Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are
One.
(Letter of 1947: vol. [,483); Jung in 1960
Jung formulated his ideas on death as personal views.
He was not looking for objectively valid statements; rather, he based his reflections on his own experiences, and he followed the stream of images that welled up in him.
“I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche,” he writes in his memoirs.
Jung called this kind of fantasizing mytbologein.
“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.” (mdr 300/278)
“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.” (mdr 302/280)
There was only one idea that Jung considered a scientific contribution to the problem of death, or of life after death.
He derived it from the fact that the psyche at least partially extends into the realm of relative or even absolute timelessness and spacelessness.
The parapsychological phenomena of true dreams, of extrasensory perception, especially the experiments of J. B. Rhine in the United States, had furnished proof.
Jung expressed this thought as early as ; in his essay “The Soul and Death” (cw 8 . and he reverted to it repeatedly.
Thus after the death of his friend Albert Oeri in [95 : he wrote to Oeri’s widow (23 Dec.):
“This spectacle of old age would be unendurable did we not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.”
Eight years later he returned to the same subject.
“The two elements of time and space, indispensable for change, are relatively
without importance for the psyche. In other words: the psyche is up to a certain
point not subject to corruptibility. That’s all we know. . . . For those people not possessing the gift of belief it may be helpful to remember that science itself points to the possibility of survival.” (Letter, 6 June [958)
From the fact that the psyche even in conscious life already extends into a relatively timeless and spaceless realm Jung drew the conclusion that ‘here must be a continuity between what is commonly called “this world” and “the next.”
“Life seems to be an interlude in a long story. It has been long before I was, and it will most probably continue long after the conscious interval in a three-dimensional existence.” (Letter, 19 Nov. 1955)
But man is not privileged to know any particulars of what lies beyond the limits of this interval called life; for “darkness covers that which has been before the beginning and that which is after its end” (Letter, 5 Mar. 1959).
Nevertheless it is highly significant that even during his lifetime he knows that he is connected—beyond time and space—with the infinite.
But this is no longer a question of a life before birth or after death, but rather of a suprapersonal, ethical issue:
“If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. … 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. 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!” (MDR 325/300)
In 1944 Jung had broken his foot and suffered a heart attack. Close to death, he experienced visions which filled him with an indescribable ecstasy.
“It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during those visions. They were the most tremendous things I have ever experienced.” (mdr 295/275)
In richly varied images of a sacred marriage, the visions circled around the theme of the coincidence of opposites.
Jung describes them in his memoirs.
In spite of the impressiveness of his own experiences, in spite of his joy at the visions, Jung never overlooked the dark aspect, the tragic side of death; both belong together, for death is also “a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep” (MDR 314/291).
The separation from one’s loved ones is painful, a “silence that has no answer” (Letter, 28 Feb. 1956), and often the pain of death is of great cruelty.
Yet for Jung the impression that outweighed all others was that of a deep inner peace.
“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.” (Letter, 1 Feb. 1945)
What mattered to him above all was the fact that dying and even aging, the diminution of the physical powers, pose one last test for man.
“The aspect/ls mortis is a mighty lonely thing, when you are so stripped of everything in the presence of God. One’s wholeness is tested mercilessly.” (Letter, 18 Dec. 1946)
A few months before his own death, Jung wrote:
“It is indeed a major effort—the magnum opus in fact—to escape in time from the narrowness of its [the body’s] embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part.” (Letter, 10 Aug. i960)
Experiencing the closeness of death provided Jung with new insights about life, especially about the importance of assenting to existence.
This was the sum of his experience:
“An unconditional ‘yes t0 tnat which is, without subjective protests—acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be. At the beginning of the illness I had the feeling that there was something wrong with my attitude, and that I was to some extent responsible for the mishap. But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete 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. It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny.” (MDR 297/2″)
Long before Jung’s death a period of preparation set in, a sort of retreat into an inner realm.
In 1951, after his friend Albert Oeri died, Jung commented on death in a letter to Dr. Adolf Vischer, of Basel.
‘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.” (2 1 Mar. 1 951)
Several months before his death, Jung wrote:
“It is quite possible that we look at the world from the wrong side and that we
might find the right answer by changing our point of view and looking at it from the other side. i.e.. not from outside, but from inside.” (Letter, 10 Aug. i960)
Jung could look back with satisfaction on a lite that had brought him untold riches in inner and outward fulfillment, but also disappointment and suffering.
“I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been bountiful, and has given me a great deal. How could I ever have expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different. But it was as it had to be; for all came about because
I am as I am.” (MDR 358/329)
Four months before his death, Jung wrote to an unknown inquirer:
“Your second question is: how do I evaluate my works, and are they out of date, etc.? To this I can only reply that every single book was written with all the responsibility I could muster, that I was honest, and have presented facts which in themselves are not out of date. I wouldn’t wish any of my publications undone and I stand by everything I have said.” (17 Feb. 1961)
Gerhard Adler, co-editor of the Collected Works and ofJung’s letters, visited Jung in Kiisnacht a few weeks before he died.
“I went into his study and there was Jung sitting completely within himself. You really felt that this man was in his inner world, completely contained in his inner images; but then he realized that I was there. He turned round to me and his whole expression had changed. There was a man suddenly, utterly, related to me.
“These two things, the immense concentration on his inner world and the immediate response to the other person, were to me the synthesis of the whole man.” (BBC radio interview, 14 July 1975)
Jung died in great peace after a short illness at his house in Kiisnacht.
He was almost eighty-six years old.
The inscription on his tombstone in the Kiisnacht cemetery reads:
VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT
PRIMUS HOMO DE TERRA TERRENUS
SECUNDUS HOMO DE CAELO CAELESTIS. (I Corinthians 15:47)Â Â Aniela Jaffe, C.G. Jung: Word and Image, Page 213-217
 
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