We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
When one follows the path of individuation (journey towards wholeness), when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would be incomplete without them.
There is no guarantee–not for a single moment–that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril.
We may think there is a sure road.
But that would be the road of death.
Then nothing happens any longer–at any rate, not the right things.
Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 297
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.
Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no
longer create fables.
As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things.
Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe.
What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or what kind of
reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know.
We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic proj ections.
Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.
We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being
that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and
establish our basic psychic conditions.
We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours.
Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this.
To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation.
To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without.
Nor is there any good reason why we should.
Parapsychology holds it to be a scientifically valid proof of an afterlife that the
dead manifest themselves—either as ghosts, or through a medium—and
communicate things which they alone could possibly know.
But even though there do exist such well-documented cases, the question remains whether the ghost or the voice is identical with the dead person or is a psychic projection, and whether the things said really derive from the deceased or from knowledge which may be present in the unconscious.
Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we
must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their
lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.
They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace.
One has centuries, one has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.
What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?
Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone.
There are people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand years!
There are also quite a few who have been so buffeted by life, or who feel such disgust for their own existence, that they far prefer absolute cessation to continuance.
But in the majority of cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it.
But how?
My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the
unconscious—in dreams, for example.
Usually we dismiss these hints because we are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer.
In response to this understandable skepticism, I suggest the following considerations.
If there is something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an intellectual problem.
For example, I do not know for what reason the universe has come into being, and shall never know.
Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem.
But if an idea about it is offered to me—in dreams or in mythic traditions—I ought to take note of it.
I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved.
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?”
I got out at Erienbach and walked home, still troubled by this memory.
My second daughter’s children were in the garden.
The family was living with us, having returned to Switzerland from Paris because of the war.
The children stood looking rather upset, and when I asked, “Why, what is the matter?” they the boathouse.
It is quite deep there, and since he could not really swim he had almost drowned.
His older brother had fished him out.
This had taken place at exactly the time I had been assailed by that memory in the train.
The unconscious had given me a hint.
Why should it not be able to inform me of other things also?
I had a somewhat similar experience before a death in my wife’s family.
I dreamed that my wife’s bed was a deep pit with stone walls.
It was a grave, and somehow had a suggestion of classical antiquity about it.
Then I heard a deep sigh, as if someone were giving up the ghost.
A figure that resembled my wife sat up in the pit and floated upward.
It wore a white gown into which curious black symbols were woven. I awoke, roused my wife, and checked the time.
It was three o’clock in the morning.
The dream was so curious that I thought at once that it might signify a death.
At seven o’clock came the news that a cousin of my wife had died at three o’clock in the morning.
Frequently foreknowledge is there, but not recognition.
Thus I once had a dream in which I was attending a garden party.
I saw my sister there, and that greatly surprised me, for she had died some years before.
A deceased friend of mine was also present. The rest were people who were still alive.
Presently I saw that my sister was accompanied by a lady I knew well.
Even in the dream I had drawn the conclusion that the lady was going to die. “She is already marked,” I thought.
In the dream I knew exactly who she was.
I knew also that she lived in Basel. But as soon as I woke up I could no longer, with the best will in the world, recall who she was, although the whole dream was still vivid in my mind.
I pictured all my acquaintances in Basel to see whether the memory images would ring a bell.
Nothing!
A few weeks later I received news that a friend of mine had had a fatal accident.
I knew at once that she was the person I had seen in the dream but had been unable to identify.
My recollection of her was perfectly clear and richly detailed, since she had been my patient for a considerable time up to a year before her death.
In my attempt to recall the person in my dream, however, hers was the one picture which did not appear in my portrait gallery of Basel acquaintances, although by rights it should have been one of the first.
When one has such experiences—and I will tell of others like them—one acquires
a certain respect for the potentialities and arts of the unconscious.
Only, one must remain critical and be aware that such communications may have a
subjective meaning as well.
They may be in accord with reality, and then again they may not. I have, however, learned that the views I have been able to form on the basis of such hints from the unconscious have been most rewarding.
Naturally, I am not going to write a book of revelations about them, but I will
acknowledge that I have a “myth” which encourages me to look deeper into this
whole realm.
Myths are the earliest form of science.
When I speak of things after death, I am speaking out of inner prompting, and can go no farther than to
tell you dreams and myths that relate to this subject.
Naturally, one can contend from the start that myths and dreams concerning
continuity of life after death are merely compensating fantasies which are
inherent in our natures—all life desires eternity.
The only argument I can adduce in answer to this is the myth itself.
However, there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject
to the laws of space and time.
Scientific proof of that has been provided by the well-known J. B. Rhine experiments.
Along with numerous cases of spontaneous
foreknowledge, non-spatial perceptions, and so on—of which I have given a
number of examples from my own life—these experiments prove that the psyche
at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of causality.
This indicates that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore of causality also, are incomplete.
A complete picture of the world would require the addition of still another dimension; only then could the totality of phenomena be given a unified
explanation.
Hence it is that the rationalists insist to this day that parapsychological experiences do not really exist; for their world-view stands or falls by this question.
If such phenomena occur at all, the rationalistic picture of the universe is invalid, because incomplete.
Then the possibility of an othervalued reality behind the phenomenal world becomes an inescapable problem, and we must face the fact that our world, with its time, space, and causality, relates to another order of things lying behind or beneath it, in which neither “here and there” nor “earlier and later” are of importance.
I have been convinced that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of space and time.
This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness.
Not only my own dreams, but also occasionally the dreams of others, helped to
shape, revise, or confirm my views on a life after death.
I attach particular importance to a dream which a pupil of mine, a woman of sixty, dreamed about two months before her death.
She had entered the hereafter.
There was a class going on, and various deceased women friends of hers sat on the front bench.
An atmosphere of general expectation prevailed. She looked around for a teacher
or lecturer, but could find none.
Then it became plain that she herself was the lecturer, for immediately after death people had to give accounts of the total experience of their lives.
The dead were extremely interested in the life experiences that the newly deceased brought with them, just as if the acts and experiences taking place in earthly life, in space and time, were the decisive ones.
In any case, the dream describes a most unusual audience whose like could
scarcely be found on earth: people burningly interested in the final
psychological results of a human life that was in no way remarkable, any more
than were the conclusions that could be drawn from it—to our way of thinking.
If, however, the “audience” existed in a state of relative non-time, where
“termination,” “event,” and “development” had become questionable concepts,
they might very well be most interested precisely in what was lacking in their
own condition.
At the time of this dream the lady was afraid of death and did her best to fend
off any thoughts about it.
Yet death is an important interest, especially to an aging person.
A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it.
To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending.
Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead.
If he believes in them, or greets them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them.
But while the man who despairs marches toward 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.
The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need man, or contact
with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge.
When I began working with the unconscious, I found myself much involved with the figures of Salome and Elijah.
Then they receded, but after about two years they reappeared.
To my enormous astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and acted as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile.
In actuality the most incredible things had taken place in my life.
I had, as it were, to begin from the beginning again, to tell them all about what had been going on, and explain things to them.
At the time I had been greatly surprised by this situation.
Only later did I understand what had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into the unconscious and into themselves—I might equally well put it, into timelessness.
They remained out of contact with the ego and the ego’s changing circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what had happened in the world of consciousness.
Quite early I had learned that it was necessary for me to instruct the figures of
the unconscious, or that other group which is often indistinguishable from them,
the “spirits of the departed.”
The first time I experienced this was on a bicycle trip through upper Italy which I took with a friend in 1910.
On the way home we cycled from Pavia to Arona, on the lower part of Lake Maggiore, and spent the night there.
We had intended to pedal on along the lake and then through the Tessin as far as Faido, where we were going to take the train to Zurich.
But in Arona I had a dream which upset our plans. ~Carl Jung, The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1962
