AUGUST 24 2019
ON LIFE AFTER DEATH – C.G. JUNG.
There are too many signs that the damage we have done to the earth has brought us to the point where we have to seriously consider whether there is life after our death as the human species. Many of us are starting to realize that we live in a FINITE EARTH. Of course the earth will not disappear: it will last forever, but we won’t. We would have if we had been responsible owners, but we have fouled our own nest.
Owners you say? Yes, there is a text for that: Psalms 115: 16 says, “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.” That’s us. We own the planet and the air around it.
Somehow the Bible recognizes three heavens (see 2 Cor. 12): the lower part, the space beneath the Ozone layer, which we now have saturated with CO2 and Methane, and where we fly our machines; the second heaven is where we send our satellites and other instruments: that too has been given to us. “But the highest heavens belong to the Lord”. There’s where he dwells, beyond the stars and planets, and here I come to a point where I disagree with most: upon death we are not going to the Highest Heaven where God dwells: that’s plain heresy. The heaven adherents don’t know the Bible. Paul, the apostle, writes, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see.” John 3: 13 affirms that nobody has ever gone to heaven except Jesus who came from there. Harold Bloom, of THE AMERICAN RELIGION fame, calls these ‘heaven’ people, “The Know-Nothing church goers,” which, sorry to say, applies to most.
OK, enough heresy-bashing, enough condemning this heaven nonsense, but, oh, oh, it is so ingrained in church lore that it is almost impossible to eradicate.
I once sent my book DAY WITHOUT END (imagining eternity on earth) to a literary agent. He liked the writing, but wrote that the concept is so alien to the reading public, that it will never sell. Eerdmans, who published four of my translations, also refused to touch it.
Yet, the idea of perfect living on earth is immensely appealing. After all, our task, as human beings, given to us in the Garden of Eden, is to lovingly and intelligently explore creation: an unending assignment.
Both Jews and Christians, affirmed in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are told, “Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength”. In other words, all our faculties must be intimately and totally and comprehensively involved in loving God: not only musically and devotionally, but also physically, emotionally, artistically, and intellectually. Somehow we’ve got the idea that singing and praying and passively pew occupying is the prerogative: it is not.
One of the maxims drilled into me as a young man, was “Soli Deo Gloria”, “Do everything to the Glory of God”.
And that ‘everything’ includes loving his creation. That’s primarily how we love God. We build museums to honor the great artists of the world; we build concert halls to celebrate the music of the great composers; we build theaters to showcase Shakespeare and Shaw: the earth is God’s creative museum, his work of art, his ultimate masterpiece, showing his infinity: our task is to pay tribute, explore, honor AND love God for this gift.
Just look at the universe: Nature arranges matter and energy and manages forces that even the most learned physicist must acknowledge are beyond our capacity to understand. A simple question: What is more impressive, a human-made skyscraper or the complex interactions we find in a square inch of soil? What mystifies us more, the internet or the call of a bird? Nature creates at a much profounder level than humans are capable of, and we would be well-advised not to seek power over it but find power with it.
What have we done?
Don’t get me going what we have done to the earth. We have treated it worse than our vilest enemy: we have abused everything to the point of collapse, and, instead of mending our ways, and humbly admit that we have been wrong, like fanatic fools we are affirming our efforts.
Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, is sailing across the Atlantic this week: sailing! wind power! Her coming reminds me of the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here it is:
“Everyone in the world with a grain of common sense, knows that the Emperor is walking around as naked as a jaybird, but no one’s behavior changes even though the signs are everywhere, nor would behavior change just because a couple of people whisper their doubts to each other, creating pockets of public knowledge that the Emperor is naked. No, the only thing that could change public behavior, is when the little girl (in this case perhaps Greta Thunberg) announces the Emperor’s nudity loudly enough so that the entire crowd believes that everyone else in the crowd heard the news.”
The real news is that Capitalism, Infinite Growth, our celebrated Western Economy, our fiat money mess is self-destructing, is a death-culture, and has not a shred of viability left.
Everything is coming out in the open, the main theme of the last Bible Book, Revelation. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Apparently it was no great secret that he abused many women for decades, but only now is this finally being revealed. Or the Epstein episode, a matter that also has been going on for years, and now, exactly now, has come to a head. The consequences of his death reach all the way to the British Royal Family.
And that brings me to Carl Jung, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst.
I am still digesting his 530 page, 157,000 words Autobiography. Here are some excerpts on what he writes
On Life after Death.
“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 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.
“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.”
Let me interrupt there, and re-iterate his words, “The interplay between the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter’. I believe that there is an intimate connection between these two: the ‘here’ determines the ‘hereafter’: our lives are the proving grounds for eternity.
If I understand Jung correctly, then rationally we cannot grasp eternity, buy emotionally believing in an afterlife is healing.
Again Jung:
“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. But how?”
(Here again that “heaven” thing, recalling the song “Amazing Grace”, and the line, “When we’ve been there 10,000 years etc.)
“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. … 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.”
So far Jung.
Read the book: it’s free on the web. Full text of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Jung“
In the end Jung believes that he will return, after death, as a psyche, a soul, sadly succumbing to this ancient Gnostic notion. He had no idea that Jesus died to restore Creation: that’s the entire point of the Scriptures!!
Me, I have done a lot of thinking on Eternity. My ideas can be found in DAY WITHOUT END, basically a dream, verging on reality, in my humble opinion. Frankly it is a better read that Jung’s version of life after death: it even has some love stories. Some groups have made it a point of discussion. You can obtain hard copies from LULU.com.
The age-old question, “How then shall we live?”
Peter’s plea comes to mind,
”But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.
Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
2 Peter 3:10-13
With the Arctic ablaze, Siberia burning and more than 75,000 fires in the Amazon rain forests alone this year, it is not difficult to believe Peter’s prophecy.