The threshold of death

Turning one's attention to death

As human beings, we can even push away the thought of death, in accordance with certain cultural conditioning programs active in our age, attributing absolute importance to organic life, and identifying (and limiting) the existence of the conscious Ego to the period of life of its organism, as long as the latter is able to function in a more or less decent way. At the same time, in popular media in the field of NDEs, mediumship, or the so-called channeling (a form of mediumship that at best is underdeveloped and, above all, imbued with elements originating in the human psyche), titles of books or programs appear such as «Death does not exist», «The dead return», and the like. It will therefore be appropriate to shed some light on this matter: the death of the human organism, meant as the irreversible cessation of the organism's functions and its gradual decomposition, is a certainty, and at least up to now it cannot be avoided. If we consider the event of death as an almost instantaneous process, then the conscious Ego may not even realize what is happening at that moment, but we usually refer to death as the series of mental experiences in which the Ego becomes involved in the more or less long period preceding the event of dying. In last month's post we observed how death can occur at any age and in the most diverse circumstances: in those cases in which it occurs under traumatic circunstances, the process of dying sometimes has the advantage for the conscious Ego – if I may put it this way – of being fast enough to avoid the physical pain of a long dying process, and the suffering resulting from the awareness of impending death, for which the Ego was not yet ready. But the natural process of dying in old age is often preceded by a progressive deterioration of the physical and mental faculties, which not only can lead to prolonged suffering, but ends up compromising the very self-perception of the conscious Ego, about whose existence an external observer may have many doubts, judging on the basis of the manifestations of the organism in agony or in a coma. Furthermore, in similar cases the whole management of the organism – and consequently all the psyche's dynamics which derive from it and which continue to involve the Ego in a random way, alternating phases of more or less confused consciousness with others of complete unconsciousness – is entrusted to other people, in particular to those who work in hospitalization and care facilities, and the Ego loses all ability and possibility of self-control. So not only should it not come as a surprise, but it should be considered perfectly reasonable that the Ego wants to prepare in time, in order to be able to face in the most decent way, and in the conditions that it believes are most suitable to it, such an important event as the process of dying.

The cultural conditionings that go to great lengths to suppress any interest in death and the dying process, by making use of the dynamics of the human psyche and fueling the collective interpretation of death as the greatest misfortune, compared to which any other misfortune would seem preferable, are determined by the need to make the billions of human organisms that make up our societies work as efficiently as possible, so that all resources can be concentrated on the needs imposed by organic life, and on the search for solutions to the various problems arising from it. But despite these conditionings, in addition to the attention towards the event of dying determined by the reasons explained above, we can observe another process that stimulates the mind of some people – at least those gifted with sufficient intellectual resources – to become interested in the phenomenon of the organism's death and in the possible experiences that the conscious Ego could face once that event has occurred. To describe this process we need to highlight how the perception of the flow of time can influence the expansion and evolution of the Ego's consciousness during a sufficiently long life. Proceeding along the unidirectional line of time, in the first part of life the Ego's consciousness progressively expands on the basis of past experiences: if we imagine human life as a segment whose extremes are the birth and death of the organism, and the conscious Ego as a point moving above this segment, parallel to it, going from birth to death, then the expansion of consciousness can be visualized by the enlargement of the angle formed by the perpendicular from the Ego point to the time segment (the present moment), and the segment connecting the Ego to the starting point (the birth). This increase in consciousness is also reflected in the future, in terms of perception, imagination and planning: consequently, as the Ego proceeds in the first part of life, human life can be perceived almost as an endless series of experiences, full of more or less attractive and interesting perspectives, based on what has been experienced in the past. But once one moves into the latter part of life, while the expansion of consciousness continues, based on past experiences, its projection into the future encounters the obstacle of the end of organic life, a kind of barrier that gets closer and closer over the years and that prevents consciousness from focusing and, as far as possible, from planning the Ego's future experiences.

It is true that consciousness can always focus its attention on the future of humankind in general, or on that of the persons who are dear to us and who will probably survive the death of our organism, but the flow of time places a definite limit on the experiences of the Ego in this physical dimension, with which we interact through an organism, and the operative utility of consciousness is determined by the presence of a conscious subject – the Ego, precisely – in whose absence any projection into the future becomes empty and meaningless. To prevent the barrier of death from stopping consciousness from continuing to expand its range of action also in the direction of the future, it is logical that the Ego begins to take an interest in the destiny that awaits it after the death of its organism: from this point of view, the position of those who consider as an inevitable and supposedly established fact the annihilation of the conscious Ego when its organism dies, and calmly surrender to what they regard as evidence, appears at the very least bizarre, precisely because it makes no sense for the Ego – once it has become aware of its own existence – to put its signature, so to speak, on the act of acceptance of its own annihilation. This does not mean that, given the strange characteristics of this dimension in which the conscious Ego experiences human life, the Ego's annihilation is not possible, but only that this annihilation should be considered by the Ego as an act of suppression, detrimental to its own right to exist: a right that should always be claimed and defended by the Ego with dignity, integrity and coherence. Since evidence shows that the organism to which the Ego is bound during its experience of human life is in any case destined to stop working – at least as far as I know – the Ego's consciousness can project beyond this event to seek information about whether the Ego will continue to exist once its current life is over. As widely reported in the pages of this site, the main sources of this information are the various mediumistic communications and the NDEs. Once this information – which in our day has become available in truly remarkable quantities thanks to the popular media available to us – has been obtained and carefully assessed, the Ego must resort to its own intellectual resources to evaluate its trustworthiness and reliability: in fact, any direct verification of what can be experienced by our conscious Ego after the death of its organism requires that this event has already occurred in time, and therefore cannot be anticipated with sufficient certainty. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that the information available is always related to the experience of another person's conscious Ego, both in the case of NDEs – in which such experiences are by their nature exclusively subjective – and for the communications of mediumistic origin, in which – as we have seen – the information obtained is always to some extent contaminated by the attunements of the psyche of the mediums and the sitters. We cannot therefore be sure that what has been experienced by someone else's Ego will also be experienced by our Ego: we can only desire and hope that this will happen, in case the experiences we learn about seem interesting, fascinating, emotionally intense and deeply appealing.

The results of examining mediumistic communications

On the pages of this blog I have reported in detail, in recent months, the mediumistic communications obtained in 1853 by Judge Edmonds through the automatic writing of Dr. Dexter. As I have already said, I have chosen to pay attention to these communications not because I consider them particularly significant or more important than others, but because – originating in the initial phase of the formation of a predominantly spontaneous spiritualist movement, still largely unstructured from a cultural and social point of view – they are really interesting as documentation of the reactions produced by the human psyche to certain events, which not only do not fall within the norm of what is considered possible or acceptable in our physical dimension, but also show a close relationship with what could happen to the conscious Ego after the death of its human organism. Furthermore, the personality of Judge Edmonds, author of the book Spiritualism in which these communications are reported, must be acknowledged as a person of considerable moral integrity, reliability and coherence, worthy of the utmost respect. Other mediumistic communications have been mentioned in the pages of this site: those due to the mediumship of Urbino Fontanelli (1913-1995) have been examined with sufficient precision in the pages dedicated to the Life history of an Italian medium. In 2019, in this blog, I also referred to the communications obtained from other mediumistic circles: the Essene Circle (see The Spirit Life), the Florence 77 Circle (through the remarkable mediumship of Roberto Setti), and the Italian Center of Parapsychology (Naples) which recorded, and then published, the substantial corpus of communications of Entity Andrea obtained through trance incorporation by the medium Corrado Piancastelli. Other information of mediumistic origin, always referring to the conditions of existence of the conscious Ego after the death of its organism, can be found in the pages of the section on psychic phenomena: in particular, the page on the The alien spirit is devoted to the critical interpretation of some of the statements of the aforementioned Entity Andrea regarding the existential condition of the spirit and its relationship with the conscious Ego when the latter is still bound to organic life. I would like to mention here, incidentally, that many people interested in phenomena of mediumistic origin think that the communications obtained from the Florence 77 Circle or from the Italian Center of Parapsychology are among the most interesting, profound and convincing information obtained up to now by us humans about the existence of the spirit and the meaning of human life.

As far as I am concerned, I can only confirm what I wrote a few years ago in the introductory part of the page of the 2019 blog page on The Spirit Life, and which I quote here again: «The entity communications concentrate essentially on the main intellectual, philosophical and moral issues pertaining to the human condition, viewed from the perspective of the evolutionary needs of the spirit, which are not, however, explained in detail. Not infrequently one has the impression that the various problems of human life, and the different aspects of the reality of this world as we humans know it, since they cannot be evaded or denied because they are undeniable facts for us (and for the conscious Ego they represent the core of the matter), are forced into a pre-existing mental framework, through forms of reasoning that merely gives the appearance of logic (and sometimes not even that), while remaining vulnerable to many criticisms and leaving many unresolved issues, and therefore cannot be considered convincing on the basis of an intrinsic logical coherence. This problem is also present with respect to the teachings of the Cerchio Firenze 77, while the communications of Entity A seem to me more consistent and exhaustive». It should be kept in mind that in this flow of mediumistic communications – which some people consider to be of a high intellectual level – it appears at a certain point the idea, rooted in Theosophy, that the spirit is an abstract entity of its own, which must go through a certain number of incarnations (necessarily successive according to human time?) in order to evolve, learning something from these life experiences. As we have seen by examining the communications obtained by Judge Edmonds, this idea is in sharp contrast to the concept of progression on which early spiritualism was based. In fact, in the progression the conscious Ego completes only the initial part of its evolutionary path linked to the organism through which, in a certain sense, it takes shape and develops: then, depending on the level of evolution reached in the course of human life, it continues its path as a spiritual Ego, always improving its condition with each passage from one sphere to the next. Although this picture leaves, as I have already pointed out, some fundamental questions unresolved, the idea of a spirit that must pass through a series of human incarnations, each endowed with its own autonomous conscious Ego, seems to me even more obscure and inconclusive. The conscious Ego, in fact, is strongly conditioned by the functioning of its own organism, and the interest it can have in the continuation of its existence after the death of its organism consists precisely in the liberation from such conditionings and in the possibility of continuing to exist in a self-conscious form in the condition of spiritual Ego. The awareness of being, so to speak, in the service of a spiritual entity distinct from itself, or – as I have called it – of an alien spirit, can never fully satisfy it, unless it itself becomes that spirit when the organism dies: but then it will no longer be an alien spirit.

Speaking of the so-called reincarnation, we must not forget the important research carried out by the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918-2007) on the cases of children who remember events and people belonging to the experience of someone who had previously lived, to the point of identifying their own conscious Ego with that of the deceased person. Although these are statistically rare cases, we will see in a future post how they can be interpreted in relation to the development of the conscious Ego: for now it will suffice to observe that almost always the person whose Ego seemed to have reincarnated had died traumatically, often murdered, and therefore we could be in the presence of a phenomenon of possession, which inhibits the formation of a new autonomous conscious Ego, rather than helping it. Anyway, the cases studied by Stevenson confirm the existence of a parallel dimension in which those processes of recording, interpretation, storage and management of human experiences occur, so to speak, in the backstage, and then often influence, in one form or another, the psyche's dynamics that manifest themselves on the stage of human life. This is also the reason why the formation of the conscious Ego and its development within a human organism is a rather delicate process, which in some cases does not even develop properly, since it is hindered or impeded by the environmental circumstances in which the organism grows, and by the tensions caused by the psyche's dynamics at the mercy of which the still weak Ego finds itself. The first spiritualist theoretical exposition of reincarnation is contained in The Book of Spirits by Allan Kardec – pseudonym of the French pedagogue Hyppolite Léon Rivail (1803-1869), founder of the Revue Spirite – published in 1857, in which the idea of the progression of the conscious Ego contained in the revelations reported by Judge Edmonds in his book Spiritualism (according to which the conscious Ego would be transformed, once and for all, into a spiritual Ego after the death of its organism), was taken up and reworked: it was no longer the conscious Ego linked to a single organism that evolved in the spirit dimensions, but an abstract spiritual entity, distinct from the conscious Ego, which had to pass through a certain number of incarnations – each, obviously, with a different organism, and therefore with a different conscious Ego – to be able to learn from the experiences of human life and practice in it as in a training ground (but always through a conscious Ego), in order to evolve on a spiritual level. Perhaps Kardec hoped in this way to offer an answer to some of the questions that the progression theory exposed by Edmonds left unresolved (as we have seen in the pages dedicated to Judge Edmonds and his book), or perhaps his theory of successive incarnations sprang from some more European attunements of the psyche, different from the American ones: in fact, in that period the influences of Hinduism exerted a strong fascination on European culture. In any case, I think that – at least as regards the fate of our conscious Ego – the theory of successive incarnations proposed by Kardec has many controversial aspects, and is even less convincing than the theory of progression presented by Edmonds.

Taken together, the information obtained through mediums should be considered for what they really are: tales, narratives of something that we humans cannot directly experience or verify. The persuasive power of such communications depends on the greater or lesser trust that everyone can place in the communicating entities, and in the affinity of what they propose with the attunements of the human psyche to which our Ego is most strongly drawn. As we have seen with regard to the communications obtained by Judge Edmonds, the contamination of the alleged spiritual revelations by the human psyche is openly recognized by the same communicating entities, and it is not surprising that – just to give an example – the classification of spirits set out by Kardec in his Book of Spirits faithfully reproduces the various human types present in our social systems. Then when one of the sitters dares to ask the communicating entities for reliable explanations on the reasons why the spirits should orient themselves towards one polarity or the other (always within the context of the human psyche), since they are all produced, so to speak, in the same factory, often gets inconclusive or even scathing answers, such as, «The human mind is not yet able to understand certain things...» or «Who are you, human, to want to question God's plans...», and similar absurdities. Sometimes recourse is made to the presumed free will granted to human beings to choose between one polarity of the psyche or the other, only to then have to recognize that certain choices are due to the ignorance in which the conscious Ego finds itself, and to the influence which evil-minded spirits, who take manifest satisfaction in misleading and deceiving the poor Ego because of its weakness, have upon it. In short, an overall confused, inconsistent and far from satisfactory theoretical framework. Ultimately, everyone is free to engage directly with the various communications of mediumistic origin and to evaluate them in the light of the orientations determined by the attunements of their own psyche: they will certainly be able to find some interesting food for thought, above all in an era – such as the present one – in which the dominant cultural programs tend to suppress (or even deny) the importance of the orientation of the conscious Ego during human life in relation to its fate after the death of the organism to which it is bound. However, it should be remembered that we still move within the dynamics determined by the human psyche, which organic life itself compels us to confront, and that our organism's death represents a fundamental (and for us mysterious) passage through which the Ego may eventually experience a completely different dimension.

In conclusion, I would like to point out that these revelations of mediumistic origin seem to belong to a different age, very distant from ours, at least in terms of the knowledge that we humans currently have. It is therefore easy to recognize the naivety or falsehood of certain information regarding, for example, the characteristics of the inhabitants of planets such as Jupiter or Mars, or the physiological functioning of the human organism, or even the ways in which the dynamics of the human psyche are attributed to energies such as electricity or magnetism. Equally naive – in a way that sometimes even seems offensive to our current intellectual resources – are the explanations given on the phenomena of life in our world and on the organization of living matter. Now, it would be easy to conclude that this information is nothing but the products of the obscure imaginative layers of the human psyche: however, the fact remains that in some cases the communicating entities also show that they are capable of producing physical phenomena – such as apports or materializations – which we, with our current knowledge, are unable to explain, and which imply powers of control over the energies of the physical world, which are far beyond our human capabilities. Furthermore, these same entities have sometimes demonstrated that they have detailed and precise knowledge of particular events relating to people or things in our world, and in some cases also that they are able to foresee events that had not yet occurred. By showing the effects of their powers and interacting with the sitters through the means at their disposal, these entities win their trust, to the point that their revelations are then believed even when our human intelligence should lead us to adopt a critical attitude towards them. If the purpose of this operation, which lasted for over a century and a half, was to convince humanity of the continuation of the existence of the conscious Ego after the death of its organism and of the need to adopt more virtuous behaviours, we must conclude that this goal has not been achieved, or that the mission was abandoned. At the beginning of the spiritualist movement, mediumistic communications often referred to a rapid and universal spread of this new faith, which would soon be shared by all humans, convinced by the evidence itself: this was not the case, and evidently the alien entities involved in this operation had underestimated the dynamics of the human psyche. It may be that this operation was undertaken on the initiative of a group of entities, which did not have the necessary resources to adequately control the quality of the communications transmitted, or to prevent other entities from gaining access to the transmission devices. In the light of what happened later, it seems instead that other entities have been more successful, who – even without directly manifesting themselves – have stimulated the development of human scientific and technological knowledge. Based on these considerations, I will not deal further with communications or revelations of mediumistic origin, unless I happen to come across something truly significant and convincing, capable of overcoming all the obstacles posed by the human psyche.

NDEs as sources of information about the experiences of the spiritual Ego

On this site I have already dealt extensively with NDEs both in the pages of the section dedicated to them, and in the Blog 2021 (Studies and research on NDEs), as well as in the two-part Report on NDEs published in the 2022 Blog. In relation to the threshold represented by the organism's death, which we are now examining, NDEs have the advantage of being regarded as real experiences – although exclusively subjective – accessible to the conscious Ego of a human being, which we may regard as having characteristics similar to those of our own Ego. When we feel able to trust the accounts of those who have gone through one of those experiences, we evaluate the possibility that, upon the death of our organism, something similar can also be experienced by our Ego. But since we are dealing with typically subjective experiences, it is evident that this possibility cannot become a certainty: it will rather take the form of desire or fear depending on the quality of the experience itself, depending on how our conscious Ego evaluates it. As we have seen in the Report on NDEs on this site, the availability a considerable number of reports of experiences of this kind allows us to identify those elements that recur more frequently, and which therefore are more likely to occur. However, it should always be kept in mind that, across the range of these experiences, the proximity of the experiencer's organism to the critical condition of death is highly variable, and in no case can it evidently be considered as definitively reached, given that the experiencer's conscious Ego has been rejoined its organism and can describe the experience. One of the main obstacles which prevent the conscious Ego from being convinced of the continuation of its existence after the death of its organism – as can easily be observed – is the apparent instability of states of consciousness, according to the conditions in which the organism finds itself. In fact, in order for the Ego to feel that it exists, it is first of all necessary that it be aware of its own existence, therefore, in accordance with what we experience during our organic life, it is essential that our consciousness functions: no consciousness, no Ego, at least in human life. But it is clear to us that the states of consciousness depend on the functioning of particular brain areas, and that – consequently – consciousness can be disabled by altering the organism's conditions. Interest in NDEs largely arises from the supposition that alternative states of consciousness are activated – though we do not know how – even in conditions in which it is believed that, as a rule, ordinary consciousness should be switched off. Of course, there are also those who do not share this supposition, and believe that the conditions in which the organism of an NDEr finds itself while the event is occurring, are such as to still allow consciousness to function organically. It is a rather complex issue, the implications of which – also from a socio-cultural point of view – are deeper than is generally assumed.

The ascertainment (and, technically, also the declaration) of an organism's death is always made from an external point of view, so to speak, that is, by another living person, assuming that, as far as we can know, the physiological conditions of the organism considered dead no longer allow its consciousness to reawaken, and therefore the conscious Ego to experience something in our dimension. But while in some cases the organism declared dead shows deteriorating conditions such as to exclude any form of brain functioning (for example in the case of an organism burned in a fire), in many other cases the process of post-mortem deterioration and decomposition proceeds at its own normal pace, and consequently the absence of any form of consciousness even in the initial stages of this period is reasonably inferred on the basis of our current knowledge on the brain functioning. However, as we have already observed in the page on Studies and research on NDEs, with particular reference to what Sam Parnia, M.D., internationally recognized expert in the field of resuscitation techniques, explains in his 2013 book Erasing Death - The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death, in recent decades these techniques have made great progress, allowing the reactivation of brain processes, and therefore of consciousness, after several hours, even in organisms that in the past would have been considered and declared definitively dead. If what Yuri Rodonaia said about his NDE is true, his body remained in a morgue for three days – considered dead and managed as such – before his consciousness reawakened in his organism. And it is suspected that in the past there have been cases of organisms buried in coffins, before a return of consciousness forced the Ego to experience an agony that was certainly not pleasant. Rare cases have also been documented of people, undergoing surgery, for which anesthesia had not worked properly in suppressing consciousness, although it was effective in inhibiting muscle activity, with the result that their Ego experienced intense pain, but was unable to communicate its conscious state to the medical staff. So it is not easy to attribute to the functioning of the brain a form of conscious activity – even if not ordinary – such as that evidently involved in NDEs, in conditions in which it is believed that the brain is not able to maintain consciousness: this question has already been dealt with in the page entitled Studies and research on NDEs, to which reference is made. Someone might argue that NDEs do not require ordinary consciousness, such as that of the waking state, but a consciousness somewhat akin to dreaming, which could be the result of brain activity even in those conditions in which the brain cannot produce ordinary consciousness. But, beyond the fact that we do not yet have sufficient knowledge about the correlations between brain states and states of consciousness, many people who have undergone NDEs deny the dreamlike nature of their experiences, and often assert with conviction that they are even more real than the reality perceived through ordinary waking consciousness.

Regardless of the mechanisms through which NDEs occur, if I may put it that way, it is evident that the value and significance they hold for the conscious Ego lies in the experience itself, which often surpasses in importance any other experience the Ego has had during its life. In relation to this fact, we could divide humanity into three categories: those who have never been in the critical conditions in which NDEs sometimes occur, those who – despite having been in such conditions – have never experienced an NDE (the vast majority), and those who have experienced at least one. In the minority group of those who have experienced an NDE we can still distinguish between those whose experience was felt by the conscious Ego as negative, distressing or hellish (a minority), those whose experience has been predominantly positive but not particularly rich, complex, prolonged and meaningful (probably the majority), and those for whom the experience has had an emotional, perceptive, intellectual and sentimental impact so rich in meaning and content as to make it, as well as unforgettable, different and more important than any other experience of their life. Experiences of the latter type offer us important clues and grounds for reflection on what can be defined as Spirit dimension, and on the ways the conscious Ego could experience it, once free from the constraints of its organism and transformed into a spiritual Ego. Since these are experiences actually undergone by the Ego of some human beings, they do not present the same interpretative ambiguities determined by the contaminations of the psyche that characterize mediumistic communications: in fact, while the latter often claim to be considered as objective, the NDEs are by their nature subjective, and therefore their variability does not surprise us. In any case, I consider NDEs all the more interesting the more they differ from the dynamics of the psyche that involve the Ego during its organic life: in this respect the Spirit dimension can really reveal itself as something completely different than what we believe it could be, and that is suggested to us by the psyche's positive polarity, from which arise the various ideas on divinity and on rewards, punishments, expiations, merits and demerits with which almost all religious orientations are imbued, forced to deal with the bipolar dynamics of the human psyche. The fact that the Spirit's energy is free from the bipolarity that characterizes our psyche completely changes the perspective, and it does not seem to me a coincidence that some of those who have experienced that dimension remember understanding the meaning of everything, and to have received a clear, incontrovertible and immediately intellegible answer to each of their questions, only to be forced to forget everything they knew during their return to organic life, and to the usual dynamics of the human psyche. Also the fact that the Spirit's energy is perceived, felt and interpreted as absolute, infinite and unconditional love, represents a further confirmation of its essential difference from the energy of the psyche. We are dealing with two truly different and separate dimensions, and the organism's death can represent for the conscious Ego the opportunity to make the transition from one to the other.

Most NDEs occur spontaneously, that is, they are neither foreseen nor expected by the Ego of those who experience them. Although nowadays information about NDEs is more and more widespread, and therefore the number of people who have heard about them is constantly growing, many of those who have made their experience public say, in answering surveys, that they were unaware of NDEs when theirs occurred. Furthermore, as we have already had occasion to observe, there does not seem to be a precise relationship between the quality of life or the orientation of the Ego of those who have experienced an NDE, and the contents of the experience itself, even if certain dynamics of the psyche of the subjects involved can manifest themselves during a part of it. When the conscious Ego enters the sphere of influence of the Spirit dimension, everything seems transformed, even if in various cases (but not always) the memories and consequences of the Ego's confrontation with the dynamics of the psyche seem to be reflected in what is called the life review. What surprises us most is the fact that in this process, during which the conscious Ego can relive with regret and sometimes even pain the negative consequences caused in others by some of its behaviors or by the expression of its thoughts, it feels the comfort of a sublime presence that not only doesn't judge it, and least of all condemns it, but doesn't even bestow forgiveness from above: on the contrary, the Spirit almost always manifests a sincere, warm and affectionate empathy towards the condition of weakness that the Ego is forced to endure during its organic life. In some cases the Spirit dimension is explicitly described as a place where pain and suffering simply do not exist, not even as a reflection of what happens in this organic life, a dimension that is indeed above and beyond good and evil. In that dimension the Spirit energy is experienced by the conscious Ego as pure, uncontaminated and absolute love that permeates everything in space-time. The Ego feels intensely attracted to this energy – which truly deserves to be called divine – to the point of losing interest in any other form of experience, and of desiring only to be allowed to remain within the Spirit's sphere of influence. We understand, then, how the Spirit dimension is completely beyond the reach of the human psyche: it seems to me above all important to understand how the Spirit is something different and quite distinct even with respect to the conceptions of divinity that are proposed to us, in various forms, by the positive polarity of the human psyche, ideas that always remain contaminated by the bipolarity that distinguishes the energy of the psyche, and consequently by the opposition between good and evil. It is advisable to reflect with particular attention on this fact, because precisely the Ego's habituation to the dynamics of the human psyche, contracted during its organic life, could become an obstacle in the process of transition to the Spirit dimension.

The lack of reliable knowledge regarding the various energies present in the cosmos, which has always characterized the human condition (at least up to the present day), causes the dynamics of the human psyche to act on the conscious Ego in a predominantly emotional and sentimental way, forcing it to identify with them and preventing it from developing an independent understanding that would allow it to study, interpret and, consequently, control them better. With the exception of those energies that fall within the sphere of physics, the knowledge of which has greatly increased in recent centuries, the other forms of energy are still interpreted in predominantly mythological terms, under the influence of the human psyche. From this point of view, the cultural programs of collective conditioning still prove remarkably effective in determining the prevailing functional attunements, to which millions and millions of human individuals adapt, just like well-designed automata. Yet, right in the age we are currently living in, there are some clues that could indicate the beginning of radical changes with respect to the way in which the conscious Ego has been involved in the dynamics of the human psyche up to now: one of these changes is the spread of information about NDEs; another change, closely associated with cognitive and technological progress, lies in the ways in which human minds are intensely induced to interact within digital computer networks, especially with the recent development of interactions related to artificial intelligence. It may be that in the near future the rapid diffusion and circulation of information will produce a sort of collective intelligence capable of making up, to a certain extent, for the limited individual resources that each of us, to a greater or lesser extent, can draw upon. We'll see if that is the case. But with regard to the individual conscious Ego and its destiny after the death of the organism to whose existence (and functioning) it is linked in this life, there are two really important questions that concern it, and for which we are looking for an answer. The first is that relating to the causes of the diversity of orientations of the various individual Egos during organic life, and to the greater or lesser resistance of each conscious Ego towards its involvement with the psyche's dynamics it experiences, and with which it tends to identify. The second concerns the importance of the Ego's determination in order to be able to successfully transfer into the Spirit dimension at the death of its organism, provided that it wishes to do so, and that such a transition is in fact possible. Even if these questions may remain unanswered, it will not be useless to try to delve into the reasons why we ask these questions, and the purpose served by the interest they arouse in us.

Although the attunements deriving from the positive polarity of the psyche often lead us to consider ourselves, as human beings, all brothers, the differences found between one person and another are undeniable: as for the formation and development of the organism, the causes of these differences are genetic, environmental and even cultural; but as regards the formation, development and functioning of the conscious Ego – which, at least from a certain stage onwards, must also provide for the needs of its own organism, and in many cases also for those of other organisms it takes care of – in addition to the influence of cultural conditioning programs, there are all the differences in resources (intellectual, volitional, creative, charismatic, emotional, etc.) generated by the way the mind functions, which gives rise to all the particular attunements in which every single conscious Ego is involved, due to the fragmentation of the human psyche into a plurality of individual entities. Although the cultural programs that are adopted according to collective needs try to promote a standard model of human behavior, the behaviors of individuals show how much it is possible to deviate from this model, to a greater or lesser extent: this fact becomes all the more evident in those historical periods – such as the one we are currently living in – in which the models of collective functioning fall into crisis, losing the ability to exert sufficient influence over the dynamics that arise spontaneously and autonomously from the individual psyche. Obviously, although the feeling of personal freedom can be enhanced (albeit often in an illusory way) by this state of affairs, the proper functioning of a human society is adversely affected by it, with consequences that then fall on the people who are part of it. The fact remains that, as I have always pointed out on this site, as far as we humans are concerned, the dimension of organic life remains under the control of the psyche, in whose dynamics the conscious Ego is inevitably involved – in one form or another – given that this seems to be the reason for its existence: to experience some of the attunements of the psyche and deal with them. But precisely under the aspect of identification with the dynamics of one's own psyche there are substantial differences between one Ego and another, differences that are also reflected in the way in which the Ego envisages, in perspective, the destiny that awaits it upon the death of the organism to which it is bound in this life. In fact, these differences depend – in the absence of direct experience – on what the psyche suggests to the Ego, and therefore on the degree to which the Ego acquiesces in what its psyche dictates. At the very least, those who have experienced an NDE can count on the direct experience of something that not infrequently occurred while the organism was in a critical condition that could have resulted in a definitive death, even if that didn't happen. As a result of their experience, the orientation of the conscious Ego of these people towards the dynamics of their own psyche often changes significantly.

The element that most influences the dynamics of the human psyche in relation to the organism's death is the flow of time: if past experiences contribute to determining the Ego's progressive transformations in the course of life, often increasing the resources of its consciousness, it is also true that the Ego seems to live in a continuous present, while the passage of time steadily reduces its expectations concerning the length of the life that still lies ahead. Furthermore, at a certain point in life, the human organism begins to show signs of decline which over time are transformed into that deterioration – often associated with various kinds of illnesses – which almost always precedes death due to old age. Consequently, that same Ego that in its youth felt intoxicated by the psyche's dynamics, which could make it feel immortal and hungry for life experiences, can end up experiencing completely different dynamics in old age, grounded in the melancholy of regrets or memories of the past, and in the knowledge that the future, which is shrinking day by day, will offer fewer and fewer positive, intense and fascinating emotions. Thus a sort of dissociation is created between a humankind that – despite the diversity of its various cultural components – continues its journey, and an Ego that knows (and feels) that its human experience is about to end: children, young and mature people, and the elderly exist in every age, but the individual Ego cannot stop the time of its own life which, in its inexorable flow, exerts its effects on the chronological age of its organism. The interest in human life does not consist in pretending to be able to remain forever young, and in trying to behave accordingly, often to ridiculous effects, to exorcise the thought of approaching death, although it is true that the cultural programs currently prevalent in our advanced societies seek to promote attitudes of this kind, with the intention of making the most of organic life. In the final part of its organic life, it would be more appropriate for the conscious Ego to use a part of the time that remains to live to prepare for death to the best of its ability, just as one prepares in anticipation of a long journey in mysterious and unexplored territories, rather than passively surrendering and resigning to the idea that the inevitable death of the organism determines the Ego's annihilation and the end of all its experiences. In the next post we will see what resources the Ego may have at its disposal to to embark upon this journey under the most favorable conditions and with the best possible prospects.

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