On Life after Death-Carl Jung

On Life after Death
by C.G. Jung
T H E N A U T I S P R O J E C T
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On Life after Death
by C.G. Jung
WHAT I HAVE to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists
entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which
have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the
latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer
to the question of the interplay between the "here" and the "hereafter." Yet I
have never written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had
to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I
would like to state my ideas now.
Even now I can do no more than tell stories—"mythologize." Perhaps one has to
be close to death to acquire the necessary f reedom to talk about it. It is not
that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such
ideas. Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and
without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within
me. I can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are
there, and can be given ut terance, if I do not repress them out of some
prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life.
And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of
superior knowledge. Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with
so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only
have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost
exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they
know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can
see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease
of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be
discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible.
Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is
therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations. In view of all this, I lend
an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at
the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in
with my theoretical postulates.
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Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no
longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important
and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things. Such talk is like the
telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe.
What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or what kind of
reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. We cannot tell whether they
possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic
proj ections. Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way
for us to attain certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.
We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being
that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and
establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate
structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of
ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a "going beyond all that," but scientific
man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile
speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives
existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any
good reason why we should.
Parapsychology holds it to be a scientifically valid proof of an afterlife that the
dead manifest themselves—either as ghosts, or through a medium—and
communicate things which they alone could possibly know. But even though
there do exist such well-documented cases, the question remains whether the
ghost or the voice is identical with the dead person or is a psychic projection,
and whether the things said really derive from the deceased or from knowledge
which may be present in the unconscious.1
Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we
must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their
lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence. They live
more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has
an inconceivable period of time at one's disposal. What then is the point of this
senseless mad rush?
Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone. There are people who feel
no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud
and playing the harp for ten thousand years! There are also quite a few who
have been so buffeted by life, or who feel such disgust for their own existence,
that they far prefer absolute cessation to continuance. But in the majority of
cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so
ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it.

1 Concerning "absolut e knowledge" in t he unconscious, cf. "Synchronicit y: An Acausal Connect ing Principle," in The
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8),pp.48iff.
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But how?
My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the
unconscious—in dreams, for example. Usually we dismiss these hints because we
are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer. In response to this
understandable skepticism, I suggest the following considerations. If there is
something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an intellectual
problem. For example, I do not know for what reason the universe has come into
being, and shall never know.
Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if
an idea about it is offered to me—in dreams or in mythic traditions—I ought to
take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints,
even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved.
A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life
after death, or to create some image of it— even if he must confess his failure.
Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the
age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to
add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the
boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known—
and that too with limitations —and live in a known framework, just as if we
were sure how far life actually extends. As a matter of fact, day after day we
live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life
of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason
dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the
unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the
more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political
absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized.
The unconscious helps by communicating things to us, or making figurative
allusions. It has other ways, too, of informing us of things which by all logic we
could not possibly know. Consider synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, and
dreams that come true. I recall one time during the Second World War when I
was returning home from Bollingen. I had a book with me, but could not read,
for the moment the train started to move I was overpowered by the image of
someone drowning. This was a memory of an accident that had happened while I
was on military service. During the entire journey I could not rid myself of it. It
struck me as uncanny, and I thought, "What has happened? Can there have been
an accident?"
I got out at Erienbach and walked home, still troubled by this memory. My
second daughter's children were in the garden. The family was living with us,
having returned to Switzerland from Paris because of the war. The children
stood looking rather upset, and when I asked, "Why, what is the matter?" they
told me that Adrian, then the youngest of the boys, had fallen into the water in
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the boathouse. It is quite deep there, and since he could not really swim he had
almost drowned. His older brother had fished him out. This had taken place at
exactly the time I had been assailed by that memory in the train. The uncon-
scious had given me a hint. Why should it not be able to inform me of other
things also?
I had a somewhat similar experience before a death in my wife's family. I
dreamed that my wife's bed was a deep pit with stone walls. It was a grave, and
somehow had a suggestion of classical antiquity about it. Then I heard a deep
sigh, as if someone were giving up the ghost. A figure that resembled my wife
sat up in the pit and floated upward. It wore a white gown into which curious
black symbols were woven. I awoke, roused my wife, and checked the time. It
was three o'clock in the morning. The dream was so curious that I thought at
once that it might signify a death. At seven o'clock came the news that a cousin
of my wife had died at three o'clock in the morning.
Frequently foreknowledge is there, but not recognition. Thus I once had a dream
in which I was attending a garden party. I saw my sister there, and that greatly
surprised me, for she had died some years before. A deceased friend of mine
was also present. The rest were people who were still alive. Presently I saw that
my sister was accompanied by a lady I knew well. Even in the dream I had drawn
the conclusion that the lady was going to die. "She is already marked," I thought.
In the dream I knew exactly who she was. I knew also that she lived in Basel.
But as soon as I woke up I could no longer, with the best will in the world, recall
who she was, although the whole dream was still vivid in my mind. I pictured all
my acquaintances in Basel to see whether the memory images would ring a bell.
Nothing!
A few weeks later I received news that a friend of mine had had a fatal
accident. I knew at once that she was the person I had seen in the dream but
had been unable to identify. My recollection of her was perfectly clear and
richly detailed, since she had been my patient for a considerable time up to a
year before her death. In my attempt to recall the person in my dream,
however, hers was the one picture which did not appear in my portrait gallery of
Basel acquaintances, although by rights it should have been one of the first.
When one has such experiences—and I will tell of others like them—one acquires
a certain respect for the potentialities and arts of the unconscious. Only, one
must remain critical and be aware that such communications may have a
subjective meaning as well. They may be in accord with reality, and then again
they may not. I have, however, learned that the views I have been able to form
on the basis of such hints from the unconscious have been most rewarding.
Naturally, I am not going to write a book of revelations about them, but I will
acknowledge that I have a "myth" which encourages me to look deeper into this
whole realm. Myths are the earliest form of science. When I speak of things
after death, I am speaking out of inner prompting, and can go no farther than to
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tell you dreams and myths that relate to this subject.
Naturally, one can contend from the start that myths and dreams concerning
continuity of life after death are merely compensating fantasies which are
inherent in our natures—all life desires eternity. The only argument I can adduce
in answer to this is the myth itself.
However, there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject
to the laws of space and time. Scientific proof of that has been provided by the
well-known J. B. Rhine experiments.2 Along with numerous cases of spontaneous
foreknowledge, non-spatial perceptions, and so on—of which I have given a
number of examples from my own life—these experiments prove that the psyche
at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of causality. This indicates
that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore of causality also, are
incomplete. A complete picture of the world would require the addition of still
another dimension; only then could the totality of phenomena be given a unified
explanation. Hence it is that the rationalists insist to this day that
parapsychological experiences do not really exist; for their world-view stands or
falls by this question. If such phenomena occur at all, the rationalistic picture of
the universe is invalid, because incomplete. Then the possibility of an other-
valued reality behind the phenomenal world becomes an inescapable problem,
and we must face the fact that our world, with its time, space, and causality,
relates to another order of things lying behind or beneath it, in which neither
"here and there" nor "earlier and later" are of importance. I have been convinced
that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of
space and time. This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance
from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness.
Not only my own dreams, but also occasionally the dreams of others, helped to
shape, revise, or confirm my views on a life after death. I attach particular
importance to a dream which a pupil of mine, a woman of sixty, dreamed about
two months before her death. She had entered the hereafter. There was a class
going on, and various deceased women friends of hers sat on the front bench. An
atmosphere of general expectation prevailed. She looked around for a teacher
or lecturer, but could find none. Then it became plain that she herself was the
lecturer, for immediately after death people had to give accounts of the total
experience of their lives. The dead were extremely interested in the life
experiences that the newly deceased brought with them, just as if the acts and
experiences taking place in earthly life, in space and time, were the decisive
ones.
In any case, the dream describes a most unusual audience whose like could
scarcely be found on earth: people burningly interested in the final
psychological results of a human life that was in no way remarkable, any more

2 Extra-sensory Perception (Boston, 1934); The Reach of the Mind (New York, 1947).
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than were the conclusions that could be drawn from it—to our way of thinking.
If, however, the "audience" existed in a state of relative non-time, where
"termination," "event," and "development" had become questionable concepts,
they might very well be most interested precisely in what was lacking in their
own condition.
At the time of this dream the lady was afraid of death and did her best to fend
off any thoughts about it. Yet death is an important interest, especially to an
aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an
obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for
reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth,
however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of
life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them with some
measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who
does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches toward
nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the
tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in
uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.
The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need man, or contact
with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge. When I began working with
the unconscious, I found myself much involved with the figures of Salome and
Elijah. Then they receded, but after about two years they reappeared. To my
enormous astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and acted
as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile. In actuality the most incredible
things had taken place in my life. I had, as it were, to begin from the beginning
again, to tell them all about what had been going on, and explain things to
them. At the time I had been greatly surprised by this situation. Only later did I
understand what had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into the
unconscious and into themselves—I might equally well put it, into timelessness.
They remained out of contact with the ego and the ego's changing
circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what had happened in the world
of consciousness.
Quite early I had learned that it was necessary for me to instruct the figures of
the unconscious, or that other group which is often indistinguishable from them,
the "spirits of the departed." The first time I experienced this was on a bicycle
trip through upper Italy which I took with a friend in 1910. On the way home we
cycled from Pavia to Arona, on the lower part of Lake Maggiore, and spent the
night there. We had intended to pedal on along the lake and then through the
Tessin as far as Faido, where we were going to take the train to Zurich. But in
Arona I had a dream which upset our plans.
In the dream I was in an assemblage of distinguished spirits of earlier centuries;
the feeling was similar to the one I had later toward the "illustrious ancestors" in
the black rock temple of my 1944 vision. The conversation was conducted in
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Latin. A gentleman with a long, curly wig addressed me and asked a difficult
question, the gist of which I could no longer recall after I woke up. I understood
him, but did not have a sufficient command of the language to answer him in
Latin. I felt so profoundly humiliated by this that the emotion awakened me.
At the very moment of awakening I thought of the book I was then working on,
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, and had such intense inferiority feelings
about the unanswered question that I immediately took the train home in order
to get back to work. It would have been impossible for me to continue the
bicycle trip and lose another three days. I had to work, to find the answer.
Not until years later did I understand the dream and my reaction. The bewigged
gentleman was a kind of ancestral spirit, or spirit of the dead, who had
addressed questions to me —in vain! It was still too soon, I had not yet come so
far, but I had an obscure feeling that by working on my book I would be
answering the question that had been asked. It had been asked by, as it were,
my spiritual forefathers, in the hope and expectation that they would learn
what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the
answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed. If question and
answer had already been in existence in eternity, had always been there, no
effort on my part would have been necessary, and it could all have been
discovered in any other century. There does seem to be unlimited knowledge
present in nature, it is true, but it can be comprehended by consciousness only
when the time is ripe for it. The process, presumably, is like what happens in
the individual psyche: a man may go about for many years with an inkling of
something, but grasps it clearly only at a particular moment.
Later, when I wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, once again it was the
dead who addressed crucial questions to me. They came—so they said—"back
from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought." This had surprised me
greatly at the time, for according to the traditional views the dead are the
possessors of great knowledge. People have the idea that the dead know far
more than we, for Christian doctrine teaches that in the hereafter we shall "see
face to face." Apparently, however, the souls of the dead "know" only what they
knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that. Hence their endeavor
to penetrate into life in order to share in the knowledge of men. I frequently
have a feeling that they are standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what
answer we will give to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me as if
they were dependent on the living for receiving answers to their questions, that
is, on those who have survived them and exist in a world of change; as if
omniscience or, as I might put it, omni-consciousness, were not at their
disposal, but could flow only into the psyche of the living, into a soul bound to a
body. The mind of the living appears, therefore, to hold an advantage over that
of the dead in at least one point: in the capacity for attaining clear and decisive
cognitions. As I see it, the three-dimensional world in time and space is like a
system of co-ordinates; what is here separated into ordinates and abscissae may
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appear "there," in space-timelessness, as a primordial image with many aspects,
perhaps as a diffuse cloud of cognition surrounding an archetype. Yet a system
of co-ordinates is necessary if any distinction of discrete contents is to be
possible. Any such operation seems to us unthinkable in a state of diffuse
omniscience, or, as the case may be, of subjectless consciousness, with no
spatio-temporal demarcations. Cognition, like generation, presupposes an
opposition, a here and there, an above and below, a before and after.
If there were to be a conscious existence after death, it would, so it seems to
me, have to continue on the level of consciousness attained by humanity, which
in any age has an upper though variable limit. There are many human beings
who throughout their lives and at the moment of death lag behind their own
potentialities and—even more important—behind the knowledge which has been
brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own lifetimes.
Hence their demand to attain in death that share of awareness which they failed
to win in life.
I have come to this conclusion through observation of dreams about the dead. I
dreamed once that I was paying a visit to a friend who had died about two
weeks before. In life, this friend had never espoused anything but a
conventional view of the world, and had remained stuck in this unreflecting
attitude. In the dream his home was on a hill similar to the Tullinger hill near
Basel. The walls of an old castle surrounded a square consisting of a small
church and a few smaller buildings. It reminded me of the square in front of the
castle of Rapperswil. It was autumn. The leaves of the ancient trees had turned
gold, and the whole scene was transfigured by gentle sunlight. My friend sat at a
table with his daughter, who had studied psychology in Zurich. I knew that she
was telling him about psychology. He was so fascinated by what she was saying
that he greeted me only with a casual wave of the hand, as though to intimate:
"Don't disturb me." The greeting was at the same time a dismissal. The dream
told me that now, in a manner which of course remains incomprehensible to me,
he was required to grasp the reality of his psychic existence, which he had never
been capable of doing during his life.
I had another experience of the evolution of the soul after death when—about a
year after my wife's death—I suddenly awoke one night and knew that I had
been with her in the south of France, in Provence, and had spent an entire day
with her. She was engaged on studies of the Grail there. That seemed significant
to me, for she had died before completing her work on this subject.
Interpretation on the subjective level—that my anima had not yet finished with
the work she had to do— yielded nothing of interest; I know quite well that I am
not yet finished with that. But the thought that my wife was continuing after
death to work on her further spiritual development—however that may be
conceived—struck me as meaningful and held a measure of reassurance for me.
Ideas of this sort are, of course, inaccurate, and give a wrong picture, like a
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