 In
a hospital in Switzerland in 1944, the world-renowned psychiatrist
Carl G. Jung, had a heart attack
and then a near-death experience. His vivid encounter with the
light, plus the intensely meaningful insights led Jung to conclude
that his experience came from something real and eternal. Jung's
experience is unique in that he saw the Earth from a vantage point
of about a thousand miles above it. His incredibly accurate view of
the Earth from outer space was described about two decades before
astronauts in space first described it. Subsequently, as he
reflected on life after death, Jung recalled the meditating Hindu
from his near-death experience and read it as a parable of the
archetypal Higher Self, the God-image within. Carl Jung, who founded
analytical psychology, centered on the archetypes of the
collective unconscious. The following is an excerpt from his
autobiography entitled
Memories, Dreams, Reflections describing his near-death
experience.
It seemed to me that I was high
up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the Earth, bathed in a gloriously
blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents. Far below my
feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India.
My field of vision did not include the whole Earth, but its global shape was
plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through
that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or
spotted dark green like oxidized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad
expanse - the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver
of the Earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea,
and far, far back - as if in the upper left of a map - I could just make out
a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that.
Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered
Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to
the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the
Earth.
 Later
I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a
view - approximately a thousand miles! The sight of the Earth from
this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.
After contemplating it for a
while, I turned around. I had been standing with my back to the Indian
Ocean, as it were, and my face to the north. Then it seemed to me that I
made a turn to the south. Something new entered my field of vision. A short
distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a
meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was
floating in space, and I myself was floating in space.
I had seen similar stones on
the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They were blocks of tawny granite, and some
of them had been hollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic
dark block. An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the
entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He
wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led up to this
antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the
temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled
with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath
of bright flames. I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple of
the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framed by several rows
of burning oil lamps of this sort.
As I approached the steps
leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had
the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at
or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence,
fell away or was stripped from me - an extremely painful process.
Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me
everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened
around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of
all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history and I felt with great
certainty: this is what I am. I am this bundle of what has been and what has
been accomplished.
This experience gave me a
feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There
was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form;
I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation
predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became
of no consequence.
Everything seemed to be past;
what remained was a "fait accompli", without any reference back to what had
been. There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been
taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was
everything.
Something else engaged my
attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about
to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I
belong in reality. There I would at last understand - this too was a
certainty - what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know
what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was
flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has
no beginning and end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an
excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life
seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many
questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I
brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What
will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions
as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would meet the people who knew
the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come
after.
While I was thinking over these
matters, something happened that caught my attention. From below, from the
direction of Europe, an image floated up. It was my doctor, or rather, his
likeness - framed by a golden chain or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at
once: 'Aha, this is my doctor, of course, the one who has been treating me.
But now he is coming in his primal form. In life he was an avatar of the
temporal embodiment of the primal form, which has existed from the
beginning. Now he is appearing in that primal form.'
Presumably I too was in my
primal form, though this was something I did not observe but simply took for
granted. As he stood before me, a mute exchange of thought took place
between us. The doctor had been delegated by the Earth to deliver a message
to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no
right to leave the Earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the
vision ceased.
I was profoundly disappointed,
for now it all seemed to have been for nothing. The painful process of
defoliation had been in vain, and I was not to be allowed to enter the
temple, to join the people in whose company I belonged.
In reality, a good three weeks
were still to pass before I could truly make up my mind to live again. I
could not eat because all food repelled me. The view of city and mountains
from my sickbed seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it,
or a tattered sheet of newspaper full of photographs that meant nothing.
Disappointed, I thought, "Now I must return to the "box system" again." For
it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional
world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in
a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that
this was important! Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it
bothered me beyond measure that I should again be finding all that quite in
order. I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I -
along with everyone else - would again be hung up in a box by a thread.
I felt violent resistance to my
doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was
worried about him. "His life is in danger, for heaven's sake! He has
appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means
he is going to die, for already he belongs to the "greater company."
Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that the doctor would have to die
in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not
understand me. Then I became angry with him.
In actual fact I was
his last patient. On April 4, 1944 - I still remember the exact
date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first
time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day the
doctor took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that
he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he
died of septicernia. He was a good doctor; there was something
of the genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to
me as an avatar of the temporal embodiment of the primal form.
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