by Sudhir Kakar
Jung’s Near-Death Experience and Its Wider Implications
John Dourley
My background is in theology and religious studies. It began in training for the Catholic priesthood, then continued through doctoral studies and as a faculty member of a university Religion department for over thirty years. After some initial reading in Jung my dreams began to speak to me, and I eventually went on to train as a Jungian analyst in Zurich and continued my practice on my retirement from the university. In terms of a more studied approach appropriate to a paper such as this, the Jungian conception of the self is of greatest importance. The paper turns to examine Jung’s conviction that the ‘primal form’ he discovered in himself and another in his near-death experience is the reality of the self, that life is a process of self-making and that the reality of the self realized in time prevails in eternity.
This contention requires an expansion of the meaning of self somewhat wider than its contraction to the ‘primal form’ Jung speaks of in his reflections on his near-death experience. Jung will speak of the self as pre-existing the ego, giving rise to it and constituting its completion (CW 11, par. 400). This side of his thought can be restricted to the developmental process in each life and simply mean that the self moves the ego out of the unconscious and renews the ego by restoring its vital continuity with the unconscious through re-immersion in it in the never-ending cycle of individuation. However, the self can also take on a much deeper meaning, which is not discontinuous with its developmental role, but gives to human development so profound a dimension as to make that development itself a religious reality, working the fullness of divine and human life as two sides of the underlying movement of history. The self then can take on connotations of an ‘incorruptible essence’, a divine spirit, which can take the ego into its service and so ground the ego in the ego’s incorruptible origin and goal (CW 11, par. 359). The dialectic between the pre-existent and incorruptible essence and the existential ego lie behind Jung’s paradoxical statement, ‘Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become’ (CW 11, par. 390). In this dialectic Jung always give a bias to the priority of the self. This leaning is most evident when he writes, ‘It is not I who create myself. Rather I happen to myself’ (CW11, par. 391).
Jung also attributes a certain infinity or boundlessness to the unconscious as the source of the ego and the resources of the unconscious which drive to become conscious in the ego. He states that the unconscious is ‘by definition unlimited’(CW 11, par. 390). No individual can exhaust its creativity though every individual must bow to its creative urgency to become conscious in individual life. These themes, so residual to the total Jung, insinuate what essentialist thinkers have widely and consistently affirmed, namely, that the individual lives in both time and eternity and that the meaning of time attains its culmination in eternity to the extent it has made eternity real in time. In the interplay between the ego and the self, Jung’s emphasis on the priority of the self becomes yet another antinomy in his psychology. He wishes to respect the undeniable sense of freedom the ego has, though he will describe such freedom as ‘hubris’, in relation to the supremacy of the self as the basis of the fate of the individual (CW 11, par. 391). What follows, then, is the focusing of these themes of the self and its role in life, death and the afterlife through an extended analysis of Jung’s personal near-death experience.
The Experience Itself
In 1944 Jung broke his foot, and this accident was followed by a heart attack (MDR, 289-95). In its wake Jung describes himself as ‘on the edge of death’ and ‘on the point of departing from the earth’ (MDR, 289, 290). In a state of delirium he underwent a number of visions (MDR, 289). One of them was outstanding in itself and illuminates the broadest dimensions of his psychology, including the psychic commerce between the living and the dead in time and beyond time.
In the vision Jung found himself standing high in space above Ceylon, now Sri Lanka (MDR, 289). Actually the vision was so real and he was so impressed by his elevation that he had a friend, Dr Marcus Fierz, a professor of physics at Basel University, calculate how high he would have to be to see what he saw in the vision (L1, 518). In one citation Jung cites the height as approximately 1000 miles (MDR, 290), and in a letter written over eleven years after the experience, as 2500 km. The second estimate is in a letter to the sister of Dr Haemmerli, his personal physician, whose appearance in the vision will be seen to be of great importance (L2, 273). These details demonstrate only how lucid the vision was and the impact it made on Jung. From his immense height in the vision Sri Lanka lay at his feet. Looking north he could see India, the Himalayas, the Arabian desert, the Red Sea and a portion of the east end of the Mediterranean (MDR 290).
Then he turned to the south and saw a ‘tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite’ (MDR, 290). The stone was like the granite that he had seen turned into temples along the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. At the door of the temple was a black Hindu in lotus position on a stone bench, apparently expecting Jung. The entrance was surrounded by the bright flames of innumerable wicks floating in alcoves of coconut oil, reminiscent of the entrance to the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Sri Lanka. As he moved to the entrance he felt that all the particulars in the flow of his life were being painfully jettisoned. What remained from this stripping away was a distillation of the sequential moments of his movement through time into its residual truth. Such disclosure portrays life as a process of self-making whose result is captured in the revelation of its essential residue or distillate. Of this objectivity beyond the contingency and emotional flux of existence Jung could write, ‘I had everything that I was and that was everything’ (MDR, 291).
As Jung moved to the stone temple in space he felt that he would meet in it the kindred spirits of the ages, in his words, ‘to whom I belong in reality’ (MDR, 291). These spirits would enlighten him as to the meaning of his life and its place in the unfolding stream of historical humanity. They would reveal to him the relation of his life to what had come before him and the relation of his life to what was to come after. In the ongoing historical drama he thought of his life in time as but a snippet or ‘fragment’ whose meaning was shortly to be revealed in the much broader context of the more total human development throughout time (MDR, 291). But as he was about to enter the temple his personal doctor approached him from Europe. The doctor appeared in what Jung calls his ‘primal form’ as a basileus or king of Kos, the island of the temple of Asklepios and the birth place of Hippocrates. Later Jung adds the detail that his doctor was ‘framed by the golden Hippocratic wreath’ (L2, p. 273). Thus imaged, the doctor was a reincarnation or avatar of Asklepios, the god of healing, and Hippocrates, the father of medicine. Jung reveals at this point that he too was in his ‘primal form’. The physician representing the demands of the world silently conveyed to Jung that he must return to earth, and in that moment the vision ceased (MDR, 292).
The return to finitude was not a happy one. Jung likened it to returning to the confines of a ‘box system’ in which each individual was at once contained and isolated from the equally coffined people in one’s world. More, he was angry at his physician not only for bringing him back to such confined existence, but at the physician’s unawareness that, having appeared in his primal form, his life had been completed and that he soon must die and join the ‘greater company’. In some kind of cosmic trade-off it slowly dawned on Jung that the doctor must die in Jung’s stead. Jung does not elaborate on the psychic nature of this trade-off, but his intuition was correct. On 4 April 1944, as Jung was allowed to sit up on the edge of his bed for the first time, his doctor took to his and shortly thereafter died of septicaemia (MDR, 292, 293).
The weeks following Jung’s return from his primal form were ambivalent to say the least. By day he was too depressed even to eat. But nightly he would sleep till midnight and then for an hour he would experience a return ‘to the womb of the universe’, to a ‘void’ filling him
with ‘eternal bliss’ (MDR, 293). He imaged such bliss in a number of ways. His nurse was transformed into an elderly Jewish mother and he entered into the cabbalistic version of what he calls throughout his work the hieros gamos, the sacred or mystical marriage. The mystical marriage describes the experience of the connectedness of consciousness with the union of the archetypal masculine and feminine and through that the identity of consciousness with such archetypal consummation. ‘At bottom it was I myself; I was the marriage’ (MDR, p. 294). So overwhelmingly religious was the experience that Jung feared it might harm his nurse and relates it to the ‘odor of sanctity’ emanating from a psychic intensity that cannot be contained in the individual thus gifted (MDR, 295). Such bliss continued with the imagery of the marriage of the lamb in the Christian tradition (Rev. chap. 14), and with the consummation of the union between Zeus and Hera in the Iliad (MDR, 294). Over a three-week period the visions gradually paled and then ceased altogether. What remained was an ineradicable sense that each life is a ‘segment of existence’ (MDR, 295) made meaningful in its continuity with the past and contribution to the future against the background of the eternal matrix of the universe to which one returns in moments such as those provoked by his vision and by its subsequent night-time amplification (MDR 295, 296). He concludes his reflection on the entire episode by referring again to its ‘absolute objectivity’ beyond all ‘subjectivity’ as if the person is stripped to one’s essential truth beyond affect, self-interest, and the manipulation and expectation of others or by others (MDR, 291, 295-97).
Jung had one other such vision, not a near-death experience, but a dream vision of his wife after her death. This dream carried the same eternal ‘objectivity’ Jung experienced in his primal form. The dream put his wife on centre stage and was a composite portrait of his wife’s whole life condensed into a single piece of art by the genius of the self as the creator of dreams. Jung writes of the dream’s summation of his wife’s lifetime in one image, ‘It contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three years of marriage, and the end of her life also’ (MDR, 296; L2, 293). The account of his wife’s appearance follows immediately his account of his own near-death experience. His doctor and himself in his vision, and his wife in his dream, are effectively psychic epiphanies of the truth and power of the primal form or self-operative in the maturation of everyone. In resonance with these dramatic experiences of the primal form, Jung’s wider psychology grounds the individual’s developmental imperative and personal morality on fidelity to this primal form. It is the foundational latency in the depths of every life seeking ever-fuller incarnation in the ego consciousness it has created for this purpose (CW11, pars. 105, 141). Such incarnation is the substance of one’s contribution to humanity and is preserved in eternity. As it moves into place over the course of a lifetime, the primal form grounds the ultimate ‘yes’ to life. It becomes the deepest resource to accept, indeed, to embrace one’s fate or destiny in whatever direction it may take and in whatever joy and suffering it might entail. The becoming progressively conscious of the primal form is thus the bedrock of a confidence resting on the demand and support of the individual’s essential truth to become real in the unique contours of individual fate (MDR, 297).
Random Points on Jung on Dying, Death and the Dead
Jung’s understanding of the psyche on almost any point defies too constrictive a systemic approach. Something is always left over. What follows are significant features of Jung’s thought on death not explicitly addressed previously.
Dreams prepare dreamers for death, and in so doing imply a continued conscious existence of some kind, though its nature remains ambiguous. Marie-Louise von Franz in her work on dreams and death documents this reality with dreams that point to the proximity of death and to death itself as a change of consciousness and not its absolute termination (von Franz, 1998).
Jung places great significance in the near-universal conviction that life continues after physical death. He rests this belief on a consensus gentium, that is, on a universal agreement by humanity about the truth of life after death, whose basis is ultimately archetypal suasion (CW 11, par. 4). Jung also understands experiential belief in the reality of God as the basis of all specific religions, and so itself to be such an archetypally based consensus (CW 6, 1971b, par. 62). For these reasons he applauds those who face death fortified with a religious and so ultimately an archetypal conviction of life after death. They are freer from despair and closer to their instincts than those divested of such conviction (MDR, 306). The latter ‘marches towards nothingness’; the former, ‘lives right into his death’ (MDR, 306).
When addressing life after death Jung repeatedly asserts that some dimension of the psyche lives beyond time and space (L1, p. 438; L2, p. 276). This conviction lies ultimately on synchronistic events authored by an agency transcending space and time, though immanent to the psyche in space and time. This universal substrate or ground is capable of transforming the lives of those who undergo synchronistic events, often in configurations of what would appear to an outsider to be pure chance (L2, 5 61). From the frequency of such events Jung concludes that a power residual to the psyche can address the individual by acausally arranging such events through the non-coercive correlation of individual consciousness and natural events beyond the individual. The arrangement of such events or meaningful chance bears immense transformative impact on the individual who undergoes them. This power lives beyond time since it evidences a knowledge of the future and beyond space, since it betrays an awareness of what is spatially distant to consciousness revealed to a usually stressed consciousness in a dream or altered state of mind.
Jung’s conception of an energy potentially unifying material and psychic formalities working throughout the universe could serve as a speculative basis for how unembodied or post-embodied consciousness could exist. Jung holds that at a point in the depth of the psyche, all opposites, including matter and psyche, come together in a preconscious, undifferentiated state (CW 8, 1969b, pars. 414-18). At this level their potential unity is due to the absence of a differentiating ego prior to the ego’s emergence from the unconscious. The world of consciousness is then the sole locus of the differentiation of opposites. The self creates this world as it urges the ego from its unconscious matrix. Once born, the ego differentiates these apparently intransigent opposites as the precondition to their integration in higher conscious syntheses. Jung describes this movement most generally as one towards spirit, understood as the unity of a host of opposites in consciousness (CW 8, par. 415). In the psyche’s overriding movement to spirit would be included among other unities, the unity of the opposites of matter and spirit or body and soul. In the world beyond bodily existence, it might be possible that the psyche integrates the material or bodily to produce an intensity of concentrated energy in which the material is present as wholly absorbed in what might be called the spiritual. In Jung’s language, such union of matter and spirit beyond death would occur at some higher frequency or energetic intensity (CW 8, par. 367; L2, 45; von Franz, 144-55). This idea is akin to Hegel’s conception of sublation. Hegel would argue that lower levels of religious consciousness are present as transformed in higher levels and eventually religion itself is completed in philosophy which both contain the truth of religion, but supersede it in philosophical form. Analogously, the transformation of material into spiritual energy would describe a state in which the material retained some residual presence even as it was wholly absorbed in the spiritual. Such a state would tentatively address, for instance, the phenomena of the movement to death as towards the more intense energy of light, and so elucidate the appearance of the dead as so often clothed in light or a numinous glow (von Franz, 148, 15 0).
Jung does hold that communication can take place between the living and the dead in some special sense, in the immediate wake of death. Evidence for this position exists in textual Jung, but is rare and in some tension with his understanding that the dead retain a non-obtrus
ive interest in the living. On the question of the dead communicating with the living, he and von Franz were given a series of dreams of the alleged appearance of a dead fiancé to the dreamer who had recently lost him in a plane crash (von Franz, xxiii). Working apart from each other, they both identified six dreams which to them did appear to contain a communication from the dead pilot. A kind of intuitive feeling is proffered as the reason for the identification of the six dreams. Obviously, such a resource cannot be readily turned into a scientific methodology. Elsewhere, Jung, in a revealing letter to someone whose brother had appeared to him in a dream across time and space shortly after an untimely accidental death, remarks that such communication is indeed possible. Very partially does Jung reveal the content of the communication between the dead and the living. He cautions that communication with the dead should not be pursued at length because it can induce states of dissociation or possession on one hand or become trivial and stupid on the other (L2, 25 6–58). In this warning about a too-extended discourse with the dead Jung’s remarks may well extend to spiritualism. His early studies of the phenomena pointed him towards the reality of the archetypal unconscious (CW 1, sec. 1). The medium with whom Jung did his most significant work was his first cousin, Helene Preiswerk, then in her mid-teens and probably in love with him. Jung claims she was later caught ‘cheating in flagrante’, though was currently leading a balanced life (CW 1, par. 71). He seems to have taken out of these experiences the idea that the truth of spiritualism is wholly psychic and, though possibly pointing to a relation to the unconscious, does not imply an autonomous supernatural realm (CW 1, par. 71). On the subject of the nearness of death, Jung himself had a vision he took to tell him of the proximity of the death of a close friend and colleague. A few weeks before the death of Richard Wilhelm, the Sinologist who provided Jung with a version of The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese gentleman appeared in a vision at the foot of Jung’s bed. He was clad in a dark-blue gown and bowed silently to him as if with a message. Jung knew the incident was a leave-taking. Wilhelm’s death followed shortly (MDR, Appendix IV, p. 377).