I see no possibility of disputing it—we must face the fact that something of our psychic existence is outside space and time, that is, beyond changeability, or one could also say, changeable only in infinite spaces of time.
These are ideas which for us are logical deductions, but are commonly held views in India.
For instance, if you read the Buddha stories in the [Pali Canon], you will find many examples.
Here is one: When the Buddha was dwelling in the grove he suddenly heard that one of the highest Brahma gods had a wrong thought.
He at once betook himself to the highest Brahma world and found the Brahma god in a fort—actually the palace of the Rajah or the Maharajah—and in the spacious paradisal gardens of this fort, set on a
high peak of the Himalayas, the Brahma god was enjoying himself with his court ladies.
They had climbed up a tree and were throwing flowers and fruit down and he found it delightful and said to the Buddha, This spectacle you see, this joy and this pleasure, will endure forever because I am
immortal.
Then said the Buddha, There you make your mistake.
Your life will endure for kalpas, for cosmic ages, but sometime it will come to an end.
The Brahma god wouldn't believe it.
At this moment there was suddenly absolute silence.
No flowers and no fruit fell down any more, the laughter of the court ladies froze, and the Brahma god was very astonished and said, What's up?
Then said the Buddha, At this very moment the karma of your court ladies is extinguished and they are no more—and so it will fare with you.
Then the Brahma god was converted to the Lord Buddha and vowed him true discipleship.
That is the story. Life may endure for an infinity of kalpas but it is not eternal.
Of course that doesn't bother us much.
But it does show that in India there was a realization of the relativity of time.
It is an intuition, naturally evolved and become second nature, of what is probably the actual state of our world.
We see a world of consciousness from which we can't really draw any conclusions, but then we know from experience that there is a background which is absolutely necessary, otherwise we couldn't explain the
phenomena of this world. In consequence, we are unable to explain a prediction of the future or a spatial extrasensory perception in terms of special radar facilities, for even the finest radar cannot predict an event taking place a fortnight hence.
We always use this radar comparison to explain seeing at a distance in space, but you get nowhere with it in explaining seeing at a distance in time.
QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Some years ago you once talked about the physicist's concept of the time quantum, according to which there is not time in between two time quanta, so that what appears between them is a kind of timelessness. Would you elaborate on this?
Dr. Jung: That is really beside the point, it is only an analogy for making comprehensible how timelessness must be implicit in the time concept, as is necessary for logical reasons.
When you say "high" you also mean "low" without saying so.
When we speak of time we must also have the concept of nontime.
Just as we have the quantum concept in energy, so also, since time is a phenomenon of energy, we can speak [without any difference of a succession of such [time quanta], that is, of these gaps then produced.
The quantum theory is a theory of the discontinuity of events, and that is why Einstein tried to bridge over the gaps.
It was a thorn in his eye that discontinuities exist; the perfect world-creator cannot afford discontinuities, everything should be rational, but it just isn't.
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.
There is also the consideration, based on experience, that any split-off part of the psyche, if it can manifest itself at all, always does so in the form of a personality, as though it possessed a consciousness of itself.
That is why the voices heard by the insane are personal.
All split-off complexes speak in personal form whenever they express themselves.
You can, if you like, or if you feel the need, take this as an argument in favor of a continuity of consciousness.
In general one could say that since consciousness is an important psychic phenomenon, why shouldn't it be just that part of the psyche which is not affected by space and time?
In other words, it goes on existing relatively outside space and time, which would by no means be a proof of immortality but rather of an existence for an indefinite time after or beyond death.
In support of this psychological hypothesis you can also adduce the experiential fact that in conditions which by all medical standards are profoundly unconscious, resulting from cerebral anemia or shock, the most complicated dreams can occur, presupposing a high degree of conscious activity as well as the presence of an individual consciousness, despite the fact that for sound commonsense any psychic activity is no longer possible.
So if I fall into an absolute coma and am totally unconscious of my coma, it is possible for a big dream to take place in this coma.
Well, who is doing that, and where?
It is explained that because of the lack of blood the brain is incapable of sustaining consciousness.
But how then does it sustain a dream in which an individual consciousness is present?
Two German physiologists have published a very interesting work on subjective levitation phenomena following brain injuries.
Such cases have been observed fairly often, though these things are rather rare.
For instance, a soldier is shot in the head in combat and lies there as if dead.
But, in his subjective consciousness, he rises up in the air in the position in which he is lying.
The noise of battle is completely extinguished, he sees the whole terrain, he sees the other people, but it is all utterly soundless and still; then he hears his name, a comrade is calling to him and he comes to himself and is now really a wounded man.
But up to that point he is in a state of levitation, he is as though lifted out of this world, yet though it continues to exist and he has some perception of it, it no longer affects him.
By any human standard such a person is profoundly unconscious.
But in his unconsciousness he undergoes a subjective experience which is simply psychic, and which can be placed on entirely the same footing as consciousness.
It is observations like these that have to be considered here.
The concept of immortality tells us nothing about the related idea of rebirth or metempsychosis.
Here again we have to depend on dreams that give us a few hints.
But it is worth bearing in mind that a highly civilized continent like India—that is, highly civilized in its spiritual culture—is absolutely convinced of the transmigration of souls, and that reincarnation is regarded as self-evident.
This is as much taken for granted as our assumption that God created the world or that some kind of spiritus rector exists—that would be a fitting comparison.
Educated Indians know that we don't think as they do, but that doesn't bother them in the least; they simply find it stupid that we don't think that way.
When I was in India, a doctor gave me a whole dossier about a child of four, a little girl who remembered her previous life.
She had been reborn a few years after her death and knew what her name was previously, her husband's name, what children she had and where she lived.
So when she was four years old—in India children are very precocious—her father went with her to that distant city and let himself be shown round by the child.
She led him to her house, where she had been the mother, where her children still were, where her husband was, and she recognized everybody, even the grandmother—an Indian household always has a grandmother on top—she knew them all and was then accepted as the previous wife.
I have never heard of such a thing in Europe.
Certainly there are many people among us today who believe in reincarnation.
Maybe it is simply a sign of our [. . .] and barbarism that we don't think like that and are only just beginning to take such thoughts seriously.
But in India, whose civilization is so much older than ours and where there is also a much greater inner culture, these ideas were arrived at very early and the Indians have never got out of them.
They took them over from the age of primitives, for practically all primitives believe that there is a continuity within the tribe.
Hence the amusing [custom] of certain Eskimos who put one of the grandfather's lice on the head of the grandchild, so that the soul substance of the grandfather shall be passed on to him.
So you see, the matter is a bit complicated, but I hope you have understood what I mean.
[Two members of the audience then relate examples of the transmigration of souls.]
Individual instances like this certainly do exist but they are very uncommon.
There is also an interesting story that allegedly happened in England.
A house began to be haunted and the whole household was terribly frightened of the ghost.
Now there was a society lady who had no connection with this house but had longed for years to own a certain house which she claimed was hers.
She searched everywhere to find something answering to this description, saying she would buy it.
Then she suddenly hit on this house, which was up for sale because it was haunted.
And when she came the housekeeper opened the door and ran off with a shriek, and it turned out that she herself was the ghost who had been haunting the house for a long time because she had seen it in her imagination.
So she got her house, or so the story goes. But—si non e vero! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391
QUESTION 4: Since our consciousness is one of the contents of the self, can we assume that individual consciousness continues after death? Do you know any modern dream material which would corroborate such an assumption? Does the concept of eternal life mean the preservation of individual consciousness, or that the human soul enters into other forms and configurations, thereby losing its individuality?
Carl Jung: You realize that this is very difficult to answer.
To put it briefly, it's a question of conscious immortality.
This is a question our Lord Buddha was asked twice.
For his disciples it was naturally a matter of great concern whether the karma that passes from one generation to another by metempsychosis is personal, and represents a personal continuity, or whether it is impersonal.
In the latter case it's as though there were an unconscious karma suspended somewhere, which is seized upon in the act of birth and is reincarnated with no awareness of any personal continuity.
That is one aspect.
The other aspect is that this karma is by nature, conscious, having a subjective consciousness, and when this is reincarnated it becomes potentially possible to remember one's previous births because of this karma's transcendent self-awareness.
Both times Buddha evaded the question, he didn't go into it, although he himself asserted that he was aware of his previous births, about 560 incarnations in all conceivable forms, plant, animal, and human.
So you see that in those times, when people were not exactly sparing with metaphysical assertions, there being as yet no theory of knowledge, Buddha rejected this question as useless.
He thought it much more useful to meditate on the nidana chain, the chain of cause and effect, consisting of old age, sickness, and death, than to speculate about immortality.
And in a sense such speculation is sterile, because we are never in a position to adduce any valid proofs in this respect.
If we could eventually adduce any proof it would be of a man, say, appearing as a ghost one year or two years or ten years or maybe even twenty years after his death.
But we still cannot prove that this ghost is identical with this dead man.
There is thus no possibility whatever of furnishing proofs, because even if the ghost of a dead man were to reveal something that only he had known in his lifetime and no one else—and there are such cases, well authenticated cases—the question would still remain as to how that was related to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.
The unconscious has a kind of absolute knowledge, but we cannot prove it is an absolute knowledge, because the Absolute, the Eternal, is transcendental.
It is something we cannot grasp at all, for we are not yet eternal and consequently can say nothing whatever about eternity, our consciousness being what it is.
These are transcendental speculations, which may be so or may not be so.
Hence for epistemological reasons it is absolutely impossible to make out anything with certainty in this matter.
On the other hand, the question of immortality is so urgent, of such immediacy, that one ought nevertheless to give some kind of answer.
So I say to myself, Well then, if I am up against a question I cannot answer and yet ought to answer for the peace of my soul, for my own well-being, I can be so disquieted by this question that an answer is
absolutely imperative.
At any rate I ought to try to form an opinion about it with the help of the unconscious, and the unconscious then obliges and produces dreams which point to a continuation of life after death.
There is no doubt of that, I have seen many examples of this kind.
Now of course you can say these are only fantasies, compensating fantasies which we cannot hinder, which are rooted in our nature—all life desires eternity—but they are far from being a proof.
On the other hand, we must tell ourselves that though this argument is all right as far as it goes, we have irrefutable evidence that at least parts of our psyche are not subject to the laws of space and time, otherwise perceptions outside space and time would be altogether impossible— yet they exist, they happen.
All cases of telepathic clairvoyance, predictions of the future—they exist.
I have been able to verify this from countless experiences, not to mention Rhine's experiments, which can't be refuted unless you stand the whole theory of probability on its head.
This has actually been proposed, a whole new probability theory should be invented, though how this could be done without violations of logic is completely beyond me.
At any rate we have at present no means of contesting Rhine's results, quite apart from the numerous instances of prediction, nonspatial perception, and the like.
This offers the clearest and most incontrovertible proof that our conceptions of space and time, as seen from the causal, rationalistic standpoint, are incomplete.
To get a complete picture of the world we would have to add another dimension, or we could never explain the totality of the phenomena in a unified way.
That is why rationalists maintain through thick and thin that no such experiences as clairvoyance and the like exist, because the rationalistic view of the world stands or falls with the reality of these
phenomena.
But if they do exist, our rationalistic view of the world is untenable.
You know that in modern physics the possibility that the universe has several dimensions is no longer denied.
We must reckon with the fact that this empirical world is in a sense appearance, that is to say it is related to another order of things below it or behind it, where "here" and "there" do not exist; where there is no
extension in space, which means that space doesn't exist, and no extension in time, which means that time doesn't exist.
There are experiences where space is reduced by 20 per cent, or time by 90 per cent, so that the time concept is only ro per cent valid.
If that is so—and I see no possibility of disputing it—we must face the fact that something of our psychic existence is outside space and time, that is, beyond changeability, or one could also say, changeable only in infinite spaces of time.
These are ideas which for us are logical deductions, but are commonly held views in India.
For instance, if you read the Buddha stories in the [Pali Canon], you will find many examples.
Here is one: When the Buddha was dwelling in the grove he suddenly heard that one of the highest Brahma gods had a wrong thought.
He at once betook himself to the highest Brahma world and found the Brahma god in a fort—actually the palace of the Rajah or the Maharajah—and in the spacious paradisal gardens of this fort, set on a
high peak of the Himalayas, the Brahma god was enjoying himself with his court ladies.
They had climbed up a tree and were throwing flowers and fruit down and he found it delightful and said to the Buddha, This spectacle you see, this joy and this pleasure, will endure forever because I am
immortal.
Then said the Buddha, There you make your mistake.
Your life will endure for kalpas, for cosmic ages, but sometime it will come to an end.
The Brahma god wouldn't believe it.
At this moment there was suddenly absolute silence.
No flowers and no fruit fell down any more, the laughter of the court ladies froze, and the Brahma god was very astonished and said, What's up?
Then said the Buddha, At this very moment the karma of your court ladies is extinguished and they are no more—and so it will fare with you.
Then the Brahma god was converted to the Lord Buddha and vowed him true discipleship.
That is the story. Life may endure for an infinity of kalpas but it is not eternal.
Of course that doesn't bother us much.
But it does show that in India there was a realization of the relativity of time.
It is an intuition, naturally evolved and become second nature, of what is probably the actual state of our world.
We see a world of consciousness from which we can't really draw any conclusions, but then we know from experience that there is a background which is absolutely necessary, otherwise we couldn't explain the
phenomena of this world. In consequence, we are unable to explain a prediction of the future or a spatial extrasensory perception in terms of special radar facilities, for even the finest radar cannot predict an event taking place a fortnight hence.
We always use this radar comparison to explain seeing at a distance in space, but you get nowhere with it in explaining seeing at a distance in time.
QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Some years ago you once talked about the physicist's concept of the time quantum, according to which there is not time in between two time quanta, so that what appears between them is a kind of timelessness. Would you elaborate on this?
Dr. Jung: That is really beside the point, it is only an analogy for making comprehensible how timelessness must be implicit in the time concept, as is necessary for logical reasons.
When you say "high" you also mean "low" without saying so.
When we speak of time we must also have the concept of nontime.
Just as we have the quantum concept in energy, so also, since time is a phenomenon of energy, we can speak [without any difference of a succession of such [time quanta], that is, of these gaps then produced.
The quantum theory is a theory of the discontinuity of events, and that is why Einstein tried to bridge over the gaps.
It was a thorn in his eye that discontinuities exist; the perfect world-creator cannot afford discontinuities, everything should be rational, but it just isn't.
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.
There is also the consideration, based on experience, that any split-off part of the psyche, if it can manifest itself at all, always does so in the form of a personality, as though it possessed a consciousness of itself.
That is why the voices heard by the insane are personal.
All split-off complexes speak in personal form whenever they express themselves.
You can, if you like, or if you feel the need, take this as an argument in favor of a continuity of consciousness.
In general one could say that since consciousness is an important psychic phenomenon, why shouldn't it be just that part of the psyche which is not affected by space and time?
In other words, it goes on existing relatively outside space and time, which would by no means be a proof of immortality but rather of an existence for an indefinite time after or beyond death.
In support of this psychological hypothesis you can also adduce the experiential fact that in conditions which by all medical standards are profoundly unconscious, resulting from cerebral anemia or shock, the most complicated dreams can occur, presupposing a high degree of conscious activity as well as the presence of an individual consciousness, despite the fact that for sound commonsense any psychic activity is no longer possible.
So if I fall into an absolute coma and am totally unconscious of my coma, it is possible for a big dream to take place in this coma.
Well, who is doing that, and where?
It is explained that because of the lack of blood the brain is incapable of sustaining consciousness.
But how then does it sustain a dream in which an individual consciousness is present?
Two German physiologists have published a very interesting work on subjective levitation phenomena following brain injuries.
Such cases have been observed fairly often, though these things are rather rare.
For instance, a soldier is shot in the head in combat and lies there as if dead.
But, in his subjective consciousness, he rises up in the air in the position in which he is lying.
The noise of battle is completely extinguished, he sees the whole terrain, he sees the other people, but it is all utterly soundless and still; then he hears his name, a comrade is calling to him and he comes to himself and is now really a wounded man.
But up to that point he is in a state of levitation, he is as though lifted out of this world, yet though it continues to exist and he has some perception of it, it no longer affects him.
By any human standard such a person is profoundly unconscious.
But in his unconsciousness he undergoes a subjective experience which is simply psychic, and which can be placed on entirely the same footing as consciousness.
It is observations like these that have to be considered here.
The concept of immortality tells us nothing about the related idea of rebirth or metempsychosis.
Here again we have to depend on dreams that give us a few hints.
But it is worth bearing in mind that a highly civilized continent like India—that is, highly civilized in its spiritual culture—is absolutely convinced of the transmigration of souls, and that reincarnation is regarded as self-evident.
This is as much taken for granted as our assumption that God created the world or that some kind of spiritus rector exists—that would be a fitting comparison.
Educated Indians know that we don't think as they do, but that doesn't bother them in the least; they simply find it stupid that we don't think that way.
When I was in India, a doctor gave me a whole dossier about a child of four, a little girl who remembered her previous life.
She had been reborn a few years after her death and knew what her name was previously, her husband's name, what children she had and where she lived.
So when she was four years old—in India children are very precocious—her father went with her to that distant city and let himself be shown round by the child.
She led him to her house, where she had been the mother, where her children still were, where her husband was, and she recognized everybody, even the grandmother—an Indian household always has a grandmother on top—she knew them all and was then accepted as the previous wife.
I have never heard of such a thing in Europe.
Certainly there are many people among us today who believe in reincarnation.
Maybe it is simply a sign of our [. . .] and barbarism that we don't think like that and are only just beginning to take such thoughts seriously.
But in India, whose civilization is so much older than ours and where there is also a much greater inner culture, these ideas were arrived at very early and the Indians have never got out of them.
They took them over from the age of primitives, for practically all primitives believe that there is a continuity within the tribe.
Hence the amusing [custom] of certain Eskimos who put one of the grandfather's lice on the head of the grandchild, so that the soul substance of the grandfather shall be passed on to him.
So you see, the matter is a bit complicated, but I hope you have understood what I mean.
[Two members of the audience then relate examples of the transmigration of souls.]
Individual instances like this certainly do exist but they are very uncommon.
There is also an interesting story that allegedly happened in England.
A house began to be haunted and the whole household was terribly frightened of the ghost.
Now there was a society lady who had no connection with this house but had longed for years to own a certain house which she claimed was hers.
She searched everywhere to find something answering to this description, saying she would buy it.
Then she suddenly hit on this house, which was up for sale because it was haunted.
And when she came the housekeeper opened the door and ran off with a shriek, and it turned out that she herself was the ghost who had been haunting the house for a long time because she had seen it in her imagination.
So she got her house, or so the story goes. But—si non e vero! ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 375-391
Hillman says five more things about the nature of the soul: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47). For Hillman, as a result of these five characteristics, the soul is the "imaginative possibility of our nature", a possibility that is realized in reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. Death is significant for soul because possibility (and hence imagination) derives from an existential recognition of one's finitude: what is finite can imagine possibilities, some of which will be realized, others of which (owing to death) will not (Hillman 1992, p. xvi, 1989, p. 21).
As a doctor I am convinced that it is hygienic—if I may use the word—to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
As a doctor I am convinced that it is hygienic—if I may use the word—to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
The Triumph of Death, or The 3 Fates. Flemish tapestry (probably Brussels, ca. 1510-1520). Victoria and Albert Museum, London
I have now seen quite a number of people die in the time of a great transition, reaching as it were the end of their pilgrimage in sight of the Gates, where the way bifurcates to the land of Hereafter and to the future of mankind and its spiritual adventure. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 603-604
MEMORIAL TO J. S. [Jerome Schloss, of New York]
Death has laid its hand upon our friend.
The darkness out of which his soul had risen has come again and has undone the life
of his earthly body, and has left us alone in pain and sorrow.
To many death seems to be a brutal and meaningless end to a short and meaningless existence.
So it looks, if seen from the surface and from the darkness.
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.
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime.
In the youthful expansion of our life we think of it as an ever-increasing river, and this conviction accompanies
us often far beyond the noonday of our existence.
But if we listen to the quieter voices of our deeper nature we become aware of the fact that soon
after the middle of our life the soil begins its secret work, getting ready for the departure.
Out of the turmoil and terror of our life the one precious flower of the spirit begins to unfold, the fourpetaled
flower of the immortal light, and even if our mortal consciousness should not be aware of its secret
operation, it nevertheless does its secret work of purification.
When I met J. S. for the first time I found in him a man of rare clarity and purity of character and personality.
I was deeply impressed with the honesty and sincerity of his purpose.
And when I worked with him, helping him to understand the intricacies of the human psyche, I could not but admire the
kindness of his feeling and the absolute truthfulness of his mind.
But though it was a privilege to teach a man of such rare human qualities, it was not
the thing that touched me most.
Yes, I did teach him, but he taught me too.
He spoke to me in the eternal language of symbols, which I did not grasp until the awe-inspiring conclusion, the culmination
in death, became manifest.
I shall never forget how he liberated his mind from the turmoil of modern business life, and how, gradually working back, he freed himself from the bonds that held him fast to his earthly parents and to his youth; and how the eternal
image of the soul appeared to him, first dimly, then slowly taking shape in the vision of his dreams, and how finally, three weeks
before his death, he beheld the vision of his own sarcophagus from which his living soul arose.
Who am I that I should dare say one word beyond this vision?
Is there a human word that could stand against the revelation given to the chosen one?
There is none.
Let us return, therefore, to the external language and let us hear the words of the sacred text. And as the ancient words which
give truth to us, we will give life to them. (I Corinthians 13; l 5 : 37-55-) ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 757-758
MEMORIAL TO J. S. [Jerome Schloss, of New York]
Death has laid its hand upon our friend.
The darkness out of which his soul had risen has come again and has undone the life
of his earthly body, and has left us alone in pain and sorrow.
To many death seems to be a brutal and meaningless end to a short and meaningless existence.
So it looks, if seen from the surface and from the darkness.
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.
Nor is death an abrupt extinction, but a goal that has been unconsciously lived and worked for during half a lifetime.
In the youthful expansion of our life we think of it as an ever-increasing river, and this conviction accompanies
us often far beyond the noonday of our existence.
But if we listen to the quieter voices of our deeper nature we become aware of the fact that soon
after the middle of our life the soil begins its secret work, getting ready for the departure.
Out of the turmoil and terror of our life the one precious flower of the spirit begins to unfold, the fourpetaled
flower of the immortal light, and even if our mortal consciousness should not be aware of its secret
operation, it nevertheless does its secret work of purification.
When I met J. S. for the first time I found in him a man of rare clarity and purity of character and personality.
I was deeply impressed with the honesty and sincerity of his purpose.
And when I worked with him, helping him to understand the intricacies of the human psyche, I could not but admire the
kindness of his feeling and the absolute truthfulness of his mind.
But though it was a privilege to teach a man of such rare human qualities, it was not
the thing that touched me most.
Yes, I did teach him, but he taught me too.
He spoke to me in the eternal language of symbols, which I did not grasp until the awe-inspiring conclusion, the culmination
in death, became manifest.
I shall never forget how he liberated his mind from the turmoil of modern business life, and how, gradually working back, he freed himself from the bonds that held him fast to his earthly parents and to his youth; and how the eternal
image of the soul appeared to him, first dimly, then slowly taking shape in the vision of his dreams, and how finally, three weeks
before his death, he beheld the vision of his own sarcophagus from which his living soul arose.
Who am I that I should dare say one word beyond this vision?
Is there a human word that could stand against the revelation given to the chosen one?
There is none.
Let us return, therefore, to the external language and let us hear the words of the sacred text. And as the ancient words which
give truth to us, we will give life to them. (I Corinthians 13; l 5 : 37-55-) ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Pages 757-758
The libido of man contains the two opposite urges
or instincts: the instinct to live and the instinct to die.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 77
You cannot get out of your skin until you become an eternal ghost. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 79
“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
or instincts: the instinct to live and the instinct to die.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 77
You cannot get out of your skin until you become an eternal ghost. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 79
“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
In ultimate situations of life and death complete understanding and insight are of paramount importance, as it is indispensable for our decision to go or to stay and let go or to let stay. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
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
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
Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, Page 85
I try to accept life and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
Where I find myself unwilling to accept the one or the other [Life or Death] I should question myself as to my personal motives. . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
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
In ultimate situations of life and death complete understanding and insight are of paramount importance, as it is indispensable for our decision to go or to stay and let go or to let stay. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 546-547
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningess, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death! ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. Thus the soul moved toward death. I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away and sought the place of the inner life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 267.
Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.
We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.
You must be in the middle of life, surrounded by death on all sides. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 370.
If I am bound to men and things, I can neither go on with my life to its destination nor can I arrive at my very own and deepest nature. Nor can death begin in me as a new life, since I can only fear death. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 356.
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 268.
You may call me death-death that rose with the sun. I come with quiet pain and long peace. I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death. I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease. ~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.
In this bloody battle death steps up to you, just like today where mass killing and dying: fill the world. The coldness of death penetrates you. When I froze to death in my solitude, I saw dearly and saw what was to come, as clearly as I could see the stars and the distant mountains on a frosty night. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 73.
Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death …Not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Becoming and passing away is the same curve. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75.
After death on the cross Christ went into the underworld and became Hell. So he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon. The image of the Antichrist, which has come down to us from the ancients, announces the new God, whose coming the ancients had foreseen. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his under worldly brother. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 231.
Look back at the collapse of empires, of growth and death, of the desert and monasteries, they are the images of what is to come. Everything has been foretold. But who knows how to interpret it? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 236.
But above all protect me from the serpent of judgment, which only appears to be a healing serpent, yet in your depths is infernal poison and agonizing death. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. You see in these days what the spirit of the depths bore. You did not believe it, but you would have known it if you had taken counsel with your fear. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
I went through a torment unto death and I felt certain that I must kill myself if I could not solve the riddle of the murder of the hero. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Footnote 135, Page 243.
That is the ambiguity of the God: he is born from a dark ambiguity and rises to a bright ambiguity. Unequivocalness is simplicity and leads to death. But ambiguity is the way of life. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
I saw it, I know that this is the way: I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 254.
You're stubborn. What I mean is that it's hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian. I also believe that it was the task of Western man to carry Christ in his heart and to grow with his suffering, death, and resurrection. ~Carl Jung to The Red One, Liber Novus, Page 260.
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don't want to return. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Pages 355-357.
It frequently happens that when a person with whom one was intimate dies, either one is oneself drawn into the death, so to speak, or else this burden has the opposite effect of a task that has to be fulfilled in real life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1, Page 239.
Psychology is a preparation for death. We have an urge to leave life at a higher level than the one at which we entered. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 16.
Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead. We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter-the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. The subsequent differentiation of this contrast leads to the actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
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.
The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.
Moreover, the unconscious has a different relation to death than we ourselves have. For example, it is very surprising in which way dreams anticipate death. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 343.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
Only for outsiders, who have never been inside, is penal servitude not a hellish cruelty. I know many cases from my psychiatric experience where death would have been a mercy in comparison with life in a prison. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 446-448.
Oh outstanding vessel of devotion and obedience! To the ancestral spirits of my most beloved and faithful wife Emma Maria. She completed her life and after her death she was lamented. She went over to the secret of eternity in the year 1955. Her age was 73. Her husband C.G. .Jung has made and placed [this stone] in 1956.
A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change; it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 223.
The ego is an illusion which ends with death but the karma remains, it is given another ego in the next existence. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 17.
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. 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? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.
… it would seem to be more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to regard death as the fulfillment of life’s meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation. Anyone who cherishes a rationalistic opinion on this score has isolated himself psychologically and stands opposed to his own basic nature. ~Carl Jung, CWs, 8, ¶807.
Death is psychologically as important as birth, and like it, is an integral part of life. ... As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life’s inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para. 68.
The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. 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. ~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix.
Life's cessation, that is, death, can only be accepted as a reasonable goal either when existence is so wretched that we are only too glad for it to end, or when we are convinced that the sun strives to its setting "to illuminate distant races" with the same logical consistency it showed in rising to the zenith. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
As a doctor I am convinced that it is hygienic—if I may use the word—to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.
Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.
Thus hun [Animus] means 'cloud-demon,' a higher 'breath-soul' belonging to the yang principle and therefore masculine. After death, hun rises upward and becomes shen, the 'expanding and self-revealing' spirit or god. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
'Anima', called p'o, and written with the characters for 'white' and for 'demon', that is, 'white ghost', belongs to the lower, earth-bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. After death, it sinks downward and becomes kuei (demon), often explained as the 'one who returns' (i.e. to earth), a revenant, a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
The fact that the animus and the anima part after death and go their ways independently shows that, for the Chinese consciousness, they are distinguishable psychic factors which have markedly different effects, and, despite the fact that originally they are united in 'the one effective, true human nature', in the 'house of the Creative,' they are two. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
Hun [Animus], then, would be the discriminating light of consciousness and of reason in man, originally coming from the logos spermatikos of hsing, and returning after death through shen to the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 116.
The creation and birth of this superior personality is what is meant by our text when it speaks of the 'holy fruit', the 'diamond body', or refers in other ways to an indestructible body. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 123.
To the psyche death is just as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
If viewed correctly in the psychological sense, death is not an end but a goal, and therefore life towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
The Chinese philosophy of yoga is based upon the fact of this instinctive preparation for death as a goal, and, following the analogy with the goal of the first half of life, namely, begetting and reproduction, the means towards perpetuation of physical life, it takes as the purpose of spiritual existence the symbolic begetting and bringing to birth of a psychic spirit body ('subtle body'), which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because "interiorization" has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.
He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ's death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.
While we are in avidya, we act like automatons, we have no idea what we are doing. Buddha regarded this as absolutely unethical. Avidya acts in the sense of the concupiscentia and involves us in suffering, illness and death. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.
After my wife's death. . . I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden was myself! ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 225.
Now I know the truth but there is a small piece not filled in and when I know that I shall be dead. ~Carl Jung [2 days before his death] ~Miguel Serrano, Two Friendships, Page 104.
The past decade dealt me heavy blows – the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honors and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.
Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.
Often people come for analysis who wish to be prepared to meet death. They can make astonishingly good progress in a short time and then die peacefully. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page16.
Christ’s redemptive death on the cross was understood as a “baptism,” that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, symbolized by the tree of death… The dual-mother motif suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is the real, human mother, the other is the symbolical mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para 494-495.
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 was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life's perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.
In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.
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.
The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.
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.
There is no loneliness, but all-ness or infinitely increasing completeness. Such dreams occur at the gateway of death. They interpret the mystery of death. They don't predict it but they show you the right way to approach the end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 145-146
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father's fate, much as I was tempted to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
With no human consciousness to reflect themselves in, good and evil simply happen, or rather, there is no good and evil, but only a sequence of neutral events, or what the Buddhists call the Nidhanachain, the uninterrupted causal concatenation leading to suffering, old age, sickness, and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.
We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man's death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.
Mama's death has left a gap for me that cannot be filled. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 316-317.
Yahweh gives life and death. Christ gives life, even eternal life and no death. He is a definite improvement on Yahweh. He owes this to the fact that He is suffering man as well as God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473
When one has looked and laboured for a long time, one knows oneself and has grown old. - The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots. All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515
The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots . All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace. There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515
Such a thing is possible only when there is a detachment of the soul from the body. When that takes place and the patient lives on, one can almost with certainty expect a certain deterioration of the character inasmuch as the superior and most essential part of the soul has already left. Such an experience denotes a partial death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 435-437.
Thus hun [Animus] means 'cloud-demon,' a higher 'breath-soul' belonging to the yang principle and therefore masculine. After death, hun rises upward and becomes shen, the 'expanding and self-revealing' spirit or god. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
'Anima', called p'o, and written with the characters for 'white' and for 'demon', that is, 'white ghost', belongs to the lower, earth-bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. After death, it sinks downward and becomes kuei (demon), often explained as the 'one who returns' (i.e. to earth), a revenant, a ghost. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
The fact that the animus and the anima part after death and go their ways independently shows that, for the Chinese consciousness, they are distinguishable psychic factors which have markedly different effects, and, despite the fact that originally they are united in 'the one effective, true human nature', in the 'house of the Creative,' they are two. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
Hun [Animus], then, would be the discriminating light of consciousness and of reason in man, originally coming from the logos spermatikos of hsing, and returning after death through shen to the Tao. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 116.
The creation and birth of this superior personality is what is meant by our text when it speaks of the 'holy fruit', the 'diamond body', or refers in other ways to an indestructible body. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 123.
To the psyche death is just as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
If viewed correctly in the psychological sense, death is not an end but a goal, and therefore life towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
The Chinese philosophy of yoga is based upon the fact of this instinctive preparation for death as a goal, and, following the analogy with the goal of the first half of life, namely, begetting and reproduction, the means towards perpetuation of physical life, it takes as the purpose of spiritual existence the symbolic begetting and bringing to birth of a psychic spirit body ('subtle body'), which ensures the continuity of the detached consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 124.
The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and after death remains alive because "interiorization" has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world. Instead of these being dissipated, they have made within the inner rotation of monad a centre of life which is independent of bodily existence. Such an ego is a god, deus, shen. ~Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 17.
He [Neitzche] expressed it as “God is dead” and he did not realise that in saying this he was still standing within the dogma, for Christ's death is one of the secret mysteries of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 197.
While we are in avidya, we act like automatons, we have no idea what we are doing. Buddha regarded this as absolutely unethical. Avidya acts in the sense of the concupiscentia and involves us in suffering, illness and death. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI, 3Feb1939, Page 74.
After my wife's death. . . I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden was myself! ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 225.
Now I know the truth but there is a small piece not filled in and when I know that I shall be dead. ~Carl Jung [2 days before his death] ~Miguel Serrano, Two Friendships, Page 104.
The past decade dealt me heavy blows – the death of dear friends and the even more painful loss of my wife, the end of my scientific activity and the burdens of old age, but also all sorts of honors and above all your friendship, which I value the more highly because it appears that men cannot stand me in the long run. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 516.
Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.
Often people come for analysis who wish to be prepared to meet death. They can make astonishingly good progress in a short time and then die peacefully. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page16.
Christ’s redemptive death on the cross was understood as a “baptism,” that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, symbolized by the tree of death… The dual-mother motif suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is the real, human mother, the other is the symbolical mother. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para 494-495.
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 was particularly interested in the dream which, in mid-August 1955, anticipated the death of my wife. It probably expresses the idea of life's perfection: the epitome of all fruits, rounded into a bullet, struck her like karma. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 310.
In the initiation of the living, however, this "Beyond" is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind's intentions and outlook, a psychological "Beyond" or, in Christian terms, a "redemption" from the trammels of the world and of sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.
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.
The imminence of death and the vision of the world in conspectu mortis is in truth a curious experience: the sense of the present stretches out beyond today, looking back into centuries gone by, and forward into futures yet unborn. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Page 10.
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.
There is no loneliness, but all-ness or infinitely increasing completeness. Such dreams occur at the gateway of death. They interpret the mystery of death. They don't predict it but they show you the right way to approach the end. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 145-146
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
It was the tragedy of my youth to see my father cracking up before my eyes on the problem of his faith and dying an early death. This was the objective outer event that opened my eyes to the importance of religion. Subjective inner experiences prevented me from drawing negative conclusions about religion from my father's fate, much as I was tempted to do so. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
With no human consciousness to reflect themselves in, good and evil simply happen, or rather, there is no good and evil, but only a sequence of neutral events, or what the Buddhists call the Nidhanachain, the uninterrupted causal concatenation leading to suffering, old age, sickness, and death. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 310-311.
We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man's death on the Cross so that we may become gods. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 312-316.
Mama's death has left a gap for me that cannot be filled. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 316-317.
Yahweh gives life and death. Christ gives life, even eternal life and no death. He is a definite improvement on Yahweh. He owes this to the fact that He is suffering man as well as God. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 471-473
When one has looked and laboured for a long time, one knows oneself and has grown old. - The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots. All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515
The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots . All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace. There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 514-515
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Numerous changes of identity are associated with funeral rites, affecting the statuses of the dead, surviving relatives, and members of the broader community.Death separates the deceased from their statuses of living parent, spouse, or coworker. The period of preparing the dead for burial or cremation moves them into a transitional phase when they are neither what they have been nor yet what they will become. Such moments of transition often involve uncertainty and potential danger. The ritual impurity of the corpse derives from its inability to respond to others, yet is still "present" in their everyday routines. Accordingly, people pay their respects to the dead, marking their former identity with them, express sorrow for the bereaved and, by so doing, reaffirm their continuing relationship with them. Stories recounting the achievement or character of the dead and supernatural powers may be invoked to forgive any evil the deceased may have perpetrated and to guide them into the afterlife. Gifts and goods may be provided to assist the individual to depart from this world to the next.
Just as initiates in their liminal period may be taught mysteries of their culture so the dead may be given their own form of education in the form of guidance provided in sacred texts, chants and prayers assist their journey, as in texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Very often there are special priests or ritual experts to attend to this task. Sometimes additional rites are performed to assist the departed, often referred to as soul or life forces, to settle in their new world. A major goal of death rites is to ensure that the individual who has died leaves the realm of the living for the realm of the afterlife. Liminal periods of change include uncertainty and are often regarded as potentially dangerous, with the case of death providing powerful examples as key social members depart and others have to take their place.
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Rites-of-Passage.html#ixzz3yPVo6JHE
Just as living persons become ancestors or souls in heaven so the living undergo changes in relation to them. Robert Hertz argues that funeral rites involve a kind of parallel process in which the decay of the dead reflects the path of grief in the bereaved. Bereavement involves both the social change of status of people—from, say, being a wife to being a widow, from being a child to being an orphan, or from being a subordinate adult to becoming the head of the family. It also involves psychological changes of identity associated with such shifts. Human beings become dependent upon each other and, in a sense, each identity is made up of elements of other people's influence. People become "part of" each other, and thus when one dies a portion of one's self perishes as well. Some theories of grief discuss this in terms of attachment and interpret bereavement as the loss that follows when attachments are removed.
The fear of ghosts or spirits, for example, can be related to both the dimensions of status and identity. In terms of status, ghosts and spirits can be seen as the dead who have not been successfully moved from their place in this world to that of the next. They are those who are caught in the between realm of an unintended liminal state, potentially dangerous liminal entities, or phenomena as they symbolize radical change that challenges the social life set up against such change. Sometimes further rites exist to try to get such spiritual forces finally to leave the world of the living and get on with their future destiny. At its most extreme, rites of exorcism serve to banish the dead or other supernatural entities and prevent them from influencing the living. In terms of identity, this time the identity of the living, ghosts and spirits and perhaps we should also include vivid dreams of the dead, all reflect the individual experience of a bereaved person who is still, psychologically speaking, caught up with the identity of the deceased person. Physical death has also been widely employed as an idiom to describe the leaving of an old status and the entry into a new one.
Two other anthropologists, Victor Turner and Maurice Bloch, have developed van Gennep's scheme. Turner explored liminality as a period in which human beings found great strength in the mutual support of others in the same situation. He coined the word communitas to describe this feeling of shared unity among those who, for example, were initiated together. The same might also apply to groups of people in the army or at college together, groups of people at carnivals or in pilgrimages, and those who are bereaved. Together they share the succor of their common humanity as they come together in adversity. For a moment they forget their different statuses and the symbols that divide them to enter into the shared emotional experiences associated with grief. To be with others at such a time is to acknowledge what it means to be human and to be mortal. In these types of situations, people sometimes speak of finding a strength they did not know they possessed, or they speak of the support they felt from others over a period of bereavement.
Maurice Bloch extensively modified van Gennep's scheme, criticizing its stress on the social status aspects of life and its ignoring of more psychological aspects. Bloch added the emphasis upon the psychological realm of experience as basic to human beings. This existentialist-like stress provides a welcomed realization that the anthropology of ritual is, ultimately, about people with feelings. Bloch stressed that while a threefold ritual scheme of preliminal, liminal, and postliminal phases may suffice to describe changes in social status, it does not do justice to the changes individuals experience. It is not that an individual is simply removed from social life, taught new things, and given a new status on re-entry to ordinary social life. Far from it, that individual changes not least because of the experiences of bereavement and grief.
Bloch makes a significant contribution to rites of passage in his theory of rebounding conquest, or rebounding violence. He describes the ordinary facts of life in terms of people being born, maturing, and then dying. Most human cultures, however, are unhappy with this simple progression. Through ritual forms they take living people and in a symbolic sense cause them to "die" and be "reborn" as new kinds of individuals, shedding old, used-up selves so new ones can take their place. Not only are they given a new status but they will also have experienced inner changes to their sense of identity. Many rituals of initiation in religions as well as in some secret societies use the natural idioms of birth and death but reverse them to speak of death and rebirth. It is as though the ordinariness of human nature is "killed" and a new and higher nature is bestowed. In some religious traditions this scheme of rebounding conquest can be applied to death rites when physical death is said to be the basis for a new and spiritual life either in future transmigration of the soul or in some form of resurrection.
See also: Gennep, Arnold van ; Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective ; Hertz, Robert
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Rites-of-Passage.html#ixzz3yPWJf5Cq
Just as initiates in their liminal period may be taught mysteries of their culture so the dead may be given their own form of education in the form of guidance provided in sacred texts, chants and prayers assist their journey, as in texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Very often there are special priests or ritual experts to attend to this task. Sometimes additional rites are performed to assist the departed, often referred to as soul or life forces, to settle in their new world. A major goal of death rites is to ensure that the individual who has died leaves the realm of the living for the realm of the afterlife. Liminal periods of change include uncertainty and are often regarded as potentially dangerous, with the case of death providing powerful examples as key social members depart and others have to take their place.
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Rites-of-Passage.html#ixzz3yPVo6JHE
Just as living persons become ancestors or souls in heaven so the living undergo changes in relation to them. Robert Hertz argues that funeral rites involve a kind of parallel process in which the decay of the dead reflects the path of grief in the bereaved. Bereavement involves both the social change of status of people—from, say, being a wife to being a widow, from being a child to being an orphan, or from being a subordinate adult to becoming the head of the family. It also involves psychological changes of identity associated with such shifts. Human beings become dependent upon each other and, in a sense, each identity is made up of elements of other people's influence. People become "part of" each other, and thus when one dies a portion of one's self perishes as well. Some theories of grief discuss this in terms of attachment and interpret bereavement as the loss that follows when attachments are removed.
The fear of ghosts or spirits, for example, can be related to both the dimensions of status and identity. In terms of status, ghosts and spirits can be seen as the dead who have not been successfully moved from their place in this world to that of the next. They are those who are caught in the between realm of an unintended liminal state, potentially dangerous liminal entities, or phenomena as they symbolize radical change that challenges the social life set up against such change. Sometimes further rites exist to try to get such spiritual forces finally to leave the world of the living and get on with their future destiny. At its most extreme, rites of exorcism serve to banish the dead or other supernatural entities and prevent them from influencing the living. In terms of identity, this time the identity of the living, ghosts and spirits and perhaps we should also include vivid dreams of the dead, all reflect the individual experience of a bereaved person who is still, psychologically speaking, caught up with the identity of the deceased person. Physical death has also been widely employed as an idiom to describe the leaving of an old status and the entry into a new one.
Two other anthropologists, Victor Turner and Maurice Bloch, have developed van Gennep's scheme. Turner explored liminality as a period in which human beings found great strength in the mutual support of others in the same situation. He coined the word communitas to describe this feeling of shared unity among those who, for example, were initiated together. The same might also apply to groups of people in the army or at college together, groups of people at carnivals or in pilgrimages, and those who are bereaved. Together they share the succor of their common humanity as they come together in adversity. For a moment they forget their different statuses and the symbols that divide them to enter into the shared emotional experiences associated with grief. To be with others at such a time is to acknowledge what it means to be human and to be mortal. In these types of situations, people sometimes speak of finding a strength they did not know they possessed, or they speak of the support they felt from others over a period of bereavement.
Maurice Bloch extensively modified van Gennep's scheme, criticizing its stress on the social status aspects of life and its ignoring of more psychological aspects. Bloch added the emphasis upon the psychological realm of experience as basic to human beings. This existentialist-like stress provides a welcomed realization that the anthropology of ritual is, ultimately, about people with feelings. Bloch stressed that while a threefold ritual scheme of preliminal, liminal, and postliminal phases may suffice to describe changes in social status, it does not do justice to the changes individuals experience. It is not that an individual is simply removed from social life, taught new things, and given a new status on re-entry to ordinary social life. Far from it, that individual changes not least because of the experiences of bereavement and grief.
Bloch makes a significant contribution to rites of passage in his theory of rebounding conquest, or rebounding violence. He describes the ordinary facts of life in terms of people being born, maturing, and then dying. Most human cultures, however, are unhappy with this simple progression. Through ritual forms they take living people and in a symbolic sense cause them to "die" and be "reborn" as new kinds of individuals, shedding old, used-up selves so new ones can take their place. Not only are they given a new status but they will also have experienced inner changes to their sense of identity. Many rituals of initiation in religions as well as in some secret societies use the natural idioms of birth and death but reverse them to speak of death and rebirth. It is as though the ordinariness of human nature is "killed" and a new and higher nature is bestowed. In some religious traditions this scheme of rebounding conquest can be applied to death rites when physical death is said to be the basis for a new and spiritual life either in future transmigration of the soul or in some form of resurrection.
See also: Gennep, Arnold van ; Grief and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective ; Hertz, Robert
Read more: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Rites-of-Passage.html#ixzz3yPWJf5Cq
Alchemy of the Afterlife:The Ka, the Ba, and the Kabbalah
(by Jay Weidner)
http://www.alchemylab.com/AJ2-1.htm
In the current use of our language, the words “soul” and “spirit” have essentially the same meaning. They are terms used to describe a mysterious state of awareness, or presence, that is the driving or animating force behind the externalized, concrete physical body that surrounds it. According to the teachings of the world’s major religions, this mystical soul, or spirit, somehow lives on after death. They tell us that just as we as human beings, living in a material body, grow and learn through linear time, so the soul, or spirit, grows in knowledge and experience through many successive incarnations. However, there is much evidence from the past that reveals that there may once have been a more complex meaning to these two terms, soul and spirit. There is a distinct possibility that they may not originally have meant the same thing at all. It may be, that somehow in the past, these two words became confused and that their separate meanings became lost in the well of history. In a way, this loss of understanding between these two words “soul” and “spirit” may lie at the root of much of our modern spiritual confusion. Perhaps it is time to re-imbue these terms with their true historical meanings once again.
In order to understand the subtleties of these two terms with greater clarity, let us take a look at the teachings of the rich and complex civilization of ancient Egypt. First of all, it is important to realize that the people of ancient Egypt lived a completely different type of existence than we do today. The ancient Egyptians lived each day, and each life, with a complete devotion to what today we would call the unseen world of soul and spirit that transcends our ordinary day-to-day existence. Time, for them, was not measured by the incessant ticking of the clock, or the hope of a secure future, but was built on a much larger concept, which included not only their time on Earth, but the afterlife as well. In fact, their entire culture, including their incredible edifices and their sacred science, was all constructed around a complete understanding of the afterlife and what happens to that animating force of human consciousness at the moment of death.
These ancient sacred scientists found that there is a great moment of confusion at the instant when the consciousness separates from the body. Examining this confused state, they realized that there was a division that occurred at this crucial moment. Consciousness became divided into two separate states, or entities. They called each of these states by a different name.
The first state in this division of consciousness was called the “Ba”. This is the immortal state of existence. This is the aspect of consciousness that reincarnates. The Ba separates from consciousness at the moment of death and goes back into the well of souls to be reborn again. In our current lexicon, the words “soul” and “spirit” mean, essentially the same thing. But looking at it more closely, it can be seen that the word “soul” is actually referencing the BA The BA, or the soul, never dies, it reincarnates and continues its sacred pilgrimage towards total illumination. It has been described in religious literature as that spark of divinity that resides within us all, the aspect of our multidimensional being that inspires us to overcome our animal nature, to move beyond the cravings of the small self-centered ego so as to experience an interconnectedness with the entire universal reality. Called the “breath of life”, it is that unseen force, or essence, that travels throughout eternity from body to body on its great journey of experience, purification and enlightenment.
In the hieroglyphs or symbolic language of Egypt, the BA is written sometimes as a winged human head and sometimes as a human-faced bird. It is the part of us that is conscious of leaving the earth at death and therefore is depicted as a winged human or a human bird. This bird motif will be more properly understood in part II of this article. Suffice to say for now that bird symbol for the BA represents the force that can free itself from the Tree of Life and soar into the cosmos, liberated from gravity and the material realm.
The second aspect of this great separation at death was named the “Ka”. The kA is the part of the human consciousness that remains here on Earth, and is represented in the hieroglyphs as two up stretched arms in front of a horizon. It is perceived as the “ghost” or psychic residue of the previous conscious being. It is the spirit. It is the part of us that has a connection with the place that the physical body lived, with the objects it possessed, with the people that it knew. It literally haunts the place of its life forever. And so do all of the spirits that existed in a place. The kA then is the aspect of consciousness that is left when the BA, or animating force, departs the physical body. It is the shadow, or remaining psychic imprint, of soul consciousness, or the “spirit” which haunts a place, that occupies illusory heavens and hells, that may relive its own human life over and over for eternity. Therefore, in this light it can be seen that the word “spirit” is actually referencing the "kA
It was through their knowledge and understanding of the consanguinity between the BA and the kA that the Egyptians realized the science of the afterlife and the great relationship that exists between soul and spirit, blood and soil, between our possessions and our spirit, between our ancestors and our own personal being.
Many philosophies, religions and spiritual teachings have spoken clearly about the BA, including Hinduism, Buddhism and many indigenous traditions. But the awareness and understanding of the kA has fallen by the wayside. Lost in superstition and legend, the great Egyptian knowledge of the afterlife has become forfeited in our modern world. Yet, there are many these days who seek deeper knowledge of the mystic realms. It is important to once again explore the great science of Egypt, the science of the afterlife, so that we contemporary seekers can have the opportunity to view the meaning and import of our lives on earth from a larger perspective.
In our exploration of this fascinating subject, it is interesting to note that recently, many Hollywood films have begun to focus upon this mysterious aspect of human experience, or the “Ka” state. Perhaps our great cultural confusion concerning the kA is at the root of these phenomena. In fact, these films are using the mysterious state of the kA as vital subject matter in their story lines. For example, The Sixth Sense, which is one of the films nominated by the academy in the year 2000 as Best Picture, is not only about a boy who can see the spirits in their kA state occupying the world around him, but also about a man who is living through the very beginning of his own kA existence. This man (played by Bruce Willis) spends much of the picture confused and bewildered by what he sees around him, that is, until he realizes that he is not alive, that he is in his kA state. No longer alive in terms of physical reality, as a disembodied spirit, he is playing out a dreamlike scenario in order to realize - and possibly correct -- the mistakes he made during his life. Traveling through this illusory, but seemingly real drama, his kA, or psychic imprint from this previous life is presented with the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. In many spiritual traditions these illusory landscapes are referred to as heavens and hells, which present the kA or disembodied spirit with scenarios which allow it to realize and purify its sins or reward it for a “good life.”
The movie Ghost was also about the kA state. Remember the demon spirit who haunted the underground New York subway system? This mad ghost, this haunted kA, was caught there in the subway system possibly forever. One gets the idea that this mad demon committed suicide there in the subway. Now he is condemned to reliving the incident over and over as his kA is driven insane. In addition, like Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense, the hero in Ghost, Patrick Swayze's kA, is presented with the opportunity to “make things right”.
At the end of the movie American Beauty, another Best Picture nomination this year, the Kevin Spacey character has just died. As the camera pulls away from his neighborhood, we hear his voice on the soundtrack. It says: “You know they say that when you die you live your entire life over again. Well, what they didn't tell you is that you live your entire life again - but that you do it for eternity. But don't worry, you'll find out”. This is about as apt a description of the basic kA state as has ever been spoken in popular culture.
In the film What Dreams May Come, the Robin Williams character dies and goes to a place that looks just like the beautiful paintings that he loved while he was alive. The film reveals that the character has “created” his own eternity in the kA state. Conversely, his wife later commits suicide and is banished to a hell. What they are telling you in this film is that the dreamlike, hallucinatory experience of your kA is based upon your own belief system and the manner in which you lived your life. This also is a clear description of how the ancients looked at the kA aspect of the separation of consciousness at death. Whatever life you lived here in this existence was repeated - perhaps forever - in the kA state after the moment of death.
In these films, the Hollywood mavens have hit a nerve in the psyches of contemporary audiences. The celluloid dreams and illusions that they are creating for the masses can be compared to the numerous types of experiences that the kA may undergo. Is it possible that, by subliminally implanting these scenarios into our collective psyches, they are both teaching us about the kA state and subtly influencing its journey?
Let us return to the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians and examine this ephemeral kA state more closely. According to their doctrines, there are certain keys to understanding the various aspects of the kA state. They believed that the formation of the kA is deeply connected to the shaping, experience and remnants of the physical form. The kA includes all of the genetic material and characteristics of our parents and ancestors. The Egyptians knew that residue from all of one's ancestors were sharing in the make-up of one’s own personal kA So reverence for one’s ancestors, and remembering their names, was considered essential to their practices. They believed that our ancestor’s kA lives on in all of us. Their genes, successfully passed down through the many generations, live on in each being born of their creation. All of our ancestors are gazing through our eyes at this very moment. The ancients believed that by just saying their names we can call them forth, with all of their wisdom and knowledge.
They also believed that whatever objects one possesses in this life hold a part of one’s kA state as long as these objects exist. Imbued with the BA essence, which once flowed through the physical form, they retain an energetic imprint of this force. This is why psychics can hold a key, an article of clothing, or other type of object in their hand and perceive many things concerning the life experience of the person who once possessed these objects. These psychics have the capacity to pick up the traces of this kA energy. Because of this factor, the ancients decided, wisely, to own as few objects as possible. They did this because they wanted to preserve their kA state in a way that they could control it after death. It was extremely important not to have their kA spread all over the place. Therefore, an essential part of their practices involved the proper preservation of the kA.
In order to accomplish this task, there were important procedures that had to be followed in the life of the person if their kA and their BA were to remain unbroken at death. When they died, their few kA objects would be gathered together by family and friends and placed in their grave, or tomb, with the body. The preservation of the body through the practice of mummification was also part of this process. The Egyptians believed that even the body itself held the kA As long as the decay of the body could be slowed the kA would stay more whole.
When grave robbers, and western treasure hunters, broke into many of the ancient Egyptian tombs they found exactly what has been described above. They found the kA objects that were the possessions of the person who was interred in the tomb. They also found the mummified remains of the person’s body. There was usually a curse put over the door to the tomb. This curse brought damnation on anyone who would disturb the tomb. The non-disturbance of the kA objects, and kA body, were crucial aspects of the Egyptian science of the afterlife. Indeed, as will be revealed, the preservation of the kA, and the kA objects, in an undisturbed state was the doorway towards a kind of immortality. The formula went like this: in order to stop the BA from falling back into a state of reincarnation; and to stop the kA from constantly reliving a fantasy based on the consciousness of the life lived previously, it was necessary to preserve the kA in an undisturbed state. This would “ground” the BA and prevent it from escaping back into the realms of reincarnation. Since the ethereal link between the BA and the kA had not severed, this allowed the BA to become an ethereal shamanic traveler into the many realms and dimensions that invisibly surround us. This includes, but is not limited to, planets, stars and even galaxies.
Certain rituals were designed to keep the kA inside the tomb and to make sure that it would not be released back into the world to become a phantom or ghost. If one were successful in accomplishing this then the BA would also be freed from the realm of incarnation. The BA would then be able to pass into many different realms of the afterlife at will. In Egyptian mythology it is fairly clear that when this state was achieved it was possible for the BA to actually become a “light body”, or a star in the heavens. Through the careful procedures of this science it would allow the division of consciousness at death to be halted, thereby gaining a certain degree of immortality.
As we have seen, the science of the ancient Egyptians was a science of the immortality of consciousness itself. It was a science of the afterlife that promised to preserve both the kA and the BA It contained practices and procedures that would allow the kA state to not fall into the path of repeated fantasy states consisting of eternally reliving the memories of the previous existence. In fact, the ancient Egyptians - and research has shown that many other indigenous peoples also held these beliefs - created a system that could change this strange destiny at death. In fact, the essential transformational practices of Tibetan tantra, including those of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, were created to lead the individual practitioner towards these same ends.
In Egypt, this sacred science of the afterlife was focused upon two things. One was the halting of the reincarnation process of the BA The second was the termination of the fantastic, dream-like states of the kA This science attempted, it appears, to reunite the essence of the kA and the BA at the moment of death in a way so that they would not separate.
But there is more. This nearly immortal being also becomes the preserver and cultivator of the earthly spiritual realm. He or she becomes a being that now has a capacity to influence events and situations here on Earth, to assist in bringing all beings into a higher spiritual awareness.
In order accomplish this sacred task, the manner in which an individual lived his or her life was of vital importance. Thus, the ancient Egyptians believed that every interaction, judgment and impulse that occurred in one’s life had a small part of one’s kA involved. Since they believed that existence is eternal and that development continues even after death of the body, they knew that whatever happened here would mirror itself in the afterlife. This is a concept very close to the eastern philosophy of karma. And so, the Egyptians were very careful with whom they interacted, became friends with, had sex, and made business deals. The point was to live lives of virtue and integrity, not allowing their own personal kA to get stained with negative experiences in this life. Hours of quiet meditation and contemplation upon the fundamental meaning of existence and relationship to the world around them would seem to have been the pattern of their lives. For it was understood that this type of lifestyle would lead to the development and genuine experience of the higher spiritual attributes of truth, insight, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
The Egyptians believed that human beings were the “seeds” for stars. It was believed that human beings were walking, talking, thinking, conscious “starstuff”. And indeed that is what we are. Our bodies are made from interstellar dust, which is the remains of ancient dead stars, cosmic debris and galactic particles. Throughout the course of our history on this planet, dust and water miraculously created animated star matter.
Therefore, the navigation of the many realms in the after life was another essential component of the rituals and practices of the ancient Egyptian priests/scientists. They discovered that even when all of the proper care and rituals were performed, there was still much confusion at the moment of death on the part of the separated and disconnected kA and BA The BA, freed from the cycle of incarnation, still did not know the way through the many faceted, and difficult to understand, realms of the after life. The astral playground was too complex and confusing to comprehend without some kind of map, without some kind of guide that one could learn during their conscious existence as a human being.
Using meditations, shamanic substances and sacred rituals, these ancient priests/scientists traveled the shamanic pathways that exist in the higher realms that surround us like an invisible net. Achieving a state of what is now called a “near death experience”, these ancient shamans pierced through the misty curtain of the astral realm. They began to create a hygiene, or a proper set of rituals, that allowed them to navigate the infinite worlds of the after life.
As these many shamanic voyages were catalogued and compared, a system began to be built that would allow the shaman, and the person experiencing death, to better understand what was happening and where to go in the afterlife. They called their map the “Tree of Life”. The purpose of this tree was to help the kA and BA, now united at death, to be able to travel the astral highways. The profound significance this symbolic map will be explored in Part II of this article.
In addition, this science may be what is behind the many ancient “ley” lines that mark the surface of our planet. These lines have been recorded all over the planet. From England and Ireland, to the Steppes. Ley lines have been found running over the tops of 18000-foot mountains in the Andes. They are usually perfectly straight. Their significance has been unknown for many years. It has been speculated that they are runways for UFOs or that they are ancient highways. According to the work of Paul Devereuax, they are actually ancient shamanic pathways. These are shamanic spirit paths that allow fully realized soul-spirits to take off and land, so to speak, into the other realms. This is why the shamans of old always were buried on the ley lines. In this way, their kA was preserved in a sacred spot. In Europe, the shamanic tradition called for the kings and priests to be buried under flowing creeks and rivers. They would damn the river and create a water by-pass. Then they would bury the body in the flow of the water and release the flow again. This preserved the body so that it would not be found and it was preserved in a natural “ley” line, which is what rivers and streams are in this tradition. Like Indra's net from the Hindu tradition, the ley lines were reflected in the night sky as the paths between the many stars. For those who could read the sacred language that linked the microcosm with the macrocosm, the earth with the larger universe, outcroppings of rock, groves of trees, creeks and streams all became the earthly representations of the stars and planets. For these adepts, when one walked the earth they were not only tracing the psychic waves and patterns of the land, but also transcending this realm and walking among the stars. The aborigines in Australia believed that the stones sang the song of the stars themselves. If one listened closely they could hear the music of the spheres.
The planet we live and walk upon is filled with the numinous residue of countless amounts of kA spirit. The dirt itself is made up of the dead bodies of plants, animals and humans. Each has endowed the soil with its kA. The food we eat is grown in dirt that contains the remains of numerous life forms that existed in the past. Each retains a charge in that soil, and it too is added to the food we eat and the water we drink. This is the reason why in some Tibetan Buddhist practices, mantras are spoken prior to the consumption of meat. It is believed that if the consumer is a practitioner on the path to enlightenment, that by eating the flesh of that animal with total awareness he/she is creating a cause for its future enlightenment. From a spiritual perspective, the awakened practitioner has linked his own essence with the kA of the animal thus planting the seed of its own spiritual awakening.
This endowment of kA essence into the earth is also the reason for the age-old linking between blood and soil. Even when genocide is committed, the kA essences of the people murdered still inhabit the land that they once occupied.
From this perspective, the Native Americans still rule the spiritual landscape of the United States. The more that we dig up the earth and destroy the landscape the more we destroy not only the land itself, but also the many kA spirits that inhabit that landscape. The Hollywood film Poltergeist presents us with a clear picture of this type of ignorant behavior. As this kA spirit escapes and is disturbed, so shall our own spiritual future be disturbed and destroyed. The digging up of ancient burial grounds, the opening of the sacred tombs of our ancestors and the destruction of the ley line system will eventually contribute to a complete lack of spiritual enlightenment.
As we increasingly lose contact with our spiritual heritage and become trapped in the seductive prison of the concrete material world, our lives become dominated by the dark passions of greed, arrogance, lust, anger, and violence. Blind to the numinous world of light, harmony and beauty, we sacrifice our sacred knowledge of the divine realms of soul and spirit, of the kA and the BA. As we trade in our spiritual values for material gain, so shall we all become the confused and angry ghosts that haunt the New York subway system. Lack of respect for our planet, for the origin and custodianship of our kA, is also a lack of disrespect for our own beings in eternity. We are creating a nightmare hell realm of our own design. In this realm all of our kA will be deserted and abandoned, repeating meaningless lives for eternity.
So, we see that the words “soul” and “spirit” have very different meanings. One is the BA, the everlasting imprint of God that incarnates and reincarnates. The other is the kA, the material and psychic manifestation of that soul here on Earth. Like a footprint left in the sand, or the crumbling temples and monuments of our ancestors, this kA leaves only an impression of its soul, or BA, essence behind. In these times of shifting values, of battles between the forces of darkness and light, it is up to us to seek out, acknowledge and learn from the wisdom of our ancestors so that we may once more, enter and navigate the divine realms and take our immortal place among the stars.
Jay Weidner is a film maker, lecturer and writer. He is the co-author (with Vincent Bridges) of A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross. Website: www.Sacredmysteries.com. See the review of his book below in the New Releases section.
(by Jay Weidner)
http://www.alchemylab.com/AJ2-1.htm
In the current use of our language, the words “soul” and “spirit” have essentially the same meaning. They are terms used to describe a mysterious state of awareness, or presence, that is the driving or animating force behind the externalized, concrete physical body that surrounds it. According to the teachings of the world’s major religions, this mystical soul, or spirit, somehow lives on after death. They tell us that just as we as human beings, living in a material body, grow and learn through linear time, so the soul, or spirit, grows in knowledge and experience through many successive incarnations. However, there is much evidence from the past that reveals that there may once have been a more complex meaning to these two terms, soul and spirit. There is a distinct possibility that they may not originally have meant the same thing at all. It may be, that somehow in the past, these two words became confused and that their separate meanings became lost in the well of history. In a way, this loss of understanding between these two words “soul” and “spirit” may lie at the root of much of our modern spiritual confusion. Perhaps it is time to re-imbue these terms with their true historical meanings once again.
In order to understand the subtleties of these two terms with greater clarity, let us take a look at the teachings of the rich and complex civilization of ancient Egypt. First of all, it is important to realize that the people of ancient Egypt lived a completely different type of existence than we do today. The ancient Egyptians lived each day, and each life, with a complete devotion to what today we would call the unseen world of soul and spirit that transcends our ordinary day-to-day existence. Time, for them, was not measured by the incessant ticking of the clock, or the hope of a secure future, but was built on a much larger concept, which included not only their time on Earth, but the afterlife as well. In fact, their entire culture, including their incredible edifices and their sacred science, was all constructed around a complete understanding of the afterlife and what happens to that animating force of human consciousness at the moment of death.
These ancient sacred scientists found that there is a great moment of confusion at the instant when the consciousness separates from the body. Examining this confused state, they realized that there was a division that occurred at this crucial moment. Consciousness became divided into two separate states, or entities. They called each of these states by a different name.
The first state in this division of consciousness was called the “Ba”. This is the immortal state of existence. This is the aspect of consciousness that reincarnates. The Ba separates from consciousness at the moment of death and goes back into the well of souls to be reborn again. In our current lexicon, the words “soul” and “spirit” mean, essentially the same thing. But looking at it more closely, it can be seen that the word “soul” is actually referencing the BA The BA, or the soul, never dies, it reincarnates and continues its sacred pilgrimage towards total illumination. It has been described in religious literature as that spark of divinity that resides within us all, the aspect of our multidimensional being that inspires us to overcome our animal nature, to move beyond the cravings of the small self-centered ego so as to experience an interconnectedness with the entire universal reality. Called the “breath of life”, it is that unseen force, or essence, that travels throughout eternity from body to body on its great journey of experience, purification and enlightenment.
In the hieroglyphs or symbolic language of Egypt, the BA is written sometimes as a winged human head and sometimes as a human-faced bird. It is the part of us that is conscious of leaving the earth at death and therefore is depicted as a winged human or a human bird. This bird motif will be more properly understood in part II of this article. Suffice to say for now that bird symbol for the BA represents the force that can free itself from the Tree of Life and soar into the cosmos, liberated from gravity and the material realm.
The second aspect of this great separation at death was named the “Ka”. The kA is the part of the human consciousness that remains here on Earth, and is represented in the hieroglyphs as two up stretched arms in front of a horizon. It is perceived as the “ghost” or psychic residue of the previous conscious being. It is the spirit. It is the part of us that has a connection with the place that the physical body lived, with the objects it possessed, with the people that it knew. It literally haunts the place of its life forever. And so do all of the spirits that existed in a place. The kA then is the aspect of consciousness that is left when the BA, or animating force, departs the physical body. It is the shadow, or remaining psychic imprint, of soul consciousness, or the “spirit” which haunts a place, that occupies illusory heavens and hells, that may relive its own human life over and over for eternity. Therefore, in this light it can be seen that the word “spirit” is actually referencing the "kA
It was through their knowledge and understanding of the consanguinity between the BA and the kA that the Egyptians realized the science of the afterlife and the great relationship that exists between soul and spirit, blood and soil, between our possessions and our spirit, between our ancestors and our own personal being.
Many philosophies, religions and spiritual teachings have spoken clearly about the BA, including Hinduism, Buddhism and many indigenous traditions. But the awareness and understanding of the kA has fallen by the wayside. Lost in superstition and legend, the great Egyptian knowledge of the afterlife has become forfeited in our modern world. Yet, there are many these days who seek deeper knowledge of the mystic realms. It is important to once again explore the great science of Egypt, the science of the afterlife, so that we contemporary seekers can have the opportunity to view the meaning and import of our lives on earth from a larger perspective.
In our exploration of this fascinating subject, it is interesting to note that recently, many Hollywood films have begun to focus upon this mysterious aspect of human experience, or the “Ka” state. Perhaps our great cultural confusion concerning the kA is at the root of these phenomena. In fact, these films are using the mysterious state of the kA as vital subject matter in their story lines. For example, The Sixth Sense, which is one of the films nominated by the academy in the year 2000 as Best Picture, is not only about a boy who can see the spirits in their kA state occupying the world around him, but also about a man who is living through the very beginning of his own kA existence. This man (played by Bruce Willis) spends much of the picture confused and bewildered by what he sees around him, that is, until he realizes that he is not alive, that he is in his kA state. No longer alive in terms of physical reality, as a disembodied spirit, he is playing out a dreamlike scenario in order to realize - and possibly correct -- the mistakes he made during his life. Traveling through this illusory, but seemingly real drama, his kA, or psychic imprint from this previous life is presented with the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. In many spiritual traditions these illusory landscapes are referred to as heavens and hells, which present the kA or disembodied spirit with scenarios which allow it to realize and purify its sins or reward it for a “good life.”
The movie Ghost was also about the kA state. Remember the demon spirit who haunted the underground New York subway system? This mad ghost, this haunted kA, was caught there in the subway system possibly forever. One gets the idea that this mad demon committed suicide there in the subway. Now he is condemned to reliving the incident over and over as his kA is driven insane. In addition, like Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense, the hero in Ghost, Patrick Swayze's kA, is presented with the opportunity to “make things right”.
At the end of the movie American Beauty, another Best Picture nomination this year, the Kevin Spacey character has just died. As the camera pulls away from his neighborhood, we hear his voice on the soundtrack. It says: “You know they say that when you die you live your entire life over again. Well, what they didn't tell you is that you live your entire life again - but that you do it for eternity. But don't worry, you'll find out”. This is about as apt a description of the basic kA state as has ever been spoken in popular culture.
In the film What Dreams May Come, the Robin Williams character dies and goes to a place that looks just like the beautiful paintings that he loved while he was alive. The film reveals that the character has “created” his own eternity in the kA state. Conversely, his wife later commits suicide and is banished to a hell. What they are telling you in this film is that the dreamlike, hallucinatory experience of your kA is based upon your own belief system and the manner in which you lived your life. This also is a clear description of how the ancients looked at the kA aspect of the separation of consciousness at death. Whatever life you lived here in this existence was repeated - perhaps forever - in the kA state after the moment of death.
In these films, the Hollywood mavens have hit a nerve in the psyches of contemporary audiences. The celluloid dreams and illusions that they are creating for the masses can be compared to the numerous types of experiences that the kA may undergo. Is it possible that, by subliminally implanting these scenarios into our collective psyches, they are both teaching us about the kA state and subtly influencing its journey?
Let us return to the beliefs and practices of the ancient Egyptians and examine this ephemeral kA state more closely. According to their doctrines, there are certain keys to understanding the various aspects of the kA state. They believed that the formation of the kA is deeply connected to the shaping, experience and remnants of the physical form. The kA includes all of the genetic material and characteristics of our parents and ancestors. The Egyptians knew that residue from all of one's ancestors were sharing in the make-up of one’s own personal kA So reverence for one’s ancestors, and remembering their names, was considered essential to their practices. They believed that our ancestor’s kA lives on in all of us. Their genes, successfully passed down through the many generations, live on in each being born of their creation. All of our ancestors are gazing through our eyes at this very moment. The ancients believed that by just saying their names we can call them forth, with all of their wisdom and knowledge.
They also believed that whatever objects one possesses in this life hold a part of one’s kA state as long as these objects exist. Imbued with the BA essence, which once flowed through the physical form, they retain an energetic imprint of this force. This is why psychics can hold a key, an article of clothing, or other type of object in their hand and perceive many things concerning the life experience of the person who once possessed these objects. These psychics have the capacity to pick up the traces of this kA energy. Because of this factor, the ancients decided, wisely, to own as few objects as possible. They did this because they wanted to preserve their kA state in a way that they could control it after death. It was extremely important not to have their kA spread all over the place. Therefore, an essential part of their practices involved the proper preservation of the kA.
In order to accomplish this task, there were important procedures that had to be followed in the life of the person if their kA and their BA were to remain unbroken at death. When they died, their few kA objects would be gathered together by family and friends and placed in their grave, or tomb, with the body. The preservation of the body through the practice of mummification was also part of this process. The Egyptians believed that even the body itself held the kA As long as the decay of the body could be slowed the kA would stay more whole.
When grave robbers, and western treasure hunters, broke into many of the ancient Egyptian tombs they found exactly what has been described above. They found the kA objects that were the possessions of the person who was interred in the tomb. They also found the mummified remains of the person’s body. There was usually a curse put over the door to the tomb. This curse brought damnation on anyone who would disturb the tomb. The non-disturbance of the kA objects, and kA body, were crucial aspects of the Egyptian science of the afterlife. Indeed, as will be revealed, the preservation of the kA, and the kA objects, in an undisturbed state was the doorway towards a kind of immortality. The formula went like this: in order to stop the BA from falling back into a state of reincarnation; and to stop the kA from constantly reliving a fantasy based on the consciousness of the life lived previously, it was necessary to preserve the kA in an undisturbed state. This would “ground” the BA and prevent it from escaping back into the realms of reincarnation. Since the ethereal link between the BA and the kA had not severed, this allowed the BA to become an ethereal shamanic traveler into the many realms and dimensions that invisibly surround us. This includes, but is not limited to, planets, stars and even galaxies.
Certain rituals were designed to keep the kA inside the tomb and to make sure that it would not be released back into the world to become a phantom or ghost. If one were successful in accomplishing this then the BA would also be freed from the realm of incarnation. The BA would then be able to pass into many different realms of the afterlife at will. In Egyptian mythology it is fairly clear that when this state was achieved it was possible for the BA to actually become a “light body”, or a star in the heavens. Through the careful procedures of this science it would allow the division of consciousness at death to be halted, thereby gaining a certain degree of immortality.
As we have seen, the science of the ancient Egyptians was a science of the immortality of consciousness itself. It was a science of the afterlife that promised to preserve both the kA and the BA It contained practices and procedures that would allow the kA state to not fall into the path of repeated fantasy states consisting of eternally reliving the memories of the previous existence. In fact, the ancient Egyptians - and research has shown that many other indigenous peoples also held these beliefs - created a system that could change this strange destiny at death. In fact, the essential transformational practices of Tibetan tantra, including those of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, were created to lead the individual practitioner towards these same ends.
In Egypt, this sacred science of the afterlife was focused upon two things. One was the halting of the reincarnation process of the BA The second was the termination of the fantastic, dream-like states of the kA This science attempted, it appears, to reunite the essence of the kA and the BA at the moment of death in a way so that they would not separate.
But there is more. This nearly immortal being also becomes the preserver and cultivator of the earthly spiritual realm. He or she becomes a being that now has a capacity to influence events and situations here on Earth, to assist in bringing all beings into a higher spiritual awareness.
In order accomplish this sacred task, the manner in which an individual lived his or her life was of vital importance. Thus, the ancient Egyptians believed that every interaction, judgment and impulse that occurred in one’s life had a small part of one’s kA involved. Since they believed that existence is eternal and that development continues even after death of the body, they knew that whatever happened here would mirror itself in the afterlife. This is a concept very close to the eastern philosophy of karma. And so, the Egyptians were very careful with whom they interacted, became friends with, had sex, and made business deals. The point was to live lives of virtue and integrity, not allowing their own personal kA to get stained with negative experiences in this life. Hours of quiet meditation and contemplation upon the fundamental meaning of existence and relationship to the world around them would seem to have been the pattern of their lives. For it was understood that this type of lifestyle would lead to the development and genuine experience of the higher spiritual attributes of truth, insight, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
The Egyptians believed that human beings were the “seeds” for stars. It was believed that human beings were walking, talking, thinking, conscious “starstuff”. And indeed that is what we are. Our bodies are made from interstellar dust, which is the remains of ancient dead stars, cosmic debris and galactic particles. Throughout the course of our history on this planet, dust and water miraculously created animated star matter.
Therefore, the navigation of the many realms in the after life was another essential component of the rituals and practices of the ancient Egyptian priests/scientists. They discovered that even when all of the proper care and rituals were performed, there was still much confusion at the moment of death on the part of the separated and disconnected kA and BA The BA, freed from the cycle of incarnation, still did not know the way through the many faceted, and difficult to understand, realms of the after life. The astral playground was too complex and confusing to comprehend without some kind of map, without some kind of guide that one could learn during their conscious existence as a human being.
Using meditations, shamanic substances and sacred rituals, these ancient priests/scientists traveled the shamanic pathways that exist in the higher realms that surround us like an invisible net. Achieving a state of what is now called a “near death experience”, these ancient shamans pierced through the misty curtain of the astral realm. They began to create a hygiene, or a proper set of rituals, that allowed them to navigate the infinite worlds of the after life.
As these many shamanic voyages were catalogued and compared, a system began to be built that would allow the shaman, and the person experiencing death, to better understand what was happening and where to go in the afterlife. They called their map the “Tree of Life”. The purpose of this tree was to help the kA and BA, now united at death, to be able to travel the astral highways. The profound significance this symbolic map will be explored in Part II of this article.
In addition, this science may be what is behind the many ancient “ley” lines that mark the surface of our planet. These lines have been recorded all over the planet. From England and Ireland, to the Steppes. Ley lines have been found running over the tops of 18000-foot mountains in the Andes. They are usually perfectly straight. Their significance has been unknown for many years. It has been speculated that they are runways for UFOs or that they are ancient highways. According to the work of Paul Devereuax, they are actually ancient shamanic pathways. These are shamanic spirit paths that allow fully realized soul-spirits to take off and land, so to speak, into the other realms. This is why the shamans of old always were buried on the ley lines. In this way, their kA was preserved in a sacred spot. In Europe, the shamanic tradition called for the kings and priests to be buried under flowing creeks and rivers. They would damn the river and create a water by-pass. Then they would bury the body in the flow of the water and release the flow again. This preserved the body so that it would not be found and it was preserved in a natural “ley” line, which is what rivers and streams are in this tradition. Like Indra's net from the Hindu tradition, the ley lines were reflected in the night sky as the paths between the many stars. For those who could read the sacred language that linked the microcosm with the macrocosm, the earth with the larger universe, outcroppings of rock, groves of trees, creeks and streams all became the earthly representations of the stars and planets. For these adepts, when one walked the earth they were not only tracing the psychic waves and patterns of the land, but also transcending this realm and walking among the stars. The aborigines in Australia believed that the stones sang the song of the stars themselves. If one listened closely they could hear the music of the spheres.
The planet we live and walk upon is filled with the numinous residue of countless amounts of kA spirit. The dirt itself is made up of the dead bodies of plants, animals and humans. Each has endowed the soil with its kA. The food we eat is grown in dirt that contains the remains of numerous life forms that existed in the past. Each retains a charge in that soil, and it too is added to the food we eat and the water we drink. This is the reason why in some Tibetan Buddhist practices, mantras are spoken prior to the consumption of meat. It is believed that if the consumer is a practitioner on the path to enlightenment, that by eating the flesh of that animal with total awareness he/she is creating a cause for its future enlightenment. From a spiritual perspective, the awakened practitioner has linked his own essence with the kA of the animal thus planting the seed of its own spiritual awakening.
This endowment of kA essence into the earth is also the reason for the age-old linking between blood and soil. Even when genocide is committed, the kA essences of the people murdered still inhabit the land that they once occupied.
From this perspective, the Native Americans still rule the spiritual landscape of the United States. The more that we dig up the earth and destroy the landscape the more we destroy not only the land itself, but also the many kA spirits that inhabit that landscape. The Hollywood film Poltergeist presents us with a clear picture of this type of ignorant behavior. As this kA spirit escapes and is disturbed, so shall our own spiritual future be disturbed and destroyed. The digging up of ancient burial grounds, the opening of the sacred tombs of our ancestors and the destruction of the ley line system will eventually contribute to a complete lack of spiritual enlightenment.
As we increasingly lose contact with our spiritual heritage and become trapped in the seductive prison of the concrete material world, our lives become dominated by the dark passions of greed, arrogance, lust, anger, and violence. Blind to the numinous world of light, harmony and beauty, we sacrifice our sacred knowledge of the divine realms of soul and spirit, of the kA and the BA. As we trade in our spiritual values for material gain, so shall we all become the confused and angry ghosts that haunt the New York subway system. Lack of respect for our planet, for the origin and custodianship of our kA, is also a lack of disrespect for our own beings in eternity. We are creating a nightmare hell realm of our own design. In this realm all of our kA will be deserted and abandoned, repeating meaningless lives for eternity.
So, we see that the words “soul” and “spirit” have very different meanings. One is the BA, the everlasting imprint of God that incarnates and reincarnates. The other is the kA, the material and psychic manifestation of that soul here on Earth. Like a footprint left in the sand, or the crumbling temples and monuments of our ancestors, this kA leaves only an impression of its soul, or BA, essence behind. In these times of shifting values, of battles between the forces of darkness and light, it is up to us to seek out, acknowledge and learn from the wisdom of our ancestors so that we may once more, enter and navigate the divine realms and take our immortal place among the stars.
Jay Weidner is a film maker, lecturer and writer. He is the co-author (with Vincent Bridges) of A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy, Fulcanelli and the Great Cross. Website: www.Sacredmysteries.com. See the review of his book below in the New Releases section.