Philosopher Michael Grosso in his 1985 book The Final Choice summarizes C. G. Jung’s psychology: “what is real, effective and fateful is the psyche. We are immersed in a sea of psychisms, deep collective images, linked somehow to vital and cosmic forces. These exist as the living forms of internal existence; what is more, as Jung believed, they are both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective.’” Jung affirmed that transcendental subjectivity is transcendent objectivity. Grosso, quoting Jung: “What is deeply within leads to what is deeply without.”
Michael Grosso, The Final Choice: Playing the Survival Game (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint Publishing, 1985), 125-26.
Jung, writing of the archetypal collective unconscious, after discovering in the dreams of his patients “mythological motifs from cultures of which they had no intellectual knowledge.” He realized, “the human psyche has access not only to the Freudian individual unconscious,” but also to “a repository of the entire cultural heritage of humanity.” And he found comparative mythology useful “for individuals involved in experiential therapy and self-exploration, and an indispensable tool for those who support and accompany them on their journeys.”
Stanislav Grof, “Revision and Re-Enchantment of Psychology,” Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science (Anoka: MN, Process Century Press, 2020).
Jung had dinner with Einstein several times and wrote in a 1953 letter that Einstein started him thinking about how the relativity of time and space is likely affecting the psyche. In “The Soul and Death” Jung asserts that: “We are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is no form of existence without space and time.” For the psyche in its depth “participates in a form of existence beyond space and time” and “partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’.”
C. G. Jung, On Death and Immortality (Princeton University Press, 1999), 4-5.
In 1944 during surgery Jung suffered cardiac arrest, had his own near-death experience, and later described it as “a glimpse behind the veil” . . .
The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will. When you can give up the crazy will to live and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist, then the truly real life begins with everything which you were meant to be and never reached. It is something ineffably grand. I was completely free and whole, as I never felt before.
I found myself 15,000 km from the earth and I saw it as an immense globe resplendent in an inexpressibly beautiful blue light. I was on a point exactly above the southern end of India, which shone in a bluish silvery light with Ceylon like a shimmering opal in the deep blue sea. I was in the universe, where there was a big solitary rock containing a temple. I saw its entrance illuminated by a thousand small fames of coconut oil. I knew I was to enter the temple and I would reach full knowledge. But at this moment a messenger from the world (which by then was a very insignificant corner of the universe) arrived and said that I was not allowed to depart and at this moment the whole vision collapsed completely.
Jung wrote he “was wakeful each night in the universe,” experiencing “the complete vision,” but not as an I. Instead, he was “united with somebody or something.” As if in “a silent invisible festival permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience.” He learned from his NDE that: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”
Grosso Final Choice, 127-28.
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