Reddit reviews Psychology and the Occult: (From Vols. 1, 8, 18 Collected Works) (Jung Extracts (3))

This.

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Symbolism-Alchemy-Occult-Arts/dp/0486209725

https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Occult-Vols-Collected-Extracts/dp/0691017913

Any 'scientific" understanding of the self is going to be a generality. Psychology had more occult potential because of its specificity and, if you want to get into it, it's emergence from the occult.

If you are interested in modern theories of the mind and how they interface with the occult the keywords are "cognitive" and "religion"... This text looks a bit more specific but I've never read it, so, at your own risk.

OP, reflecting on my replies some days later I realised they didn't directly address your questions here but only provided a space for inference from the quoted material, a leaping-off space for self enquiry in regards to belief, while not really pointing to possible ways of framing it (particularly the religious mystical quote, which pertains more to the psychic death you mentioned in your original post).

My return to addressing your post is a little lengthy, so bear with me while I make another attempt to bring something hopefully a little more worth your while in response.

Presumably in the interim you've continued your own research and have probably come across some of the following content yourself. Forgive if I'm merely repeating or throwing stuff at you that you've come to on your own.

You raise a good, old and thorny, question which haunts humankind, hinging as it does on the inevitability of death and further queries and puzzles regarding meaning or meaninglessness varyingly that arise in this space.

For a variety of reasons I can't recall much of what I have read in Jung presently (and currently have returned to retracing my steps, which is painstakingly slow, to jog my memory). While others cite the Red Book as a source for Jung's views on this, there's also a section in CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Soul and Death, pp.404-416 (also collected in an anthology, The Psychology of the Occult), where he espouses his views on such matters.

Jung infers here that consciousness extends into an eternity post death but doesn't establish a clear demarcation of a coherent belief, undesirous to foister such a belief upon another in that instance, to fill in the space and question mark of death; he makes suppositions suggestive of continued existence in a manner but they remain unproveable or clearly outlined in this region of his writings.

Here's a link to the abstract from CW8 to give you some idea of the content.

Curiously, as I searched around following your line of enquiry, while also ponderous after my own lines of thought and assumptions begging reappraisal, I came across this odd nugget of an assertion:

>The ego is an illusion which ends with death but the karma remains, it is given another ego in the next existence.

~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 3, Page 17

As I write I haven't pursued that particular quote to its source but it would appear to speak directly to your concerns. It is a wonderfully weird comment!

Elsewhere, such as in the following material, he elaborates his perspective thusly (this is a short excerpt of the material in this exposition. I'm not sure of the original source but he mentions contents that are in the Red Book, unpublished at the time of his writing these words):

>Carl Gustav Jung (1934)

>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 never 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.

>Even now I can do no more than tell stories—”mythologize.” Perhaps one has to be close to death to acquire the necessary freedom to talk about it. It is not that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such ideas. Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within me. I can’t say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life. And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of superior knowledge. Critical rationalism has apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have happened because nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinarism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible. Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations. In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates.

>Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things. Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe.

>What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections. Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.

>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..

...

(to be continued)