A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it–even if he must confess his failure.
Not to have done so is a vital loss.
For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.
Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known and that too with limitations and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends.
As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us.
The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.
Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized.
The unconscious helps by communicating things to us, or making figurative allusions. It has other ways, too, of informing us of things which by all logic we could not possibly know.
Consider synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, and dreams that come true.
I recall one time during the Second World War when I was returning home from Bollingen.
I had a book with me, but could not read, for the moment the train started to move I was overpowered by the image of someone drowning.
This was a memory of an accident that had happened while I was on military service.
During the entire journey I could not rid myself of it. It struck me as uncanny, and I thought, “What has happened?
Can there have been an accident?” ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections, Page 363-364