Faced with the indubitable reality of death, we frequently find ourselves talking and thinking about what happens after death.Furthermore, our speculation about death is founded on the naive assumptions that we know what life is, and that death ineluctably follows life.
Although it is quite clear that we cannot be definitive in a scientific sense about the nature of life, death and life after death, we can and should heed Jung's advise that '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' (Jung 1963, p. 333).
It seems to me that the term life has at least three meanings:
(1) individual organismic existence - conception or thereafter
(2) individual psychological existence - when we become "ego aware"
(3) the collective state of being - entelechy (life force); universal
Therefore, it follows that birth must have at least three meanings:
(A) the moment we become organismically "alive"
(B) the moment we become by psychologically "alive" - awareness of my own being-ness
(C) the first moment all life came to be
Interestingly, conventional custom defines birth as that time we physically enter the external world - not conception (A) or psychological birth (B). Quite an arbitrary notion I think. It is not even related to that time when we can become self-supporting.
Therefore, it follows that perhaps death also has three meanings:
(X) cessation of (1)
(Y) cessation of (2)
(Z) cessation of (3)
Death must be related to life, insofar as it seems like an opposite.
But herein lies a critical conceptual difficulty. Death is only the opposite of life insofar as from the perspective of life defined as life (1) or life (2) above. Life defined (3) renders the notion of death quite obscure - it would occur when all life is ceases. Death then is that state when there is no state - big paradox!
Accordingly, because (P1) there is life (3) and life (1) before birth (B) - in utero plus early infancy and (P2) there is life (3) after death (X) and death (Y) and (P3) the idea of life after death is archetypal in nature I am inclined to believe that there is life (2) after death.
Because the only life that I am aware of is life (2), and it seems to me that the sole purpose of my being alive is to ascribe some form of meaning to what life (2) means, I suspect that the life that precedes birth (B) and follows on from death (X) is psychological.
An interesting pointer is found in death (Y) which occurs frequently - when we sleep. If Life is only ego awareness, then we die each night. Clearly, death (X) does not occur, so there is another form of life (4) that we are largely ignorant of - that exists simultaneously with life (2). Jung calls this life - the unconscious. Life (2) is consciousness and life (4) is unconsciousness.
Similarly, because we exhibit life (1) in utero prior to life (2), I suspect that death (Y) in the form of sleep might in some ways be like the life (4). Remember Wordsworth said "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting".
Therefore, life (4) empirically seems to bookend life (2). As Jung says "Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. (Jung 1973a, p. 483)
With regard to knowledge, it appears as self evident that we can only know about life (2), and this to a limited extent. We get glimpses of knowledge about life (4) in our dreams and other obscure phenomena, which seems to me to establish the objective validity of life (4) and the objective possibility or hope of knowledge of life (4).
Because life (4) is the teleological goal of life (2), and life (2) is characterised by knowing, then I can only assume that knowledge in life (4) is not only possible, but beyond my imagining.
A few other conclusions:
Life (1) renders consciousness unnecessary - life is only biological
Life (2) renders consciousness as the only important thing - what about Alzheimer's suffers and infants?
Life (3) render consciousness ephemeral - being/God is a priori
Life (4) renders consciousness instrumental - a tool with which to grow in knowledge toward something else.
Interestingly, the common thread in life (2), (3), and (4) is life as psychic life - and the essence of psychic life is knowing.
Remember Jung's trip to Africa: “But why on earth”, you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to develop a higher level of consciousness?”…I believe that after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Althi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt as if I were the first man, the first creature to know that all this is. The entire world around me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I became to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly and most fully conscious man' (Jung 1969c, pp. 95-96).
Consequently, another questions begs, namely, what happens of my individuality when I die?
Well, I think the answer is partly contained in life (4), because in this life (4) I am individual, but I get a glimpse of being also not individual. Therefore, maybe life (2) prescribes my individuality, and life (4) might prescribe my non-individuality?
I wonder whether in all this, there is no actual objective divide called "birth", between "life" and "death". Jung says "the form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These a priori categories have a by nature a collective character; they are images of parents, wife and children in general, and are not individual predestinations. We must therefore think of these images as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious". (Jung 1977, p. 188).
Perhaps what we are talking about are phase changes from one manner of existing to another, determined by archetypes? Or perhaps as Jung elsewhere wonders, the "other side", our unconscious existence "is the real one and our conscious world a kind of illusion, and apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it" (Jung 1963, p. 356).
Regarding whether life (4) might possess a knowing of a kind, Jung says "the unconscious perceives, has purposes and intuitions, feels and thinks as does the conscious mind. We find sufficient evidence for this in the field of psychopathology and in the investigation of dream-processes" (Jung 1969e, p. 349).
Jung write a bit about life after death in his Memories Dreams and Reflections:
"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". (Jung 1963, p. 340)
"The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at the time of his death is so important. Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. that seems to be mans metaphysical task" (Jung 1963, pp. 342-343)
"If we assume that life continues "there", we cannot conceive of any other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the psyche requires no space and no time" (Jung 1963, p. 351)
It seems to me that to understand either death or life after death, we need to understand life. The bigger and more inclusive our understanding of life is, the easier its opposite becomes to admit simultaneously. Clearly, life and death are two oppositional halves of a greater whole, whose co-existence is just beyond the grasp of our one-sided consciousness. Perhaps, a clue is found in the cellular process of apoptosis.
Sources:
Jung, C. G., 1963, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jaffe, A. (ed), trans. Winston, C., Flamingo, London.
Jung, C. G. 1973a, C G Jung Letters, vol. 1, Adler, G. (ed), trans. Hull, R. F. C., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.