The Soul and Death: The Archetypal Path
I read recently that Mick Jagger will be 93 when his new child is old enough to drive. The context for this observation was time and mortality. There are absolute markers in life. For example, if I make it to 80, I have a good shot at making it to 86 or so. With the poet, I should be ever aware of what’s coming around the bend. “And at my back I always hear time’s winged chariots hurrying near.”
Earlier this year the oldest person in the world died at age 117 on a small island in the south of Japan. Perhaps the sea and the solitude helped. I visited some of these islands while in the Navy and felt even then to be a little outside of time and the ticking of the chronometer. Less well-traveled now I try to take a more naturalistic view of death and sometimes mumble, in a self-pitying kind of way, Yul Bynner’s words: “We are born alone, we live alone and we die alone.” I have a habit of chopping off the final sentence of this quote, perhaps because I like to live at the rhetorical extremes: “Everything in-between is a gift.”
In one of his more lucid essays, “The Soul and Death,” Carl Jung writes about the arc of life and death from a psychological perspective. Jung is very matter-of-fact in his references to death: the stone has come to rest, the clock has stopped ticking, and the sand has run out. Writing this in the mid-twentieth century, Jung had every reason to have a sober and somewhat fatalistic view of life and death. And the clichés about death have been around a long time: you can’t live forever and everyone must die sometime.
For Jung life is an energy-process, a teleology, an intrinsic striving toward a goal. And the curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile that eventually returns to a state of rest. But, as Jung notes, the psychological curve of life refuses to conform to this law of nature. “The projectile ascends biologically, but psychologically it lags behind.” We struggle, uneasy with the inevitable curve of life. We might hope that time will stand still and act accordingly. If we happen to reach a summit in life, even after long delays, we might settle there and cling, reluctant to leave the peak. Early fears in our life are often translated into fears of death. In this sense Jung suggests “our psychology loses its natural basis. Consciousness stays up in the air, while the curve of the parabola sinks downward with ever increasing speed.”
Jung considers natural life or consciousness as the nourishing soil of the soul. “Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in midair. That is why so many people get wooden in old age; they look back and cling to the past with a secret fear of death in their hearts. They withdraw from life processes, at least psychologically, and consequently remain fixed like nostalgic pillars of salt, with vital recollections of youth but no living relation to the present. From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born.”
Of course, our consciousness is reluctant to accommodate this undeniable truth because we cling to our past and remain stuck in our youth. As Jung notes, “Being old is widely unpopular.” He continues: “A young man who does not fight and conquer has missed the best part of his youth, and an old man who does not know how to listen to the secrets of the brooks, as they tumble down from the peaks to the valleys, makes no sense; he is a spiritual mummy who is nothing but a rigid relic of the past. He stands apart from life, mechanically repeating himself to the last triviality.”
For Jung the birth of a human is pregnant with meaning, so why not death? As a young man prepares himself for his unfolding, why shouldn’t an old man prepare for his demise. And then the nagging question: what is attained in death?
Jung acknowledges that he won’t pull a belief system out of his pocket to answer the foregoing question because it would be inviting his readers to believe in something he did not. He does acknowledge the obvious: that most great religions have complicated systems of preparing for death, “so much so that life, in agreement with my paradoxical formula, actually has no significance except as a preparation for the ultimate goal of death.”
Jung takes issue with religious thought since the Age of Enlightenment that saw religions as rationalistic and philosophical systems, “concocted out of the head. At some time someone is supposed to have invented a God and sundry dogmas and to have led humanity around by the nose with this ‘wish-fulfilling’ fantasy. But this opinion is contradicted by the psychological fact that the head is a particularly inadequate organ when it comes to thinking up religious symbols. They do not come from the head at all, but from some other place, perhaps the heart; certainly, from a deep psychic level very little resembling consciousness, which is always only the top layer.”
Jung adds that this is why religious symbols have a revelatory character; they are usually spontaneous products of unconscious psychic activity. Over the centuries these symbols have developed, plant-like, as natural manifestations of the human psyche. Religions are not conscious constructions, “but they arise from the natural life of the unconscious psyche and somehow give adequate expression to it.” For Jung “This explains their (religions’) universal distribution and their enormous influence on humanity throughout history, which would be incomprehensible if religious symbols were not at the very least truths of man’s psychological nature.”
For Jung it is more in accord with the collective psyche of humanity to view death as a fulfillment of life’s meaning and goal, instead of a meaningless cessation., a view the psychologist considers a neurosis, an “alienation from one’s instincts, a splitting off of consciousness from certain basic facts of the psyche.”
Jung apparently cared for many people who were dying, taking note of their unconscious activities, their dreams and visions. He was able to follow them into the immediate presence of death and note symbols which proclaimed changes in their psychological conditions, including “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.”
Jung was surprised how little the unconscious psyche makes of the fact of death 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.” The psyche seems to urge the dying, particularly through their dreams, to set things right in their lives.
Not preparing for death psychologically is a neurosis, a deviation from the truths of the blood, as Jung put it, creating a restlessness and a meaninglessness; a soul-sickness we have yet to fully comprehend. It is a tribute to the soul to die well, that is consciously and psychologically, and enter the psychic realm outside of space and time.
Jung, the scientist, stops just short of that last “hypothetical possibility.”
