WAITING FOR THE LAST ANGEL
Consciousness, Death, & NDEs
by Iona Miller, 2016
Consciousness, Death, & NDEs
by Iona Miller, 2016
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, The Red Book, Page 244.
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, The Red Book, Page 244.
It is the mourning of the dead in me,
which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266
What & Who is Reborn?
Our ancestors inhabit our energetic being,
tissues, and central nervous system.
The world comes to live in the symbol. Images can interact with bodily tissues in a dialogue with cells, organs, tissues, and CNS, effecting change. When the whole body is involved in a strong emotional state, the autonomic nervous system is activated, hormones secreted, as a primal arousal grips us.
We cannot leave the body behind in our self-exploration and neither do our dearly departed, who give us hand-me-down genes and epigenetics. The dead are entangled with our psychophysical being. Reincarnation is a transfer metaphor. This is not reincarnation, but perpetual incarnation which requires no theory or philosophy to close the carnal gap. Soul migration is incremental.
Ancestral patterns also inform the gut (gut wisdom, gut rumbling, digestive disorders) and the heart with its EM field -- symbolically, metaphorically, and literally. In some sense, they 'live' there within us. What does your heart think about your metaphors? What does you gut feel? Structural metaphors ground our conceptual, behavioral, and functional systems, directly relating two ideas.
The coherent structure of experience is partly metaphorical and partly emergent. Therefore, it is well-suited to spontaneous transformation through experiential process work. Working through conscious and unconscious resistance gives a voice to repressed wisdom.
Symbolically Modelling the Internal Landscape
Metaphor is a connective pattern. The whole range of affect is bound up with embedded tissue memory and coherent metaphor -- how we know what we know about self, world, and cosmos. Such reactions are inherently linked to the human nervous system. Dysfunction has the potential to cause effects in the physical body and unusual states in the mind but unconscious skill also resides in the parasympathetic nervous system.
Metaphor in Language, Thought, & Action
Body and culture can be the source domain for metaphors. The body is our most important object of knowledge. One kind of experience is understood in terms of another. Many idiomatic phrases and ideomotor responses use body parts metaphorically.
Metaphors function as conduits and spatial or temporal orientations. Imagination has tangible effects on the body; changing attitudes has physical, emotional, and behavior effects. Attending to such body language can be grounding and calming to the nervous system. Your body may be a wonderland, but it is also an underland.
Our 'physical presence', large or small is an embodiment of our ancestors and our experience. We bury not only relatives, but our feelings; we stuff them down. Different 'parts' of ourselves go through changes in physiology and function. We can despise our behaviors by dissociating, attempts to vacate the body, saying we were 'beside ourselves.' Ideomotor responses can be used to by-pass the conscious mind and access the emotional body and unconscious mind.
Touch, kinesthesia, and proprioception help us sense the dark body, as do magnetoreception, thermal sensing, haptics (pressure), balance, thirst, hunger and 'skin talk'. Metaphor pervades everyday language. We can act out such sensory metaphors, as the 'thirst' for knowledge, 'hunger' for affection, feelings of vertigo when triggered by issues, blowing hot or cold, getting 'chills' being on or off balance, grounded or ungrounded feelings.
Metaphors give meaning to form, helping us move from the known to the unknown. We talk about others being 'a thorn in the side,' 'a pain in the neck,' or elsewhere. Anger 'chaps my hide,' we grind our teeth and clench our jaws, and a variety of other descriptions of our reactions, that sometimes become literal or pathological as they are so unconscious. Even reason is not disembodied. Our ideas, concepts, and worldviews have a genealogy of their own development. Metaphors function within the worldview of the individual.
Emotions 'touch' us. All kinds of conflicting ways of knowing abide within us. Recognizing our pain leads us toward wisdom and self-knowledge, and how our immediate and ancestral family might be embodied in more or less meaningful ways. This leads us toward transgenerational integration, new insights and self-healing.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. Recurrent patterns are embodied in form and functionality.
Linguistic, cognitive, sensory-affective, and neuropsychological processes play a role in therapeutic changes resulting from self-generated metaphors. Over time we learn what such experiences feel like in our particular body. With internal scrutiny, subjective insights can be useful or productive sources of knowledge.
Lakoff & Johnson describe experiential gestalts rooted in our bodies, and interactions with the physical environment and interactions with others. Cultures are grounded in conceptual metaphors.
In the reciprocal relationship of mind-body we also apply a broad range of metaphysical and philosophical notions that have no ontological reality to ourselves. Metaphors inform human awareness through reinforcement of the power of enacted symbols that take us deeper into the mind. The primordial serpent bites its tail.
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266
What & Who is Reborn?
Our ancestors inhabit our energetic being,
tissues, and central nervous system.
The world comes to live in the symbol. Images can interact with bodily tissues in a dialogue with cells, organs, tissues, and CNS, effecting change. When the whole body is involved in a strong emotional state, the autonomic nervous system is activated, hormones secreted, as a primal arousal grips us.
We cannot leave the body behind in our self-exploration and neither do our dearly departed, who give us hand-me-down genes and epigenetics. The dead are entangled with our psychophysical being. Reincarnation is a transfer metaphor. This is not reincarnation, but perpetual incarnation which requires no theory or philosophy to close the carnal gap. Soul migration is incremental.
Ancestral patterns also inform the gut (gut wisdom, gut rumbling, digestive disorders) and the heart with its EM field -- symbolically, metaphorically, and literally. In some sense, they 'live' there within us. What does your heart think about your metaphors? What does you gut feel? Structural metaphors ground our conceptual, behavioral, and functional systems, directly relating two ideas.
The coherent structure of experience is partly metaphorical and partly emergent. Therefore, it is well-suited to spontaneous transformation through experiential process work. Working through conscious and unconscious resistance gives a voice to repressed wisdom.
Symbolically Modelling the Internal Landscape
Metaphor is a connective pattern. The whole range of affect is bound up with embedded tissue memory and coherent metaphor -- how we know what we know about self, world, and cosmos. Such reactions are inherently linked to the human nervous system. Dysfunction has the potential to cause effects in the physical body and unusual states in the mind but unconscious skill also resides in the parasympathetic nervous system.
Metaphor in Language, Thought, & Action
Body and culture can be the source domain for metaphors. The body is our most important object of knowledge. One kind of experience is understood in terms of another. Many idiomatic phrases and ideomotor responses use body parts metaphorically.
Metaphors function as conduits and spatial or temporal orientations. Imagination has tangible effects on the body; changing attitudes has physical, emotional, and behavior effects. Attending to such body language can be grounding and calming to the nervous system. Your body may be a wonderland, but it is also an underland.
Our 'physical presence', large or small is an embodiment of our ancestors and our experience. We bury not only relatives, but our feelings; we stuff them down. Different 'parts' of ourselves go through changes in physiology and function. We can despise our behaviors by dissociating, attempts to vacate the body, saying we were 'beside ourselves.' Ideomotor responses can be used to by-pass the conscious mind and access the emotional body and unconscious mind.
Touch, kinesthesia, and proprioception help us sense the dark body, as do magnetoreception, thermal sensing, haptics (pressure), balance, thirst, hunger and 'skin talk'. Metaphor pervades everyday language. We can act out such sensory metaphors, as the 'thirst' for knowledge, 'hunger' for affection, feelings of vertigo when triggered by issues, blowing hot or cold, getting 'chills' being on or off balance, grounded or ungrounded feelings.
Metaphors give meaning to form, helping us move from the known to the unknown. We talk about others being 'a thorn in the side,' 'a pain in the neck,' or elsewhere. Anger 'chaps my hide,' we grind our teeth and clench our jaws, and a variety of other descriptions of our reactions, that sometimes become literal or pathological as they are so unconscious. Even reason is not disembodied. Our ideas, concepts, and worldviews have a genealogy of their own development. Metaphors function within the worldview of the individual.
Emotions 'touch' us. All kinds of conflicting ways of knowing abide within us. Recognizing our pain leads us toward wisdom and self-knowledge, and how our immediate and ancestral family might be embodied in more or less meaningful ways. This leads us toward transgenerational integration, new insights and self-healing.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. Recurrent patterns are embodied in form and functionality.
Linguistic, cognitive, sensory-affective, and neuropsychological processes play a role in therapeutic changes resulting from self-generated metaphors. Over time we learn what such experiences feel like in our particular body. With internal scrutiny, subjective insights can be useful or productive sources of knowledge.
Lakoff & Johnson describe experiential gestalts rooted in our bodies, and interactions with the physical environment and interactions with others. Cultures are grounded in conceptual metaphors.
In the reciprocal relationship of mind-body we also apply a broad range of metaphysical and philosophical notions that have no ontological reality to ourselves. Metaphors inform human awareness through reinforcement of the power of enacted symbols that take us deeper into the mind. The primordial serpent bites its tail.
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
phenomenology, bowie death, Angels & Daemons, NDE for good and ill, ego death, rebirth
On Life After Death, by CG Jung
http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/C.G._Jung_-_On_Life_After_Death.pdf
Carl G. Jung's Near-Death Experience In a hospital in Switzerland in 1944, the world-renowned psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, had a heart attack and then a near-death experience. His vivid encounter with the light, plus the intensely meaningful insights led Jung to conclude that his experience came from something real and eternal. Jung's experience is unique in that he saw the Earth from a vantage point of about a thousand miles above it. His incredibly accurate view of the Earth from outer space was described about two decades before astronauts in space first described it. Subsequently, as he reflected on life after death, Jung recalled the meditating Hindu from his near-death experience and read it as a parable of the archetypal Higher Self, the God-image within. Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology, centered on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The following is an excerpt from his autobiography entitled Memories, Dreams, Reflections describing his near-death experience.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/notable/carl-jung.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232975304_Jung_and_the_evolution_of_consciousness
https://books.google.com/books?id=i3maBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&dq=laurence+O+McKinney,+near-death+experience&source=bl&ots=rBUrPwfJNp&sig=4G4ZT0PwWML5TX1s7PQnsKWOm58&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilyPTAs4DNAhWHGB4KHfEDD0kQ6AEIRzAH#v=onepage&q=laurence%20O%20McKinney%2C%20near-death%20experience&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened. If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, and if the personal spark has never gotten into the ground, nothing will come out of it; no linga [creative core] or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in the infinity that was before. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
"Trees are sanctuaries.
Whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth."
~Herman Hesse
“If we have souls, they're made of the love we share.
Undimmed by time, unbound by death.” ― Jack Harper
"The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them." ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 236.
Where Space and time do not exist there is only oneness (monotes).
There is no differentiation; there is only pleroma.
Pleroma is always with us, under our feet and above our heads.
Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him.
Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 22.
“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity;
if life, death.” ―Pythagoras
We ask the question: how did creatura originate? Created beings (creatures) indeed originated but not the creatura itself, for the creatura is a quality of the Pleroma, in the same way as the non-creation [non-creatura or non-created non-world], which is the eternal death [dark abyss]. Creation is always and everywhere, and death is always and everywhere. The Pleroma possesses all: differentiation and non-differentiation. --Jung, Seven Sermons, Sermon 1
Jacob Boehme said the basis of the world is nonbeing…because the beginning [of the world] is desire, longing, and only an absolute vacuum can have a longing.
A vacuum, nonbeing, can by longing draw or attract into itself...something exceedingly positive because it creates the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 424-425.
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; Page 244.
The day comes when you are outgrown and then you are approaching the void, which seems to me to be the most desirable thing,
the thing which contains the most meaning.
And you end where you started. This is the philosophy of the East.
--Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1026.
The great asset of the East is that they are based on instinct.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1066.
The Eastern philosophy is a sort of yoga, it is alive, it is an art, the art of making something of oneself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1024
And who can not be awed by the quote from the Corpus Hermeticum 10.24-25 ,
"So let us not be afraid to tell the truth. The true man is above them [the
celestial gods], or at least equal to them. For no god leaves his sphere to come to earth, whereas man ascends to heaven and measures it. Let us dare to say that a man is a mortal god and a celestial god is an immortal man." --Corpus Hermeticum
The further development of the individual can be brought about only by means of symbols which represent something far in advance of himself and whose intellectual meanings cannot yet be grasped entirely. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 680
Concrete values cannot take the place of the symbol; only new and more effective symbols can be substituted for those that are antiquated and outworn and have lost their efficacy through the progress of intellectual analysis and understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Para 680
http://jungiancenter.org/the-art-of-dying-well-a-jungian-perspective-on-death-and-dying/
Carl Jung on Death
“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.”
“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 meaningless cessation.”
“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.”
“…death appears as a joyful event. In light of eternity, it is a wedding…The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness.
“What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings ado not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”
"Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose."
"We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. 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!"
"Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, 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."
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing."
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect.
Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence sterile.
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, Pages 311-312.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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 meaningless cessation.”
“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.”
“…death appears as a joyful event. In light of eternity, it is a wedding…The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it achieves wholeness.
“What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings ado not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.”
"Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose."
"We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. 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!"
"Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live. If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, 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."
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing."
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and now, not couched in language of the intellect.
Only when we let its statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the example of numerals, does it come within the range of our understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to us.
This process is convincingly repeated in every successful dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence sterile.
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, Pages 311-312.
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.
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.