Carl Jung: Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death.

So when you say “Yes” you say at the same time “No.”

This principle may seem a hard one, but as a matter of fact there must be this split in the libido or nothing works and we remain inert.

Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death.

Once I had a very wealthy patient who on coming to me said, “I don’t know what you are going to do with me, but I hope you are going to give me something that isn’t grey.”

And that is exactly what life would be if there were no opposites in it; therefore the pairs of opposites are not to be understood as mistakes but as the origin of life.

For the same thing holds in nature.

If there is no difference in high and low, no water can come down.

Modern physics expresses the condition that would ensue were the opposites removed from nature by the term entropy: that is, death in an equable tepidity.

If you have all your wishes fulfilled, you have what could be called psychological entropy. I found, then, that what I had thought to be a pathological phenomenon is in fact a rule of nature.

We are part of the general energic process, and it is psychology looked at with this fact in mind that I have tried to present in the Types. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 85

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Carl Jung: ....so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life.

Just as the childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life.

It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks awaited him, or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept, or as if his life up to now seemed to him so fair and precious that he could not relinquish it.

Is it perhaps at bottom the fear of death?

That does not seem to me very probable, because as a rule death is still far in the distance and therefore somewhat abstract.

Experience shows us, rather, that the basic cause of all the difficulties of this transition is to be found in a deep-seated and peculiar change within the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 777

Carl Jung on the Dreams and Death of a 62 Year Old Woman.

In my rather long psychological experience I have observed a great many people whose unconscious psychic activity I was able to follow into the immediate presence of death.

As a rule the approaching end was indicated by those symbols which, in normal life also, proclaim changes of psychological condition—rebirth symbols such as changes of locality, journeys, and the like.

I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward
situation.

Dying, therefore, has its onset long before actual death.

Moreover, this often shows itself in peculiar changes of personality which may precede death by quite a long time.

On the whole, I was astonished to see how little ado the unconscious psyche makes of death.

It would seem as though death were something relatively unimportant, or perhaps our psyche does not bother about what happens to the individual.

But it seems that the unconscious is all the more interested in how one dies; that is, whether the attitude of consciousness is adjusted to dying or not.

For example, I once had to treat a woman of sixty-two.

She was still hearty, and moderately intelligent.

It was not for want of brains that she was unable to understand her dreams.

It was unfortunately only too clear that she did not want to understand them.

Her dreams were very plain, but also very disagreeable.

She had got it fixed in her head that she was a faultless mother to her children, but the children did not share this view at all, and the dreams too displayed a conviction very much to the contrary.

I was obliged to break off the treatment after some weeks of fruitless effort because I had to leave for military service (it was during the war).

In the meantime the patient was smitten with an incurable disease, leading after a few months to a moribund condition which might bring about the end at any moment.

Most of the time she was in a sort of delirious or somnambulistic state, and in this curious mental condition she spontaneously resumed the analytical work.

She spoke of her dreams again and acknowledged to herself everything that she had previously denied to me with the greatest vehemence, and a lot more besides.

This self-analytic work continued daily for several hours, for about six weeks.

At the end of this period she had calmed herself, just like a patient during normal treatment, and then she died. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809

Carl Jung on "The Supreme Meaning of Death"

he supreme vision comes not at the end of the Bardo, but right at the beginning, at the moment of death; what happens afterward is an ever deepening descent into illusion and obscuration, down to the ultimate degradation of new physical birth.

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.

Life in the Bardo brings no eternal rewards or punishments, but merely a descent into a new life which shall bear the individual nearer to his final goal.

But this eschatological goal is what he himself brings to birth as the last and highest fruit of the labors and aspirations of earth ~Carl Jung; Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Psychology and Religion, Pages 524-525.

It is highly sensible of the Bardo Thodol to make clear to the dead man the primacy of the psyche, for that is the one thing which life does not make clear to us. We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, inthe midst of all these “given” things, to wonder by whom they are “given.”

It is from this world of “given” things that the dead man liberates himself; and the purpose of the instruction is to help him towards this liberation. We, if we put ourselves in his place, shall derive no lesser reward from it, since we learn from the very first paragraphs that the “giver” of all “given” things dwells within us.

This is a truth which in the face of all evidence, in the greatest things as in the smallest, is never known, although it is often so very necessary, indeed vital, for us to know it.

Such knowledge, to be sure, is suitable only for contemplatives who are minded to understand the purpose of existence, for those who are Gnostics by temperament and therefore believe in a savior who, like the savior of the Mandaeans, is called “knowledge of life” (Manda d’Hayye).

Perhaps it is not granted to many of us to see the world as something “given.” A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as “given” by the very nature of the psyche.

It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances.

That is why attempts of this kind were always the object of secret initiations, culminating as a rule in a figurative death which symbolized the total character of this reversal.

And, in point of fact, the instruction given in the Bardo Thodol serves to recall to the dead man the experiences of his initiation and the teachings of his guru, for the instruction is, at bottom, nothing less than an initiation of the dead into the Bardo life, just as the initiation of the living was a preparation for the Beyond. Such was the case, at least, with all the mystery cults in ancient civilizations from the time of the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries.

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.

Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything “given.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 513 – 514.

Zen and Death: Jung’s Final Experience

Zen and Death: Jung’s Final Experience



This lecture was delivered at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles in 2003 as part of a series on mortificatio, the alchemical process of psychological or inner death inherent in such diminishing experiences as depression, illness, failure, aging, and dying.

Good evening.

“Death,” Jung wrote in 1945 not long after his heart attack, “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.”

Jung was speaking here of his out-of-body, neardeath experience, whose gripping effect indeed made it difficult for him to return to the world of everyday life even though he resiliently recovered from his illness. He remarked how “life has fortunately become provisional. It has become a transitory prejudice, a working hypothesis for the time
being, but not existence itself.”

Well, Jung lived seventeen more years after this experience, making the most out of this life which he now saw so provisionally and transitorily. He produced some of his most important works, and had several insights further deepening his understanding of the psyche. When death did finally come to claim him, he was prepared. He knew his health was failing, as he had had two strokes shortly before, and he had also had two or three dreams announcing that the end was near. Indeed, he was looking forward to his death in a curious, almost eager way. The family and friends who were present during his final days all observed how peaceful and clear-headed he was. “Quick!,” he said to his son when his housekeeper momentarily left the room the evening before he died. “Help me out of bed before she comes
back or she’ll stop me. I want to look at the sunset.” Wishing to celebrate his passing as a special occasion, his last words to his housekeeper were, “Let’s have a really good wine tonight.”

The experience of dying as a conscious, creative act has become a focus of interest in recent times as people are more and more recognizing it as the final, culminating act of life itself, the crowning event for which one’s whole life has in a certain way been a preparation. How different this is from the attitude expressed by Woody Allen: “I have no problem with dying,” he said, “as long as I’m not there when it happens.”

Dying consciously brings up the related idea of living life with a consciousness of death. Becoming aware of our mortality in more than just the detached manner with which we usually tend to think about it can help us appreciate the here-and-now, the fullness of the moment—or indeed, whether this moment really is as full as it could be. This kind of contemplation sharpens us to the quality of our lives and the choices we make. As Dr. Johnson said, the prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind. For this reason do Thai Buddhist monks meditate in graveyards
where the recently deceased are being cremated. Jung’s own experiences nearly dying and while dying—how his mind was concentrated—brought him to some interesting discoveries, and evidently, a revision of his views on Eastern religion and Zen in particular. This then brings us to our present topic, Jung’s Zen experience in his final days. To begin, it is important to first have some understanding of what makes a Zen experience distinct from other kinds of religious experience.

In the mystical traditions of all the major world religions, there have evolved disciplines that attempt to cultivate a state of mind in which the mysterium tremendum, or awe-inspiring mystery of the divine, can manifest and flourish. In Western religions, the predominant discipline has been prayer, though in alchemy, an underground current of Western religion, the chief method involved a meditation upon the transmutation of material substances (for example, turning lead into gold). Jung showed that this external focus was a psychic projection of inner transformation. In Eastern religion, the predominant discipline has been meditation directly focused on transforming the psyche itself. Though there are many schools and methods, their aims tend to be similar: to transcend the limitations of ego-consciousness and allow a deeper consciousness—a consciousness of the Absolute (regardless of which name it is known by)—to emerge.

In Zen, it is less important what the discipline is than what the quality of discipline invested is. This fluid attitude allows Zen practitioners to encounter the Absolute through a variety of disciplines—calligraphy, tea
ceremony, pottery making, bamboo flute music, flower arrangement, haiku poetry, archery, and swordfighting—as easily as through zazen or sitting meditation, the most common form of Zen discipline. Though I should say that these disciplines are anything but easy. They usually take many years if not a lifetime to master. For what is involved is precisely the investment of a highly refined, focused quality of discipline, of concentration or what Zen
Buddhists call “one-pointedness of mind.” If the one-pointedness of mind is strong enough, pure enough, and sustained for long enough, the Zen practitioner becomes so absorbed in the activity of his or her chosen discipline that the usual boundaries of the ego become extended. If they become extended enough, there comes a moment when the practitioner merges not only with the activity, but with the Self as it manifests through the activity.

This principle expresses the central idea of Zen, the Doctrine of No Mind. No Mind is also called “Mind,” “Buddha-mind,” “Zen Mind,” “Big Mind,” the “Self,” the “Void,” the “Unconscious,” and “It.” The “It” here is not the “It” of Nietzsche or the “id” of Freud (id in Latin means “it”), but the transpersonal Self. As for the Zen usage of the term “Unconscious,” it is of special interest.

That Zen is first and foremost a way of understanding the unconscious is overlooked by many people. As the renowned Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki writes, “the concept of the unconscious is the foundation of Zen Buddhism.”

One may find it discussed at length in the teachings of early Chinese Zen masters such as Hui-neng and Shen-hui, both of whom lived in the 7th century. However, the Zen conception of the unconscious clearly differs from that of most Western psychology, and is remarkably close in key regards to Jung’s conception. As Suzuki comments, “in Zen Buddhism the unconscious is not a psychological term either in a narrower or in a broader sense. . . . [It is] fundamentally different from the psychologists’ Unconscious. It has a metaphysical connotation. When Hui-neng speaks of the Unconscious in Consciousness, he steps beyond psychology.”

The Unconscious in Zen is, simply put, the mind of the cosmos. Suzuki on occasion calls it the “Cosmic Unconscious.” Eugene Herrigel offers an illustration of the Zen Unconscious in action in his book about his years of arduous training in the Zen art of archery. He recounts an incident in which his teacher told him how he hits the target without using his eyes. When Herrigel scoffed at this, the master, to prove his point, allowed Herrigel to set up the target in a practice hall that was brightly lit but in which the target area was pitch-black, thus making it
impossible for one’s vision to adjust to the darkness and delineate the target. Herrigel writes: “[The master’s] first arrow shot out of dazzling brightness
into deep night. I knew from the sound that it had hit the target. The second arrow was a hit, too. When I switched on the light in the target-stand, I discovered to my amazement that the first arrow was lodged full in the middle of the black [bull’s-eye], while the second arrow had splintered the butt of the first and plowed through the shaft before embedding itself beside it.” Explaining his precision, the master said, “It is not ‘I’ who must be
given credit for this shot. ‘It’ shot and ‘It’ made the hit.”

Of course, the true goal of any martial art practiced in the Zen spirit is not to achieve spectacular feats but to attune oneself to the Unconscious, to “It”; winning against one’s opponent or hitting the target is only a by-product of this inner attunement.

In Herrigel’s account, we see certain distinct features typical to the Zen experience: a merging of the inner with the outer, a merging of the ego with the Unconscious or the Self, and, very significantly, the occurrence of all this while one is fully awake and alert as opposed to being in a visionary, dream, or trance state. There is one other crucial feature that makes Zen distinct from many other kinds of religious experience. Together with
oneness there occurs the experience of emptiness, what in Buddhism is called the Void. When the universe is perceived as a single, infinite expanse with nothing separate in it or beside it to quantify or contrast it to, it has the
sensation of being nothing at all and is hence experienced as a Void. If you think of the universe as a single sheet of steel, for example, with nothing else in it, well, soon it has the quality of being like air, empty. Oneness makes
possible emptiness, and vice versa. But one cannot arrive at this truth merely intellectually. In Zen it must be experienced on a crisp, perceptual, visceral level; it must be a living experience. Listen to my former Zen
teacher Yamada-roshi as he describes his own enlightenment experience, his encounter with the Void. This is from a letter he wrote in 1953 before he became a roshi, that is, a Zen master. It is addressed to the famous Zen
master Nakagawa-roshi with whom he briefly visited:

The day after I called on you I was riding home on the train with my wife. I was reading a book on Zen by Son-o, who,
you may recall, was a Soto Zen master at the end of the 17th century. As the train was nearing Ofuna station I ran across this line: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”

I had read this before, but this time it impressed itself upon me so vividly that I was startled. I said to myself: “After seven or eight years of zazen I have finally perceived the essence of this statement,” and couldn’t suppress the tears that began to well up. Somewhat ashamed to find myself crying among the crowd, I averted my face and dabbed at my eyes with my handkerchief.

. . . it was after 11:30 before I went to bed. At midnight I abruptly awakened. At first my mind was foggy, then suddenly that quotation flashed into my consciousness: “I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” And I repeated it. Then all at once I was struck as though by lightning, and the next instant heaven and earth crumbled and disappeared. Instantaneously, like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of
delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly: “Ha ha ha, ha ha ha!

There’s no reasoning here, no reasoning at all! Ha ha ha!” The empty sky split in two, then opened its enormous mouth and began to laugh uproariously: “Ha ha ha!”

. . . Suddenly I sat up and struck the bed with all my might and beat the floor with my feet, as if trying to smash it, all the while laughing riotously. My wife and youngest son, sleeping near to me, were now awake and frightened. Covering my mouth with her hand, my wife exclaimed: “What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?” But I wasn’t aware of this until told about it afterwards. My son told me later he thought that I had gone mad, that my laughter had sounded inhuman. When I calmed down I apologized to the rest of the family, who had come downstairs frightened by the commotion. That morning I went to see Yasutani-roshi and tried to describe to him my experience of the sudden disintegration of heaven and earth. . . . Patting me on the back he said: “Well, well, it is rare indeed to experience to such a wonderful degree. It is termed ‘Attainment of the emptiness of Mind.’ You are to
be congratulated!”

As one can gather from Yamada-roshi’s account, the experience of the Void—or as he calls it, empty oneness—is not the nihilistic emptiness of existentialists such as Sartre. Although it is framed in the Doctrine of No Mind as a negation—hence the “No” element of No Mind—it is a pregnant emptiness. In the Kabbalah, the experience of God in this way is described as the absolute or mystical “Nothing.” St. John of the Cross refers to it as todo-y-nada, infinite totality and emptiness.

Meister Eckhart, too, qualifies the fullness of God as emptiness.

And last but not least, Jung intuited the essential nature of the Self as empty even before his final death experience:

“The whole course of individuation is dialectical, and the so-called ‘end’ is the confrontation of the ego with the ‘emptiness’ of the center. Here the limit of possible experience is reached: the ego is dissolved as the referencepoint of cognition.”

Jung defines emptiness as “something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity,” “not as absence or vacancy.”

However, with his death experience, he probably would have no longer insisted that it was unknowable.

In order to convey a more crisp sense of what this emptiness is, I would like for the next few minutes to move off the discursive, conceptual level of language. I’m going to play a piece of shakuhachi flute music, a Zen art developed by the Fuke school of Zen Buddhism in the practice of suizen, or blowing meditation. The shakuhachi flute is made from bamboo. The piece you will hear is called “Matsukaze,” or “Wind in the Pines,”
performed by Stan Richardson. Listen to its emptiness.

In addition to the element of empty oneness, there are a variety of features one can attribute to the Zen experience, or at least to the process that leads up to it. Not everybody experiences all of them and there is certainly no
qualification check list or properly correct form. The features I will focus on here tonight for our purposes are those connected with mortificatio, or inner, spiritual death.

The first feature I’d like to highlight brings us to Yamada-roshi’s inhuman laughter. It is, for lack of a better term, Zen madness. This is not clinical or pathological madness, i.e., insanity, but the madness that comes
from confronting the paradox of the human condition, namely, that we are mortally limited and human in form, and yet empty and cosmic in essence,
and all at the same time. The experience of empty oneness can be a maddening, mortificatio experience. To realize the profound and infinite hollowness of the cosmos on an experiential level takes the ground out from under one’s feet. This aspect of the mysterium tremendum sends one into a sort of existential free-falling, and one doesn’t know where and if there is a safety net. As Nietzsche said, “Be careful as you gaze into the abyss. It may gaze back into you.” And yet, the very thing that makes this experience so maddening or unnerving is what also makes it humorous, for to discover that our basic conception of reality is an illusion has a kind of cosmic joke about it. This is what accounts for the humor of Zen with its pithy and paradoxical koans or riddles.

Another typical feature is the mortificatio of depression. One may not immediately associate Zen enlightenment with depression, but one can be sure that many Zen practitioners have had their share of darkness as part of their journey of awakening. Certainly, the Buddha could not have been too happy about the years he spent as an ascetic only to discover that ascetic practices did nothing to advance enlightenment other than reveal that such ego-driven practices do not work. Zen depression, like Zen madness, is existential rather than clinical or chemical, revolving around a sense that life is meaningless and hopeless. It stems from an awareness of what in Buddhism is called dukkha, the suffering that is intrinsic to life. Indeed, the First Noble Truth of the Buddha is, “Life is suffering.”

One should thus not be too surprised that depression figures into Zen in this sort of way. Furthermore, the very process of the ego awakening to emptiness—what is referred to as enlightenment, satori, or kensho—involves an annihilation of that which the ego holds most dear: its belief in its self-importance. Contrary to what some believe, satori is not the dissolution or abolishment of the ego. We need an ego—and a welldeveloped one—in order to survive and thrive. But satori is the disillusionment or transcendence of the ego’s perspective of itself as sovereign master of the world, and as other than the world. Satori is the realization that the ego, too, is empty. Depression can bring us to this realization precisely because it sinks us—gradually and increasingly—into emptiness. It helps eat up our narcissism and kill our sense of selfimportance. The mortificatio of depression bottoms us out into the
emptiness of the cosmos. One may say that coming to enlightenment through depression, as through any form of Zen mortificatio, is an experience of the Void gnashing its teeth.

The Zen approach to depression is to work with it the way one works with a koan. There are different methods of working with koans. In the Harada-Yasutani school of which Yamada-roshi was the abbot, one does not attack koans in the traditional way of persistently trying to penetrate their meaning. Rather, one carries one’s koan lightly, to quote Aitken-roshi, a Zen master in this school. This means to carefully attend to it and let it brand itself into one’s consciousness until it unveils itself in an illuminating, experiential way. Accordingly, one stays with the ‘Is’ of the depression in a resigned, nonresistant, but curious way. The depression may be deadening, but is to be coupled with a one-pointedness of mind from focusing on it in this koan-like manner.

I should add here that this way of working with depression is, obviously, not incompatible with the Jungian way or any other school of psychology that genuinely embraces and goes with the pathos rather than against it. Only its emphasis on eventually seeing through the suffering into its empty Buddha nature differs in accord with Buddhist phenomenology.
But the notion of immersing oneself into the unconscious, penetrating the substrata of the depression, and coming through the other side as a somehow transformed being is similar to the process depicted in the Rosarium pictures
of alchemy; it too is an inner alchemy. In my practice with depressed patients, I work their depression with them in such a focusing, concentrating way, going into it deeper and deeper and surrendering to its mystery. Regardless of whether they are interested in Zen or whether they will ever have a Zen experience, this meditative approach goes well with the analysis of their psychic material. If anything, it promotes tolerance of pain and acceptance of oneself as one is, depression and all. I believe this is extremely important in psychotherapy, for depression alone never kills
anyone. It is lack or loss of such tolerance and acceptance that leads to suicide.

Let’s discuss one final and very typical mortificatio feature of the Zen experience. It is the mortificatio of doubt—profound, existential doubt. It is referred to as taigi, literally, the “Great Doubt.” In the West, St. John of the
Cross knew this as the “Dark Night of the Soul,” and, as is the case in Zen as well, it is often merged with the mortificatio of depression. It is a condition of disillusionment, confusion, and thirst for enlightenment that was
demonstrated par excellence by the Buddha himself in his journey of selfrealization. The doubt revolves fundamentally around the question, “What is Buddha-mind?” The Zen patriarch Hakuin believed that the greater the doubt, the more intense the experience of enlightenment, and he knew how to push his disciples to the extremes of nagging doubt.

It is a state of suspended judgment fostered by zazen and particularly by the koans which so bewilder and defeat the rational mind or ego. But amidst the suspended judgment there occurs one-pointedness of mind. These two together—
suspended judgment and one-pointedness of mind—make possible the breakthrough of empty oneness. The Zen practitioner is encouraged to surrender him- or herself to this tantalizing, gripped state of mind, the Great Doubt. He or she is told, “You must reach the point where you feel as though you had swallowed a red-hot iron ball that you cannot disgorge despite your every effort.

Thus, the mortificatio of Zen has a fiery, calcinatio edge. This deadly, hot, razorsharp edge that the ego itself becomes is what pierces the Void and releases the latter into consciousness. A key part of Zen training consists of
sesshin—a week-long intensive immersion into zazen. The student wakes up at 4:30 in the morning and sits on the cushion till 9:00 at night, 7 days nonstop except for meals, clean-up, and a half-hour afternoon rest. In the
sesshins I undertook in Japan, Yamada-roshi used to encourage us with admonitions to attain the Great Doubt, which he described as the “fire of concentration.” He said we must become like the Vietnamese Zen monks who protested against the Vietnam War. Many of you might recall the photographs of them sitting in the lotus posture, lighting themselves on fire in full public view and dying consciously in a blaze of meditation. Quiet, dignified, enduring their pain fully awake. No trance state here. This acutely focused concentration is thus extremely peaceful but extremely
intense at the same time. It is an act of watchful surrender. Death by fire. In the Great Doubt, one burns off the illusory forms of body and mind, whether one does so concretely as the Vietnamese monks did or inwardly as
Zen practitioners do everywhere in the world.

Let us turn now to Jung’s mortificatio experience, and particularly, its Zen character. Jung struggled with the issue of the mortificatio of the ego in its resignation to the Self his entire adult life. Indeed, he is among those
religious geniuses of the ages and the first modern thinker to clearly define it as a principle of human development or individuation. “. . . [T]he experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego,” he famously said in
Mysterium Coniunctionis. If the experience of the Self does not come easily due to the obstinacy of the ego, how much more difficult is that more rarefied and sublime form of self-realization, the experience of empty oneness? It almost invariably requires a profound mortificatio, either in the form of near-madness, depression, great doubt, near-death, or death itself. Certainly, Jung had his fair share of exposure to near-madness and depression in his lifetime, the former during his reclusive years of confrontation with the unconscious after his break with Freud, and the latter
on-and-off throughout his life and even well into his advanced years. But his encounter with emptiness seems to have occurred mostly in relation to his near-death and dying experiences. The connection between the experience of empty oneness and near-death and dying experiences is probably to be expected. Death is the final, absolute release, and in Zen circles there are stories of people who have had enlightenment experiences while dying and who lived long enough to report them. Both Zen practice and the process of dying, or nearly dying, inspire a one-pointedness of mind
and involve a transformation of the ego that makes it possible for the experience of empty oneness to emerge.

In Jung’s case this is especially evident. To be sure, it needs to be acknowledged that in his better known writings on Eastern religion Jung was generally not a great believer in the viability of satori, at least for the Westerner, and he seemed to question the accuracy of its description as conveyed even by Easterners. He gave it credence as a subjective experience, but doubted its veracity as an objective indication of absolute knowledge. Listen to what he said about it in 1939 in his commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation: “The experience of “at-onement” is one example of those ‘quick-knowing’ realizations of the East, an intuition of what it would be like if one could exist and not exist at the same time. If I were a Moslem, I should maintain that the power of the AllCompassionate is infinite, and that He alone can make a man to be and not to be at the same time. But for my part I cannot conceive of such a possibility. I therefore assume that, in this point, Eastern intuition has overreached itself.”

In the same year, Jung wrote a foreword to D.T. Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism. There he is more open to the satori experience, but not on its own terms or the terms of the Zen masters. A careful reading reveals that
he attempts to explain it mechanistically and somewhat reductively. He
concludes, “Could any of us boast that he believes in the possibility of a boundlessly paradoxical transformation experience?,” and he warns the Westerner of taking on a method that for various reasons is only suitable to
the Eastern mind. I imagine that Suzuki, the monk and scholar first and most responsible for bringing Zen to the West and at that time the sole figure doing so, humbly accepted Jung’s foreword in order to give his work some
authority and exposure, but I also imagine that he didn’t agree with everything Jung said.

I have written elsewhere extensively about the reasons underlying Jung’s reticence to accept the satori experience on its own terms, so I won’t say too much about that here. Suffice it to say that these reasons include:

1. Jung’s epistemological orientation as influenced by Kant, who asserted that the “thing-in-itself,” and by extension the unconsious-in-itself and the transcendent-in-itself, cannot be directly perceived or known. It is, Jung
claims, “only by indirect means” such as dreams, fantasies, and visions that the unconscious and transcendent can be known.

2. Jung’s reticence was influenced by his psychiatric orientation which upholds that without the center of an ego, the contents of the unconscious will invade and extinguish consciousness and likely lead to a psychosis. The Jungian and Freudian views here are basically two sides of the same coin, the former attributing the experience of oneness to an ego overreaching itself and the latter reducing it to the ego’s regression to the oceanic womb state; the one sees
this experience as beyond the ego and the other as before the ego. Although both agree with the Buddhist view that in oneness the ego returns to its essential, original condition of unity with the unconscious, they do not accept, as Buddhism does, that the ego—the ego that is strong and welldeveloped, that is—can endure this without dissolution. And, finally,

3. Jung’s initial position on satori was influenced, naturally, by the Weltanschauung of Western civilization, which is rooted in a fundamental schism or split between man and God as conveyed through the biblical fall of Adam. Jung’s reservations about Western mystics such as Meister Eckhart, who claimed to have overcome this schism, were similar to those he had about Eastern mystics. Things began to shift with Jung’s 1944 heart attack and brush with death. Firstly, there was the vision Jung had during the episode itself. He saw himself, on a huge meteor-like rock in outer space, enter the antechamber of a seemingly Eastern temple with a black Hindu sitting
silently in lotus posture to the side of the antechamber’s entrance. He writes: “I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me—an extremely painful process. . . . This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form.”

14 Clearly, this was a mortificatio experience, happening in an Eastern imagistic context. The diminishment or
impoverishment had a Zenlike emptying character, and thus the emptying in turn led to fullness. Shortly after this episode, Jung had a dream that seemed to pick up where his near-death experience left off, for in the above vision, he never in fact entered the temple because his doctor, or the image of his doctor, came to bring him back to life. In this dream, Jung was on a hiking trip and came upon a small chapel which he entered. He writes: “. . . I saw that on the floor in front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi—in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: ‘Aha, so he
is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’ I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.”

15 Needless to say, this dream has profound implications. The yogi is both Jung’s alter ego—no pun intended—and the Self. In typical Eastern fashion, the dream conveys the Hindu and Buddhist idea that the Self alone is real, and the ego but a passing mirage. Jung’s piercing statement, “I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be,” works with both forms of mortificatio, the form of living consciously with death on a day-to-day basis, and the form of actually dying. The person in whom the Self has become awakened and who lives life in a more or less awake state knows that the ego no longer exists the way it was originally conditioned, that is, as an isolated, separate entity and identity
unto its own. And of course, the person who is dying may well be predisposed or inclined to soon discover the same in a more complete and ultimate manner.

It was either during his final encounter with death or approaching it that Jung’s most transformative experience vis-à-vis Eastern religion seems to have occurred. Of course, this experience happened too late for him to write
about. What we know is that on his deathbed, Jung was reading Charles
Luk’s Ch’an and Zen Teachings: First Series. This is the first of a series of three highly sophisticated books. Luk was a Chinese monk and scholar involved in keeping alive one of the few remaining Zen or Ch’an sects in China in the last century. He studied under the renowned master Hsu Yun. Included in the book are Hsu Yun’s discourses to the monks in the monastery of which he was abbot. These discourses were given during an intensive retreat like the kind I mentioned earlier. If one is in a state of Great Doubt or some other form of mortificatio, and has one-pointedness of
mind such as the kind ushered in when one is dying, a master’s poignant discourse—the way he says something or emphasizes a certain phrase—can itself be a trigger for satori. Very likely, however, Jung, a master in his own
right, may have already at this point been familiar with the satori state, and he may have been merely reading and reconfirming what he already knew. He was, after all, not only dying, but concluding a most astounding and
historic journey of consciousness, much of it couched, no doubt, in the language of alchemy, but a significant part of it, as the above vision and dream illustrated, in the wisdom of the East. And what tells us that Jung was already familiar with satori if not actually in a satori state? He does. Too weak to write anything himself, he asked Marie-Louise von Franz, who was among the few at his bedside during this time, to write Luk a letter. I quote von Franz: “. . . he was enthusiastic. . . . When he read what Hsu Yun said, he sometimes felt as if he
himself could have said exactly this! It was just ‘it’!”

16 “It” is in italics and also with an exclamation mark, apparently connoting the Unconscious of Zen. When Jung met at this same time with his friend Miguel Serrano, he told him the following, and I quote Jung from Serrano’s notes: “I have just finished reading a book by a Chinese Zen Buddhist. I felt as if we were talking about one and the same thing and were simply using different words for it. The use of the word ‘unconscious’ is not the decisive thing; what
counts is the Idea that lies behind this word.”

17 Can Jung here be referring to anything else but the central Idea of Zen, the Doctrine of No Mind, the Void? Clearly, these reflections occurring in Jung’s final days convey a sense of enthusiasm and conviction absent in his earlier writings on the East.

Let us now turn to the Oxherding Pictures, Zen’s counterpart to the Rosarium pictures and an itinerary, so to speak, to the Zen experience of mortificatio. Although to be accurate, it should be said, as is the case with
the Rosarium pictures, the Oxherding Pictures are not just about death. They are about death and rebirth. It must be emphasized that the Oxherding Pictures are ultimately about being reborn into a life that is lived with the living knowledge of empty oneness. It is not just about the initial enlightenment experience or awakening to empty oneness, i.e., satori, which is usually a peak experience that settles, but about the practical life one has to then lead in the aftermath of that experience and integrating that experience. Seeing emptiness is thus only the beginning; leading a life in accord with emptiness is another matter, and the true goal of Zen.

To begin, I should say, firstly, that what I will present to here is a very brief sketch, without the commentary and poetry that accompany each picture. For those of you interested in a fuller treatment, D.T. Suzuki’s writings may be considered a primary source, and Marvin Spiegelman and Mokusen Miyuki also provide an interesting treatment of these pictures in their book Buddhism and Jungian Psychology. Secondly, there is more than one set of the Oxherding Pictures, each with its own unique advantages. I will tonight use the set that has gained the widest acceptance today, the set attributed to the 12th century Chinese Zen master Kuo-an Shih-yuan, or Kakuan Shien in Japanese. Moreover, I will use a modern version of it in the form of ink-and-brush paintings by Gyokusei Jikihara (available at
http://www.mro.org/zmmold/zenarts/oxherdinggallery.html). Earlier sets in China show the ox gradually turning from black to white, signifying that the ultimate goal of Zen is the realization and increasing integration of emptiness. The gradual quality of this speaks to the Soto school’s emphasis on gradual enlightenment, as opposed to the sudden enlightenment of the Rinzai school of Zen. In Jungian language, one could say that this whitening represents a progressive diminishment of shadow, shadow not in the sense of personal or archetypal shadow, but simply in the sense of what the ego does not see in regard to enlightenment. Also, other sets present each picture as a circle within a square, suggesting that the Unconscious or Self must be integrated into consciousness—a principle known in alchemy, with some subtle variations in nuance, as “squaring the circle.”

Let’s look at the first picture. It is called “Seeking the Ox.” The ox represents the seeker’s true nature, that is, Buddha nature or Buddha-mind, the Self. It is probably because of the ox’s sacred nature in ancient India
that it came to symbolize man’s primal nature or Buddha-mind. The oxherder here, however, knows himself only as small mind, as an ego. He sets out in search of enlightenment, but in fact, his original nature has never
gone astray—he just can’t see it. What blocks enlightenment are the defilements of the ego—its desires, fears, and delusions of duality. As the 15th Hindu sage Meher Baba said, “The ego sees what is not there, and does not
see what is there.” But herein lies the paradox: If the oxherder doesn’t see the ox, how does he know it even exists? How does he even know to seek it? It is the Self from the very beginning that seeks itself, that inspires the urge to realization. The whole process occurs under the auspices of the Self. Let us go to Picture Two. Entitled “Finding the Tracks,” it is fairly self-explanatory. Basically, in this picture, Dorothy is on the Yellow Brick
Road to Oz. At least on an intellectual level, the ego knows that there is such a thing as the Self, similar to the early phase of analysis in which the patient is seeking and trusting that something will help him or her but does
not know what it is.

Turning to the third picture, it is called “”First Glimpse of the Ox.” This picture indicates the threshold of satori, the point at which onepointedness of mind is so strong and clear that there are real hints of Buddha
nature. Enlightenment is glimpsed, but not yet fully crystallized and experienced. This is a peculiar, in-between state, and often the Zen practitioner thinks he or she has realized emptiness when in fact he or she is perceiving it, as the picture illustrates, in an obscured way.

Picture Four is called “Catching the Ox.” It celebrates the experience of satori, enlightenment. Emptiness is clearly perceived and apprehended by consciousness. But it is not yet fully comprehended, not yet integrated
into everyday life. Grasping emptiness is thus tantamount to realization, but not actualization, at least not as of yet. The aim of Zen is to embody emptiness in one’s daily existence. This picture marks the culmination of
the initial phase of Zen training.

Picture Five is “Taming the Ox,” the beginning of working with one’s realization in a practical, applied way. It portrays the struggle to integrate empty oneness into everyday life. One wrestles with one’s thoughts and
desires. But even they arise from Buddha nature, and it is only because the delusions of the ego still persist that they are imagined to be real. The process of working through this subjective state of delusion is undertaken
via the study of the Mumonkan, the 48 koans that comprise the main text of Zen training.

Picture Six is “Riding the Ox Home.” Kakuan’s commentary tells all:

“The struggle is over, ‘gain’ and ‘loss’ no longer affect [the oxherder]. He hums the rustic tune of the woodsman and plays the simple songs of the village children. Astride the Ox’s back, he gazes serenely at the clouds above. His head does not turn [in the direction of temptations]. Try though one may to upset him, he remains undisturbed.”

Picture Seven is called “Ox Forgotten, Self Alone.” The term “Self” here refers to the Self-realized ego. At this stage, the relations between the ego and the Self are transcended. “Self” is no longer other, and what occurs
now and henceforth is beyond such dualistic relations, beyond “betweenness.” The oxherder has embodied emptiness; he has, so to speak, made it his own. If the first six pictures are about the relations between the ego and the Self, the latter four represent the movement toward sheer emptiness, first without an awareness of the Self as other, and then, as we shall see in the next picture, without even an awareness of oneself as the embodiment of emptiness, for any such awareness can only be from a distance and hence a form of separation from empty oneness.

Picture Eight, “Both Ox and Self Forgotten,” is then true empty oneness. Even the act of emptying and the sense of emptiness have been thrown out. Now that’s really empty! The ego has been bottomed out, and only the bottomless Void remains. Of this end to egocentricity, Kakuan writes, “If hundreds of birds were now to strew flowers about [the shepherder’s] room, he could not but feel ashamed of himself.” What a humility and “poverty of spirit”—as the Christian mystics call it—this statement reveals. In Zen, there are three levels of enlightenment or emptiness. The first is dropping off body and mind.

Pictures One to Seven correspond to this. The second level is dropping off dropping body and mind. This corresonds to Pictures Eight and Nine. And the final picture is dropping off dropping off. Picture Eight here denotes the peeling process that razes the ego down to nothingness. Notice its resemblance to the ouroboros—the primal beginning, infinity, but also death. To give up not only the attachments of the body and mind but even the attachment to the rewarding feeling of giving up involves a real mortificatio. As Bob Dylan sings, “When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you could always lose a little more. . . . I close my eyes and wonder if everything is as hollow as it seems.”

18 Picture Nine is called “Returning to the Source.” Here the oxherder is simply what is. He has returned to the origin of all, not in any particular form or state of distinctness, but simply as what naturally exists in the form
of life itself, just as it is. As he nears the final stage of his Zen journey, he finds himself back at the beginning, but with a new consciousness. This process is conveyed in the Zen saying that Donovan made famous when he
sang, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”

18 One sees the world, then one realizes one does not see the world, then one sees the world. And seeing the world exactly as it is, endlessly changing and with nothing to strive for, including enlightenment, the oxherder is able to
fully yet selflessly enter it.

Picture Ten is thus called “Entering the Market With Helping Hands.” The summum bonum of the Zen process of death and rebirth, it reflects individuation as Jung himself understood it: the oxherder, here transfigured into the jovial or laughing Buddha, is an in-dividual in the sense that he is undivided not only within himself but from the world. Unlike the yogi who remains in his cave in permanent retreat from the world, or the Hinayana Buddhist monk who must be a saintlike paragon of virtue, the Zen bodhisattva returns to the world, inhabiting it now as easily as he dwelled in his hut in Picture Seven. Zen teaching warns against sinking into an emptiness or enlightenment that becomes static, that hasn’t dropped off dropping off. “True Zen does not smell of Zen,” the sages tell us, by which they mean it does not smell of enlightenment or some kind of lofty sanctity.

True Zen is ordinary, not extraordinary. Chop wood, carry water, see patients. In ancient China, gourds were commonly used as wine bottles, signifying in this picture the enlightened man’s ordinariness as opposed to
otherworldliness. The Zen master then is a free spirit who un-selfconsciously embodies empty oneness and can go anywhere, bringing his ordinary Zen into the world, partaking in the community and marketplace, and helping his fellow human beings live in the Way of the Buddha simply by virtue of his own example.

To conclude tonight’s presentation, there is a parable of somebody who knocks on the door of God’s private chamber. God says, “Who’s there?” The person responds, “It is I.” God says, “Go away.” The person goes away. Sometime later he returns and knocks again. God asks, “Who’s there?” The person says, “It is Thou.” God replies, “Come in.”

It would seem that what has occurred here in this parable, between the person’s two visits to God’s chamber, is the greater mortificatio, the mortificatio in which the ego dies in its sense of separateness from the Self. I say “sense” of separateness because, as Zen teaches, the ego in fact never was or is separate from the Self; it only thinks it is. So the question then becomes, What is it that goes through a mortificatio if all that really dies is an illusion to begin with? In true Zen spirit, the topic of this paper has been about nothing at all.

I hope you didn’t expect more. Thank you

Carl Jung: Life Needs Death

On the following night, I wandered to the northern land and found myself under a gray sky in misty-hazy cool-moist air.

I strive to those lowlands where the weak currents, flashing in broad mirrors, stream toward the sea, where all haste of flowing becomes more and more dampened, and where all power and all striving unites with the immeasurable extent of the sea.

The trees become sparse, wide swamp meadows accompany the still, murky water, the horizon is unending and lonely, draped by gray clouds.

Slowly, with restrained breath, and with the great and anxious expectation of one gliding downward wildly on the foam and pouring himself into endlessness, I follow my brother, the sea.

It flows softly and almost imperceptibly, and yet we continually
approach the supreme embrace, entering the womb of the source, the boundless expansion and immeasurable depths.

Lower yellow hills rise there.

A broad dead lake widens at their feet.

We wander along the hills quietly and they open up to a dusky, unspeakably remote horizon, where the sky and the sea are fused into infinity.

Someone is standing there, on the last dune.

He is wearing a black wrinkled coat; he stands motionless and looks into the distance.

I go up to him-he is gaunt and with a deeply serious look in his eyes. I say to him:

“Let me stand beside you for a while, dark one. I recognized you from afar.

There is only one who stands this way, so solitary and at the last corner of the world.”

He answered: “Stranger, you may well stand by me, if it is not too cold for you. As you can see, I am cold and my heart has never beaten.”

“I know, you are ice and the end; you are the cold silence of the stones; and you are the highest snow on the mountains and the most extreme frost of outer space.

I must feel this and that’s why I stand near you.”

“What leads you here to me, you living matter? The living are never guests here.

Well, they all flow past here sadly in dense crowds, all those above in the land of the clear day who have taken their departure, 1 never to return again.

But the living never come here. What do you seek here?”

“My strange and unexpected path led me here as I happily followed the way of the living stream.

And thus I found you. I gather this is your place, your rightful place?”

“Yes, here it leads into the undifferentiable, where none is equal or unequal, but all are one with one another. Do you see what approaches there?”

“I see something like a dark all of clouds, swimming toward us on the tide.”

“Look more closely; what do you recognize?”

“I see densely pressed multitudes of men, old men, women, and children.

Between them I see horses, oxen and smaller animals, a cloud of insects swarms around the multitude, a forest swims near, innumerable faded flowers, an utterly dead summer.

They are already near; how stiff and cool they all look, their feet do not move, no noise sounds from their closed ranks.

They are clasping themselves rigidly with their hands and arms; they are gazing beyond and pay us no heed -they are all flowing past in an enormous stream. Dark one, this vision is awful.”

“You wanted to stay by me, so get hold of yourself Look!”

I see: “The first rows have reached the point where the surf and the stream flow together violently.

And it looks as if a wave of air were confronting the stream of the dead together with the surging sea, whirling them up high, scattering them in black scraps, and dissolving them in murky clouds of mist.

Wave after wave approaches, and ever new droves dissolve into black air. Dark one, tell me, is this the end?”

“Look!”

The dark sea breaks heavily-a reddish glow spreads out in it-it is like blood -a sea of blood foams at my feet-the depths of the sea glow-how strange I feel-am I suspended by my feet? Is it the sea or is it the sky? Blood and fire mix themselves together in a ball-red light erupts from its smoky shroud-a new sun escapes from the bloody sea, and rolls gleamingly toward the uttermost depths-it disappears under my feet.

I look around me, I am all alone. Night has fallen. What did Ammonius say? Night is the time of silence.

I looked around me and I saw that the solitude expanded into the immeasurable, and pierced me with horrible
coldness.

The sun still glowed in me, but I could feel myself stepping into the great shadow.

I follow the stream that makes its way into the depths, slowly and unperturbed, into the depths of what is to come.

And thus I went out in that night (it was the second night of the year 1914), and anxious expectation: filled me. I went out to embrace the future.

The path was wide and what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood.

From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day.

We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall.

When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.

But what happened to my day? Torches were kindled, bloody anger and disputes erupted.

As darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world, since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore.

And so we had to taste Hell.

I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality; your love became hate, and your understanding became madness.

Why did you want to comprehend the darkness!

But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates
this grasp.

Did you ever think of the evil in you?

Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly; as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding.

But did you know I what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance?

You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale.

But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.

With horror you see that you are defenseless, and that the army of your vices falls powerless to its knees.

With the power of daimons, you seize the evil, and your virtues cross over to him.

You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf.

You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But of one thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers.

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.

Carl Jung, Red Book, Pages 274-275

Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death

Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death

I have often been asked what I believe about death, that unproblematical ending of individual existence.

Death is known to us simply as the end. It is the period, often placed before the close of the sentence and followed only by memories of aftereffects in others. For the person concerned, however, the sand has run out of the glass; the rolling stone has come to rest.

When death confronts us, life always seems like a downward flow or like a clock that has been wound up and whose eventual “running down” is taken for granted.

We are never more convinced of this “running down” than when a human life comes to its end before our eyes, and the question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living.

How different does the meaning of life seem to us when we see a young person striving for distant goals and shaping the future, and compare this with an incurable invalid, or with an old man who is sinking reluctantly and without strength to resist into the grave!

Youth — we should like to think — has purpose, future, meaning, and value, whereas the coming to an end is only a meaningless cessation.

If a young man is afraid of the world, of life and the future, then everyone finds it regrettable, senseless, neurotic; he is considered a cowardly shirker.

But when an aging person secretly shudders and is even mortally afraid at the thought that his reasonable expectation of life now amounts to only so many years, then we are painfully reminded of certain feelings within our own breast; we look away and turn the conversation to some other topic.

The optimism with which we judge the young man fails us here.

Naturally we have on hand for every eventuality one or two suitable banalities about life which we occasionally hand out to the other fellow, such as “everyone must die sometime,” “one doesn’t live forever,” etc.

But when one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but the thoughts which add and subtract the years, and the long row of disagreeable facts which remorselessly indicate how far the hand of the clock has moved forward, and the slow, irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, possess, wish, strive, and hope for — then all our profundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding place, and fear envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket.


Fragment of Carl C.G. Jung – The Soul and Death (in: The Meaning of Death, Herman Feifel, editor)

Carl Jung on “Reincarnation” “Rebirth’ – Anthology

Nobody knows whether there is reincarnation, and equally one does not know that there is none. Buddha himself was convinced of reincarnation, but he himself on being asked twice by his disciples about it, left it quite open whether there is a continuity of your personality or not. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 103-104.|

...the figures in the unconscious could be explained by a long-lasting primeval matriarchy if only we knew for certain that it ever existed, just as the flood myths could be explained by the myth of Atlantis if only we knew that there ever was an Atlantis. Equally, the contents of the unconscious could be explained by reincarnation if we knew that there is reincarnation. ~ Carl Jung to Baroness Tinti, Letters Volume 1, Pages 208-209.

I . . . have the feeling that this is a time full of marvels, and, if the auguries do not deceive us, it may very well be that . . . we are on the threshold of something really sensational, which I scarcely know how to describe except with the Gnostic concept of [Sophia], an Alexandrian term particularly suited to the reincarnation of ancient wisdom in the shape of ΨA. ~Carl Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters, Page 439

Psychologically, the central point of a human personality is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 304

The purpose of nearly all rebirth rites is to unite the above with the below. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 259-261

After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the Chameleon], a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his lof the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.

All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 277.

The Buddha did not need quite so long to see that even rebirths are vain. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 298, Footnote 94.

I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. A flame from the fire of Hell awaited me above the baptismal basin. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 304.

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.

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.

To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 266

The righteous man is the instrument into which God enters in order to attain self-reflection and thus consciousness and rebirth as a divine child trusted to the care of adult man. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Page 739.

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, CW 11, Para 856.

Hierosgamos. Sacred or spiritual marriage, union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity and also in alchemy. Typical examples are the representation of Christ and the Church as bridegroom and bride (sponsus et sponsa) and the alchemical conjunction of sun and moon. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 395.

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.

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.

I am trying to get nearer to the remarkable psychology of the Buddha himself, or at least of that which his contemporaries assumed him to be. It is chiefly the question of karma and rebirth which has renewed my interest in Buddha. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 548.

There are women who are not meant to bear physical children, but they are those that give rebirth to a man in a spiritual sense, which is a highly important function. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 454-456

Flight from life does not exempt us from the laws of old age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life. If it is not possible for the libido to strive forwards, to lead a life that willingly accepts all dangers and ultimate decay, then it strikes back along the other road and sinks into its own depths, working down to the old intimation of the immortality of all that lives, to the old longing for rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 617

The sun, rising triumphant, tears himself from the enveloping womb of the sea, and leaving behind him the noonday zenith and all its glorious works, sinks down again into the maternal depths, into all-enfolding and all regenerating night. This image is undoubtedly a primordial one, and there was profound justification for its becoming a symbolical expression of human fate: in the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself—a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking night. This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest. If, like Peirithous, he tarries too long in this abode of rest and peace, he is overcome by apathy, and the poison of the serpent paralyses him for all time. If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 207

For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching rebirth from the spirit; yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation. Though this may be poor testimony to the strength of the spirit, the penalty for misunderstanding is neurotic decay, embitterment, atrophy, and sterility. It is easy enough to drive the spirit out of the door, but when we have done so the meal has lost its savour—the salt of the earth. Fortunately, we have proof that the spirit always renews its strength in the fact that the essential teaching of the initiations is handed on from generation to generation. Ever and again there are human beings who understand what it means that God is their father. The equal balance of the flesh and the spirit is not lost to the world. ~Carl Jung, CW4, Para 783

Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Cannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, "I am come not to bring peace but a sword." But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of all-uniting love. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 293

The tremendous compulsion towards goodness and the immense moral force of Christianity are not merely an argument in the latter's favour, they are also a proof of the strength of its suppressed and repressed counterpart —the antichristian, barbarian element. The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well. It is a still untouched fortune, an uncorrupted treasure, a sign of youthfulness, an earnest of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 20

Carl Jung on “Death.” Anthology

Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, Seminar 1925, Page 85

Carl Jung on “Death and Fate” - Anthology

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist?

Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention.

Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.

What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary

It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths.

True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling.

But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape.

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation.

He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.

Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 299

Much indeed can be attained by the will, but, in view of the fate of certain markedly strong-willed personalities, it is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at all costs to our will.

Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection.

This, if it really is reflection, is supposed to be rational, i.e., in accord with reason.

But has it ever been shown, or will it ever be, that life and fate are in accord with reason, that they too are rational?

We have on the contrary good grounds for supposing that they are irrational, or rather that in the last resort they are grounded beyond human reason. io4a:72

We cannot rate reason highly enough, but there are times when we must ask ourselves: do we really know enough about the destinies of individuals to entitle us to give good advice under all circumstances?

Certainly we must act according to our best convictions, but are we so sure that our convictions are for the best as regards the other person?

Very often we do not know what is best for ourselves, and in later years we may occasionally thank God from the bottom of our hearts that his kindly hand has preserved us from the "reasonableness" of our former plans.

It is easy for the critic to say after the event, "Ah, but then it wasn't the right sort of reason!"

Who can know with unassailable certainty when he has the right sort?

Moreover, is it not essential to the true art of living, sometimes, in defiance of all reason and fitness, to include the unreasonable and the unfitting within the ambiance of the possible? ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 462

Reason must always seek the solution in some rational, consistent, logical way, which is certainly justifiable enough in all normal situations but is entirely inadequate when it comes to the really great and decisive questions.

It is incapable of creating the symbol because the symbol is irrational.

When the rational way proves to be a cul de sac—as it always does after a time—the solution comes from the side it was least expected. 69:438

We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness—that latest and greatest achievement of man.

We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws.

It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations.

There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own.

Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order.

They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way.

We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina.

They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings.

Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 113

What if there were a living agency beyond our everyday human world—something even more purposeful than electrons ?

Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and control our own psyches, and is what science calls the "psyche" not just a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, allowing unknown and mysterious powers to act upon man and carry him on the wings of the night to a more than personal destiny. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 148

"The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast," says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart.

But for this, so far, men have had little understanding.

Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control.

The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example.

Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate.

Today we call the gods "factors," which comes from facere, 'to make.'

The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre.

It is so in great things as in small.

In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the "factors" themselves.

But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors, 10:49

It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself.

A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: "Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 28

In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. 114:261

Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situations in which the great "principles" entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out.
~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 869

People often behave as if they did not rightly understand what constitutes the destructive character of the creative force.

A woman who gives herself up to passion, particularly under present-day civilized conditions, experiences this all too soon.

We must think a little beyond the framework of purely bourgeois moral conditions to understand the feeling of boundless uncertainty which befalls the man
who gives himself over unconditionally to fate.

Even to be fruitful is to destroy oneself, for with the creation of a new generation the previous generation has passed beyond its climax.

Our off spring thus become our most dangerous enemies, with whom we cannot get even, for they will survive us and so inevitably will take the power out of our weakening hands.

Fear of our erotic fate is quite understandable, for there is something unpredictable about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 101

It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391

What happens to a person is characteristic of him.

He represents a pattern and all the pieces fit.

One by one, as his life proceeds, they fall into place according to some predestined design. ~Carl Jung, Men, Women, and God. ~Daily Mail, April 1955.

The reality of good and evil consists in things and situations that just happen to you, that are too big for you, where you are always facing death.

Anything that comes upon me with this intensity I experience as numinous, no matter whether I call it divine or devilish or just "fate." ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 871

The great decisions in human life usually have far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living.

Each of us carries his own life-form within him—an irrational form which no other can outbid. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 81

Fear of fate is a very understandable phenomenon, for it is incalculable, immeasurable, full of unknown dangers.

The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence.

But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 165

In the domain of pathology I believe I have observed cases where the tendency of the unconscious would have to be regarded, by all human standards, as essentially destructive.

But it may not be out of place to reflect that the self-destruction of what is hopelessly inefficient or evil can be understood in a higher sense as another attempt at compensation.

There are murderers who feel that their execution is condign punishment, and suicides who go to their death in triumph. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 149

Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too.

This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 696

In the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born.

The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal.

The negation of life's fulfilment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending.

Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

Waxing and waning make one curve. 90 : 800

Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death.

Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal. 90:803

Death is psychologically as important as birth and, like it, is an integral part of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 68

The birth of a human being is pregnant with meaning, why not death?

For twenty years and more the growing man is being prepared for the complete unfolding of his individual nature, why should not the older man prepare
himself twenty years and more for his death? ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 803

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, Para 792

We know of course that when for one reason or another we feel out of sorts, we are liable to commit not only the minor follies, but something really dangerous which, given the right psychological moment, may well put an end to our lives.

The popular saying, "Old so-and-so chose the right time to die," comes from a sure sense of the secret psychological cause. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para i94

That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 432

The psyche pre-existent to consciousness (e.g., in the child) participates in the maternal psyche on the one hand, while on the other it reaches across to the daughter psyche.

We could therefore say that every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and that every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.

This participation and intermingling give rise to that peculiar uncertainty as regards time: a woman lives earlier as a mother, later as a daughter.

The conscious experience of these ties produces the feeling that her life is spread out over generations—the first step towards the immediate experience and conviction of being outside time, which brings with it a feeling of immortality.

The individual's life is elevated into a type, indeed it becomes the archetype of woman's fate in general.

This leads to a restoration or apocatastasis of the lives of her ancestors, who now, through the bridge of the momentary individual, pass down into the generations of the future.

An experience of this kind gives the individual a place and a meaning in the life of the generations, so that all unnecessary obstacles are cleared out of the way of the life stream that is to flow through her.

At the same time the individual is rescued from her isolation and restored to wholeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 316

Our life is indeed the same as it ever was.

At all events, in our sense of the word it is not transitory; for the same physiological and psychological processes that have been man's for hundreds of thousands of years still endure, instilling into our inmost hearts this profound intuition of the "eternal" continuity of the living.

But the self, as an inclusive term that embraces our whole living organism, not only contains the deposit and totality of all past life, but is also a point of departure, the fertile soil from which all future life will spring.

This premonition of futurity is as clearly impressed upon our innermost feelings as is the historical aspect.

The idea of immortality follows legitimately from these psychological premises. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 303

For the man of today the expansion of life and its culmination are plausible goals, but the idea of life after death seems to him questionable or beyond belief.

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.

But to believe has become such a difficult art today that it is beyond the capacity of most people, particularly the educated part of humanity.

They have become too accustomed to the thought that, with regard to immortality and such questions, there are innumerable contradictory opinions
and no convincing proofs.

And since "science" is the catchword that seems to carry the weight of absolute conviction in the temporary world, we ask for "scientific" proofs.

But educated people who can think know very well that proof of this kind is a philosophical impossibility.

We simply cannot know anything whatever about such things. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 790

One should not be deterred by the rather silly objection that nobody knows whether these old universal ideas—God, immortality, freedom of the will, and so on—are "true" or not.

Truth is the wrong criterion here.

One can only ask whether they are helpful or not, whether man is better off and feels his life more complete, more meaningful and more satisfactory with or without them. ~Carl Jung, Face to Face, Pages 48-51

It would all be so much simpler if only we could deny the existence of the psyche.

But here we are with our immediate experiences of something that is—something that has taken root in the midst of our measurable, ponderable, three dimensional reality, that differs mysteriously from this in every respect and in all its parts, and yet reflects it.

The psyche could be regarded as a mathematical point and at the same time as a universe of fixed stars.

It is small wonder, then, if, to the unsophisticated mind, such a paradoxical being borders on the divine.

If it occupies no space, it has no body.

Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear?

What is more, life and psyche existed for me before I could say "I," and when this "I" disappears, as in sleep or unconsciousness, life and psyche still go on, as our observation of other people and our own dreams inform us.

Why should the simple mind deny, in the face of such experiences, that the "soul" lives in a realm beyond the body? ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 671

Everything psychic is pregnant with the future. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 53

The cult of the dead is rationally based on the belief in the supra-temporality of the soul, but its irrational basis is to be found in the psychological need of the living to do something for the departed.

This is an elementary need which forces itself upon even the most "enlightened" individuals when faced by the death of relatives and friends.

That is why, enlightenment or no enlightenment, we still have all manner of ceremonies for the dead.

If Lenin had to submit to being embalmed and put on show in a sumptuous mausoleum like an Egyptian pharaoh, we may be quite sure it was not because his followers believed in the resurrection of the body.

Apart, however, from the Masses said for the soul in the Catholic Church, the provisions we make for the dead are rudimentary and on the lowest level, not because we cannot convince ourselves of the soul's immortality, but because we have rationalized the abovementioned psychological need out of existence.

We behave as if we did not have this need, and because we cannot believe in a life after death we prefer to do nothing about it.

Simpler-minded people follow their own feelings, and, as in Italy, build themselves funeral monuments of gruesome beauty.

The Catholic Masses for the soul are on a level considerably above this, because they are expressly intended for the psychic welfare of the deceased and are not a mere gratification of lachrymose sentiments. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 855

Flight from life does not exempt us from the laws of old age and death.

The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life.

If it is not possible for the libido to strive forwards, to lead a life that willingly accepts all dangers and ultimate decay, then it strikes back along the other road and sinks into its own depths, working down to the old intimation of the immortality of all that lives, to the old longing for rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 617

The sun, rising triumphant, tears himself from the enveloping womb of the sea, and leaving behind him the noonday zenith and all its glorious works, sinks down again into the maternal depths, into all-enfolding and all regenerating night.

This image is undoubtedly a primordial one, and there was profound justification for its becoming a symbolical expression of human fate: in the morning
of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights.

Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself—a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own
source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers.

His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking night.

This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away.

Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest.

If, like Peirithous, he tarries too long in this abode of rest and peace, he is overcome by apathy, and the poison of the serpent paralyses him for all time.

If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights.

And having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter.

The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

Only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 93

The highest value, which gives life and meaning, has got lost.

This is a typical experience that has been repeated many times, and its expression therefore occupies a central place in the Christian mystery.

The death or loss must always repeat itself: Christ always dies, and always he is born: for the psychic life of the archetype is timeless in comparison with our individual time-boundness.

According to what laws now one and now another aspect of the archetype enters into active manifestation, I do not know.

I only know—and here I am expressing what countless other people know—that the present is a time of God's death and disappearance.

The myth says he was not to be found where his body was laid. "Body" means the outward, visible form, the erstwhile but ephemeral setting for the highest
value.

The myth further says that the value rose again in a miraculous manner, transformed. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 149

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.

The fact that only a few people see the Risen One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding and recognizing the transformed value. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 149

When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed, and returns to the point of cleavage, the navel, where it first entered the body.

This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her the current of life reached us.

Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to the fountainhead—and
that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life.

For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill.

But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 449

The birth of a saviour is equivalent to a great catastrophe, because a new and powerful life springs up just where there had seemed to be no life and no power and no possibility of further development.

It comes streaming out of the unconscious, from that unknown part of the psyche which is treated as nothing by all rationalists.

From this discredited and rejected region comes the new afflux of energy, the renewal of life.

But what is this discredited and rejected source of vitality?

It consists of all those psychic contents that were repressed because of their incompatibility with conscious values—everything hateful, immoral, wrong, unsuitable, useless, etc., which means everything that at one time or another appeared so to the individual concerned.

The danger is that when these things reappear in a new and wonderful guise, they may make such an impact on him that he will forget or repudiate all his former values.

What he once despised now becomes the supreme principle, and what was once truth now becomes error.

This reversal of values amounts to the destruction of the old ones and is similar to the devastation of a country by floods. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 449

If the old were not ripe for death, nothing new would appear; and if the old were not blocking the way for the new, it could not and need not be rooted out. ~Carl ung, CW 6, Para 446

Everything old in our unconscious hints at something coming. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 630

The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must actually exist.

What these experiences are like we can only infer from the statements that have been made about them.

So, if we want to find out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in order to ascertain what "rebirth" has been understood to mean. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 206

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 207

In the initiation of the living, "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.

Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything "given." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841

We are so hemmed in by things which jostle and oppress that we never get a chance, in the midst of all these "given" things, to wonder by whom they are "given." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841

A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as "given" by the very nature of the psyche.

It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen.

Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841

If I know and admit that I am giving myself, forgoing myself, and do not want to be repaid for it, then I have sacrificed my claim, and thus a part of myself.

Consequently, all absolute giving, a giving which is a total loss from the start, is a self-sacrifice.

Ordinary giving for which no return is received is felt as a loss; but a sacrifice is meant to be like a loss, so that one may be sure that the egoistic claim
no longer exists.

Therefore the gift should be given as if it were being destroyed.

But since the gift represents myself, I have in that case destroyed myself, given myself away without expectation of return.

Yet, looked at in another way, this intentional loss is also a gain, for if you can give yourself it proves that you possess yourself.

Nobody can give what he has not got. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390

From that sacrifice we gain ourselves—our "self"—for we have only what we give. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 398

Fear of self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength.

No one who strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self—the sub-human, or supra-human, world of psychic "dominants" from which the ego originally emancipated itself with enormous effort, and then only partially,
for the sake of a more or less illusory freedom.

This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object.

This, at first sight, would appear to be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose.

Here we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting
to know that all evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished, destroyed, or enjoyed.

But nature herself does not allow this paradisal state of innocence to continue forever.

There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 849

The effect of the unconscious images has something fateful about it. Perhaps—who knows—these eternal images are what men mean by fate. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 183

If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death.

The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path.

But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him.

If he refuses this then no other way is open to him.

Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the
way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live.

The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 675

Consciousness is always only a part of the psyche and therefore never capable of psychic wholeness: for that the indefinite extension of the unconscious is needed.

But the unconscious can neither be caught with clever formulas nor exorcized by means of scientific dogmas, for something of destiny clings to it—indeed, it is sometimes destiny itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 906

The new thing prepared by fate seldom or never comes up to conscious expectations.

And still more remarkable though the new thing goes against deeply rooted instincts as we have known them, it is a strangely appropriate expression
of the total personality, an expression which one could not imagine in a more complete form. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 19

If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events.

This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 138

When I examined the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrew themselves, I saw that their fates had something in common.

The new thing came to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accepted it and grew with its help.

It seemed to me typical that some took the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grew into some persons from without, and into others from within.

But the new thing never came exclusively either from within or from without.

If it came from outside, it became a profound inner experience; if it came from inside, it became an outer happening.

In no case was it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seemed to be borne along on the stream of time. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 18

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 [Nietzsche] 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

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

As I have so earnestly shared in his [Victor White] life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563

We still consider his [Socrates] daimonion as an individual peculiarity if not worse. Such people, says Buddha, "after their death reach the wrong way, the bad track, down to the depth, into an infernal world." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 531-533

We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86

If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139

How great the importance of psychic hygiene, how great the danger of psychic sickness, is evident from the fact that just as all sickness is a watered-down death, neurosis is nothing less than a watered-down suicide, which left to run its malignant course all too often leads to a lethal end. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 38-46

Death is more enduring of all things, that which can never be cancelled out. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323

Death gives me durability and solidity. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 323.

But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

If the old were not ripe for death, nothing new would appear; and if the old were not injuriously blocking the way for the new; it could not and need not be rooted out. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 446.

Death is a drawing together of two worlds, not an end. We are the bridge. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 95.

One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 275.

I have frequently been able to trace back for over a year, in a dream-series, the indications of approaching death, even in cases where such thoughts were not prompted by the outward situation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809

Death, therefore, has its onset long before death. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 809

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 fulfilment, as we do without hesitation the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendance. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 797

For when the soul vanished at death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpale to the state of death in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 493

We can therefore understand why the nuptiae chymicae, the royal marriage, occupies such an important place in alchemy as a symbol of the supreme and ultimate union, since it represents the magic-by-analogy which is supposed to bring the work to its final consummation and bind the opposites by love, for “love is stronger than death.” ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 398

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. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1705-7