The fate of the conscious Ego

The fate of the conscious Ego after the death of its organism

The Ego's condition of subjection

In the course of human life, the Ego soon learns – both from its direct experience and as a result of the cultural programs that are transmitted to it – that its will is not enough for it to overcome the powers that drive the events of this world, and that, if it wants to live, it must learn to bear various things (including pain and suffering), to suffer the blows of fate and the consequences of its own or others' decisions, and – in simple terms – to be patient, ready to fight and to suffer. Indeed, the only thing to which the Ego is truly subject is the dynamics of its own psyche, as shown by the different reactions of various people when they find themselves in the same environmental conditions of risk or adversity. On the other hand, the will to live itself, together with all the various forms of desire and attachment that bind us to organic life, originates from our psyche. Precisely the bond that links the Ego to its organism, consequently involving it in the dynamics of the psyche that derive from it, means that the death of the organism can be interpreted and felt as a misfortune or as a liberation, depending on the experiences that fate reserved for the Ego during life. But in relation to what it can possibly experience after its organism's death, the Ego usually continues to rely on the same attunements of the psyche to which it has become accustomed during organic life, without considering that, with the death of the organism, the very bond that subjected it to those attunements also comes to an end, and that therefore everything may change. Obviously, the more the Ego has managed to distance itself from the dynamics of its own psyche, and not identify with them already in the course of organic life, the more it will feel ready to embark on the journey into the unknown that awaits it after death. Regardless of the orientations, very different from one Ego to another, about what experiences await the Ego once its organism has ceased to function, one can wonder whether the Ego has the necessary resources to control the course of these experiences, or if it will find itself – once again – at the mercy of superior powers that will be able to impose on it any kind of experience (pleasant or unpleasant) as its destiny, in the same way as it often had to experience in the course of organic life. Of course, this field of investigation cannot interest those who are convinced that the organism's death determines the annihilation of the conscious Ego, who, precisely because of the loss of any form of consciousness, would not even be able to realize its own condition of non-existence. Actually, one of the most fascinating aspects of the study of the human psyche lies in the variety and diversity of the interpretations that have been developed concerning what may happen to the conscious Ego after the death of its organism.

The flow of time that governs our organic life ensures that, when the moment comes, every Ego can directly experience what happens near death, and possibly afterwards. So, it's just a matter of being patient and letting time take its course: that moment will come for each of us. But since we humans are curious by nature, and to some extent thirst for knowledge, we are also accustomed to trying to foresee what the future may hold, so that we can manage it to the best of our abilities. For this reason, we feel the need to obtain information (more or less reliable) on what awaits our conscious Ego when its organism dies. In search of this information, we will consider those direct subjective experiences involving a non-ordinary state of consciousness, through which the Ego can experience a state of existence – often defined as incorporeal – completely different from that of organic life, not only from waking life, but also from ordinary dreaming. Most of these experiences are classified as NDEs (Near Death Experiences), precisely because when they occur the organism is in a critical condition – in which some vital functions are more or less seriously compromised – which could result in permanent death. Other experiences occur when the organism is in a condition of risk, even if its vital functions remain intact: for example, during a long fall from a high place. In other cases these experiences occur spontaneously when a person is in a persistent condition of psychophysical exhaustion, anxiety or anguish. Sometimes, but rarely, meaningful experiences of this kind occur as a result of taking psychoactive substances. Equally rarely, and only in certain individuals, they can occur as a result of meditative practices, particular physical exercises, penance or mortifications of one's organism. I think we shouldn't be surprised by the differences that are found between the experiences of one Ego and those of another, given that in most cases these experiences are contaminated by the ambivalent dynamics of the human psyche. Instead, all those experiences in which the conscious Ego feels it has entered a new dimension, which perfectly harmonizes with all its deepest needs, are particularly interesting.

Every conscious Ego carries within itself a kind of compass which guides it toward what it believes may be experienced as a form of happiness, in the broadest sense of the term, also through those human emotions which we interpret as pleasure, joy, satisfaction, and that we generally regard as positive. At the same time this compass leads it to try to avoid pain and suffering, both when they are determined by its organism's traumas and malfunctions, and when they derive from emotions and feelings that arise from the human psyche. Despite its commitment, the Ego often fails to navigate successfully in the troubled waters of organic life, following the direction that its compass indicates: this happens due to the environmental conditions with which the organism is forced to interact as a result of its survival needs, due to the Ego's involvement in the dynamics of the human psyche with which it almost always identifies, due to the fragmentation of consciousness into a plurality of individuals in which the psyche's bipolar dynamics manifest themselves in different and often conflicting ways, and because of the scarcity of resources available to the Ego, above all in terms of knowledge, a deficiency that is not offset by the poor quality of most of the cultural programs that are transmitted to it (also produced, as we have seen, by the human psyche). The various individual experiences of each conscious Ego depend on all the possible variations of these causes and on the way in which they amalgamate over time (for better or for worse): not infrequently – due to the confusion in which it is forced to live – the Ego also loses the ability to orient itself, above all when it allows itself to be seduced by what appear to be immediate benefits, without evaluating the future consequences deriving from them, or when it takes refuge in what seems to it the lesser evil, at present, hoping that some benevolent star will eventually come to its aid. However, we can observe that in some cases (very few, in percentage) the conscious Ego displays extraordinary steadfastness in remaining faithful to what we may call its ideals, remaining largely indifferent to the hardships and even the torments that its organism has to endure as a consequence of its steadiness: it seems then that the Ego may find itself under the influence of something that transcends the ordinary dynamics of the human psyche, as they are manifested through the organism's functioning. This particular condition is often referred to as fortitude, spiritual strength, spirit of sacrifice, heroic virtue, holiness, and other similar expressions. It should be specified, for clarity and completeness of information, that in some cases this particular condition is also found when the conscious Ego is oriented towards the negative polarity of the psyche: in simple terms, when it commits itself to the service of what is considered evil (at least by those who suffer its negative consequences), as happens not only with conquerors and tyrants, but also with terrorists who believe they are fighting for a just cause.

Therefore, if the conditioning deriving from the dynamics of the human psyche can imprison the conscious Ego in a cage in which the compass on which it should rely no longer works correctly, so much so that it can cause the most absurd and aberrant orientations, what possibilities are available to the Ego for freeing itself from this condition of subjection and to reach the Spirit dimension once its organism is dead? We can observe, first of all, that the organism's death should in itself free the Ego from the influence of the force field generated by the human psyche, which exerts its power mainly through the needs and vulnerabilities of the organism. However, examining the reports of some NDEs, one gets the impression that sometimes the Ego can become caught in a kind of phantom force field, so to speak, because it has become so accustomed to being subjected to the dynamics of the psyche during its organic life, so as to no longer even be able to conceive a different condition of existence: just like those prisoners who, after having lived in a jail cell for many years, are no longer able to get out even when the door is opened. Also in the case of positive NDEs, the journey of the Ego's transition into the sphere of influence of the Spirit's energy is often experienced with some surprise, as if it depended on the intervention of superior forces or entities, even if benevolent towards the Ego, in whose presence the Ego nevertheless remains passive. This condition of subjection to a superior will becomes particularly evident when the Ego is invited – and in some cases even forced, against its will – to leave the Spirit dimension to come back to organic life, despite feeling an intense desire to be allowed to stay there forever. It is also true that, in many of these cases, the efforts of those who, in our physical dimension, are working strenuously to revive the organism whose Ego is involved in the NDE must be taken into account: in turn, the Ego – back conscious in its organism – often does not feel any gratitude towards those who have worked so hard to bring it back: a truly strange and, in some respects, paradoxical situation. On the other hand, once freed from the distorting conditionings imposed by the human psyche, we cannot regard the Ego's will as something insignificant merely because it may be weaker than other cosmic energies capable of influencing its destiny, even when – as in the Spirit case – the same Ego has no doubts in feeling and recognizing the superior value of a form of energy to which it feels irresistibly attracted. Let us therefore try to examine a certain number of NDE reports, to see how the intentions and the will of the Ego may play an active role in shaping the course of the experience.

When the journey takes a bad turn

I have already referred to distressing NDEs, characterized by sometimes even hellish experiences, both on the page dedicated to them in the NDE section and on the Blog 2021 post dedicated to Research on NDEs. Just on this last page, I reported this consideration of mine: «We cannot avoid the impression that our destiny is determined by something that escapes the control of the conscious Ego, who can only become conscious – at the best it can, in relation to the resources at its disposal – of what it happens to experience, both when it is connected to the human organism, and when it is possibly able to explore different dimensions. According to various NDE testimonies, even among those who have managed to access the Spirit dimension, some have been forced to reconnect with their organism and to return to the human condition, despite having felt and expressed an intense desire not to return». Cases of distressing or hellish NDEs are a minority – they are estimated to represent about 5% of all NDEs – but it may be that many of those who have experienced them do not talk about them, not only for fear that their reports will not receive a good welcome, but precisely so as not to reactivate an extremely painful memory, which they wish they could bury forever. In her 2003 book Territori oltre la vita (Territories beyond life), dedicated to NDEs, the author Fulvia Cariglia tells of a Florentine doctor who, when asked to recount his experience, so replied: «I can't talk about that again... so as not to frustrate the efforts I make to forget those visions». In any case, these decidedly negative experiences confirm some important facts for us: first of all, that the Ego is forced to experience something which, without any doubt, it does not like, to the point that it would rather lapse into complete unconsciousness than continue that kind of experience. Secondly, it is an unexpected experience (as is also the case for most positive NDEs), with respect to which the Ego cannot find the necessary resources to modify it in a more pleasant, or at least more bearable, way. Furthermore, we usually have very little information on the personal history of the experiencer and the dynamics of the psyche in which the experiencer's Ego was involved, to even be able to hypothesize the connections between an experience that undoubtedly springs from the psyche's negative polarity, and the condition of the conscious Ego in the ordinary state of consciousness. However, as demonstrated by some NDEs also mentioned on this site (for example, that of Howard Storm, or that of Josiane Antonette), there are cases of experiences which, after an initial negative and distressing phase, often marked by the presence of wicked spirits, evolve in an increasingly positive way. This transition, from a condition decidedly characterized by elements belonging to the negative and dark polarity of the psyche, to a completely different environment, in which positive and luminous elements predominate, usually occurs when experiencers call upon a higher spiritual entity for help and ask to be rescued.

One may think that in the distressing or hellish NDEs the Ego did not have time to take any action capable of altering its condition, since the experience is in any case interrupted when the organism starts functioning again and the Ego is brought back to organic life. It is not uncommon for NDEs that later evolve in a positive direction to begin with a phase in which the Ego still experiences, in some way, the earthly environment, before finding itself in a condition of emptiness or darkness. For example, in the Anonymous French NDE, this condition is recalled as follows: «Later I found myself in an abyss of darkness, of silence. I was alone in the world, in an infinite nothingness and I would have given anything to hear a noise and see something. I do not know how long that state had lasted. Maybe a fraction of a second? Time did not exist. I thought, "Here, my girl, you're dead". And yet I was not dead since I existed. I remembered a phrase I had been taught at catechism when I was a child: We live until the end of time, until the final resurrection. In that context, the idea of living in that nothingness and darkness seemed unbearable to me. Something within me cried out for help and from a distance I saw a light. From that moment on I was no longer alone in the world». Thus, the Ego does not always lose heart when it finds itself in a situation for which it was neither prepared nor accustomed. One may think, and perhaps not without reason, that the original core, on which the various programs that are culturally spread and assimilated as religion developed, was made up of experiences of this type, which, not being all the same, were then elaborated in a different way. It is evident, however, that we are still in a dimension heavily contaminated by the energy of the human psyche, of which the infernal experiences, as opposed to the heavenly ones, clearly demonstrate its bipolar nature. Once the Ego no longer feels bound to its own organism, the barrier of separation between what we usually perceive as real and what seems to us to be imaginary can disappear, and if the Ego does not have the resources to transform the experience it is undergoing – in the event that it is unpleasant or painful for it – it remains trapped in that experience, until something from the outside comes to free it. It is as if the Ego found itself accidentally tuned to a television channel that is broadcasting a horror movie – which is experienced as absolutely real, because of the Ego's increased sensitivity due to its disembodied state – without being able to use a remote control that allows it to change channels. After all, an analogous condition can also occur during our organic life, when the Ego – due to an accident or trauma – remains trapped in a situation in which it is no longer able to autonomously control its own organism in order to be able to break free, and – despite its suffering – it is forced to wait for help to be given by someone else in order to be saved. We are still dealing with dynamics originated by the human psyche, which the Ego can manage more effectively if, already in the course of its organic life, it is able to devote part of the time and energy at its disposal to exercising itself to increase its own autonomy, without becoming ensnared in the attunements of its own psyche.

It is important that the Ego be able, in all circumstances, to understand and, so to speak, to remember its role as an experiencer: the consequences that the experienced events determine for its sensitivity, with their positive or negative effects, to varying degrees, are part of the dynamics imposed on the Ego by the human psyche, whether they derive from the interactions between the Ego's organism and the natural environment (in all its variables), or from the interactions between each organism and other human beings. Furthermore, by naively allowing itself to be influenced by the dynamics of its own psyche, the Ego is continually induced to make choices and decisions, even when it does not know whether the results of these choices and decisions will conform to its predictions or hopes. These complex processes often occur automatically – without the Ego being truly aware of what it does, why it does it, and the consequences its decisions may have – as a result of the cultural programs that have been transmitted to a person, and which exert their effects on that person's mental system. And even when the Ego becomes entangled, for one reason or another, in the negative reactions generated by its psyche as a result of all these complex dynamics, it almost always continues to turn to the same psyche, disguised in a different form, to be deluded and deceived once again. These are the normal effects of organic life, and in attempting to interpret them the Ego is led to believe that everything depends on something else, on a reality that must be considered as objective and absolutely dominant, given that the organism's life depends on it: whereas what actually predominates in this dimension is the human psyche, to which the Ego often attributes a divine value. It could be argued that the function of the human psyche is to bring order out of what would otherwise be the chaos of nature, and certainly this aspect is present within the psyche, which, in its bipolarity, also manifests negative and destructive dynamics directed against what it has itself made possible through its positive polarity. In any case, these assessments of mine do not mean that the Ego can completely free itself from the dynamics of its own psyche as long as it remains linked to its organism, unless it has become completely indifferent to the fact that its organic life may end at any moment (something that, since ancient times, some people have actually achieved). But it is more within the reach of the Ego to practice distancing itself from the dynamics of its own psyche, without letting itself be involved or influenced by them more than strictly necessary, so that it can observe them as particular and limited elements and attunements of that much larger and more predominant phenomenon which is the human psyche as a whole, being well aware, however, that the conscious Ego of a great many people still identifies almost entirely with the limited range of attunements of the psyche picked up by their minds. If practiced over time with sufficient determination, this exercise allows the Ego to feel freer and less conditioned especially towards the negative dynamics of the psyche that try to involve it, and makes it far more aware of the bipolar character of the psyche's energy while recognizing the intrinsic unity of the phenomenon as a whole.

Among the strange negative dynamics produced by the human psyche that the Ego must sometimes experience are nightmares: even though the Ego is caught up in them during the dream state, the emotions it experiences can be particularly intense, and the anguish lasts until the moment it manages to wake up, returning to the waking state and interrupting a painful experience, the memory of which can remain vivid in its mind for some time. There may not be a cause and effect relationship between waking life events and nightmares: not infrequently the individuals who experience particularly intense nightmares are children whose daytime life is, at least in appearance, completely normal. Distressing NDEs give the impression of being nightmares that the conscious Ego experiences as a reality in which it feels trapped, unable, so to speak, to wake up. Also those experiences, however, end when the Ego returns to organic life, even though they may have seemed to last an extraordinarily long time: we cannot know what would have happened next if the experience had not stopped. What we can consider certain is that in all those cases in which the Ego feels oppressed and subjugated by powers that force it to experience negative, painful and demeaning emotions, we are still operating within the sphere of influence of the human psyche, whether we are dealing with organic experiences, or whether the Ego feels dissociated and separated from its own organism: the transition to the Spirit dimension has not succeeded, or has not occurred. And since there are cases in which this transition occurs, as we will see better shortly, it is understandable that the Ego wonders if its aspirations and intentions have any real influence within these energetic dynamics. During its organic life, the Ego has to deal with the dynamics of its own psyche, which are still determined by the functioning of the organism to which it is linked, and in particular by the nervous system and the brain: strange as it may seem, especially in the light of most of the cultural conditioning programs that we receive, the very thing to which the Ego feels most strongly attached, that is, its organism, exhibits some decidedly peculiar characteristics in its functioning, to justify which – towards others, but often also towards itself – the Ego must resort to the most absurd stratagems suggested by the psyche. In carefully considering its own condition, or even – as far as possible – that of the Ego of other people, the Ego often has to recognize the inadequacy of the resources at its disposal to manage the difficulties that arise even only in relation to the pure and simple management of its body, within an environment that may show itself as adverse, in one form or another. From this arises that sense of frustration and subjection to one's destiny, which often accompanies the Ego for the entire duration of its human life, and perhaps even beyond. Yet the Ego should remember that, with death, that powerful bond linking it to its organism is dissolved once and for all.

Sometimes the Ego succeeds in experiencing the Spirit dimension

A considerable number of NDEs provide evidence of the possibility of experiencing the Spirit dimension, which has been granted to the conscious Ego of some human beings. Since these are real experiences – to deny which it is necessary to accuse those who report them of bad faith – one cannot question the value they have for the conscious Ego of those who have been involved in them. Everyone is free to study them from the perspective they consider most interesting or most useful for the advancement of human knowledge, even in an attempt to identify their causes (be they organic or of another origin), but for the conscious Ego the only truly significant fact is the experience itself, since its emotional and often cognitive intensity surpasses any other possible human experience. With regard to these experiences, our conscious Ego, bound to its organism, can find itself in one of these three conditions: 1) it has directly experienced the Spirit dimension and retained a sufficiently clear and lasting memory of it; 2) it has not experienced the Spirit dimension directly, but is familiar with accounts given by others about their experiences in that dimension; 3) it is completely unaware of the possibility offered to the Ego to experience the Spirit dimension. Those who belong to the first category are far fewer than those in the second, and probably, throughout the world, the number of those who belong to the third category is even higher, even if the spread of information allowed by current technologies should determine, over time, an increase in the second category. Among those who are in the second condition, some remain indifferent to what may happen to their Ego after the death of its organism, and some of them continue to take for granted that their Ego will be annihilated, while many others feel an intense desire to be able to live experiences similar to those told by those who have managed to access the Spirit dimension. These experiences are characterized by some very specific elements, to which I referred in the pages of the Report on NDEs (Blog 2022), and which I summarize here: 1) the presence of an energy that takes the form, sometimes personified, of a light that radiates an absolute, unconditional and all-encompassing love; 2) the absence of any form of bipolarity, unlike what happens for the energy of the human psyche; 3) a perception of time, which can be interpreted as an eternal present that also includes past and future, completely different from the human one; 4) a profound sense on the part of the Ego that it has finally come home, that is, in the dimension most in harmony with its own authentic essence; 5) the Ego's intense and irresistible desire to remain forever in that dimension, its clear refusal to return to organic life, and the suffering, or spirit of sacrifice, with which it accepts the necessity of returning, or the decision (whether fully explained or not) that it must do so.

The very nature of these characteristics should lead the conscious Ego to desire and aspire to experience them after the death of its organism: if this does not happen, it is because the Ego is not yet sufficiently mature and developed to understand their importance and value, or because it is still imprisoned in mental patterns determined by its psyche's tunings that prevent it from admitting and recognizing the very existence of the Spirit energy. However, if we examine the personal histories of those who later experienced the Spirit dimension, in most cases, as far as we know, there appears to be no correlation between the Ego's expectations, outlook, or way of life prior to the NDE and what it actually experiences during the experience itself, often filling it with surprise and wonder. On the other hand, the complete absence of the experience of the Spirit dimension in most cases of people whose organism has been in a critical condition similar to that of those who have experienced it, or the reports of NDEs with distressing or hellish content, do not allow us to assume the existence of any automatic mechanism by which every Ego could take for granted that at the death of its organism it will be able to experience the Spirit dimension. It therefore seems that the fact that this experience occurs or not depends upon a will that is independent of the experiencer's own will: the same will that in some cases can force the Ego to return to organic life, even if the Ego opposes that with all its energies. In some cases, but not always, the transition to the Spirit dimension is described as a journey at dizzying speed through a tunnel at whose far end a light shines that becomes more and more intense as the Ego proceeds towards it. Sometimes the tunnel is traveled in the opposite direction, and even faster, when the Ego has to return to the dimension of organic life, but more often the retuning of consciousness to the normal range of human experiences occurs almost instantaneously. During these travel experiences the Ego plays an almost entirely passive role, regardless of whether it can feel them as pleasant, or disconcerting and disorienting, or even uncomfortable, for a sort of sense of vertigo that they cause to it. However, at the beginning of the experience, the Ego already felt freed from all the physical pain that previously afflicted it due to the critical conditions of its organism (which is now perceived as something utterly alien to itself), and therefore it becomes extremely difficult to establish meaningful correlations between the events occurring on the physical plane, involving the organism, and what the conscious Ego is experiencing during what we, as human beings, regard as the normal flow of time, but which the experiencer perceives and interprets in an entirely different way. When the Ego finally reaches the Spirit dimension – whether at the end of its journey of transition or simply upon completing its separation from the patterns of the psyche associated with organic life – it experiences that dimension as intensely real, often even more real than the physical world, while remaining fully aware that what it is experiencing does not belong to the organic realm.

At this point, it is tempting to think that we have outlined a sufficiently clear picture, which we could summarize as follows: the conscious Ego is formed, develops and transforms during organic life, through its engagement with the dynamics of the human psyche, to pass, at the end of it, into the Spirit dimension, where it continues to exist (and to further evolve) in harmony with its most authentic and profound essence. The fact that we do not know how the Ego passes from the vehicle (if it may be called such) of the human organism to some other vehicle which allows it to continue to exist in a different form and in a different dimension, despite being important, is not ultimately so serious, if we consider that our experience of organic life too is based on habit, not on knowledge: from the point of view of the conscious Ego, in fact, we find that we are associated and bound to an organism, and to depend on the brain functioning for the activation of the psyche's dynamics that we experience in this dimension, but we do not know what determines this form of existence, which, furthermore, has a temporary duration. Thus, once this life has ended, the Ego might just find out that its consciousness, its sensitivity, its sense of identity and some of its memories of this organic life have been retuned to a different range of frequencies through an unfamiliar device (which is exactly what appears to happen in most NDEs). Furthermore, according to the reports of some NDErs, when the Ego is in the Spirit dimension it realizes that it is no longer quite what it was during organic life: even if it maintains a sense of its own identity, it experiences and interprets reality in a different way. This does not surprise us, since in organic life there is a close correlation between the environmental conditions (in the broadest sense of the term, including human interactions) in which our organism finds itself, and the dynamics of the psyche in which the Ego becomes involved. Consequently, in such a different environment as the Spirit dimension undoubtedly is, the Ego experiences not only the reality, but also its own essence, in a completely different light from that (with all its shadows and darker aspects) to which it got used to under the influence of the human psyche. We can therefore understand how both the spiritual Ego and the conscious Ego linked to organic life are fundamentally the same entity, which however experiences itself, and the reality in which it exists, in a markedly different way. During its organic existence, the Ego forms, develops, transforms, and experiences over time all the psyche's dynamics resulting from the vicissitudes and events in which its organism is involved, including the final experience of death. In the Spirit dimension, instead, the Ego experiences its own eternal essence, in any case not conditioned by the flow of time, and at last feels freed from the bipolar dynamics of the human psyche, having experienced them directly, and it may be worthwhile to reflect upon the significance of that experience.

In a considerable number of NDEs, the realization recurs, on the part of the spiritual Ego (or in any case by the Ego who is experiencing the Spirit dimension), that the experience of human life has been accepted, and in a certain sense even willingly chosen and planned, by the Ego itself, obviously in its spiritual condition. Motivations of various kinds, more or less convincing, are then put forward to explain and justify this choice, of the difficulties and risks of which the spiritual Ego is well aware (or so it seems). Experiences of this kind, interpreted in the light of the human psyche, have given rise to the theory of reincarnation (in its various forms), on the basis of which the spiritual Ego would undergo (or would be forced to undergo) a series of experiences of organic life, each of which would give rise to a conscious Ego that, as a rule, would not remember either its existence as a spiritual Ego, or its previous existences in organic form: only after returning to the Spirit dimension would the Ego remember, more or less vaguely, all its organic existences. This theory, often naively used also to justify the strong differences that characterize the destiny of every human being and that determine the experiences that their conscious Ego goes through, contains several unresolved issues that undermine its credibility: in fact, it recognizes an individuality also to every spiritual Ego – which would be one among a multitude – without going into the causes and motivations of the differences that characterize such individuality. Furthermore, basing itself on the way in which the conscious Ego linked to its human organism perceives the flow of time, it arbitrarily extends this temporality to the Spirit dimension, attributing a succession over time to the various incarnations, which sometimes takes on almost comical aspects when it is taken seriously by those who claim to remember their former lives (although this does not rule out the possibility that memories of lives actually lived by another organism may, on rare occasions, be tuned into by the human mind). To understand the condition of the conscious Ego during human life, and to intuit and interpret the condition of the spiritual Ego in the light of the information received through NDEs, it is necessary to establish a fundamental principle, without which everything becomes meaningless: each stage in the Ego's evolution, including its temporal unfolding, must represent a genuine advance beyond a condition previously experienced by that same Ego, and the Spirit dimension represents the final goal of this process, as recognized by the Ego of all who have experienced it. If the spiritual Ego, once it has reached the Spirit dimension, freely chooses to undergo, as a conscious Ego, the experiences of organic life, it is necessary that this confrontation has an interest and a meaning for it, that is, that it constitutes, to some extent, a further progress. If, on the other hand, the spiritual Ego were forced, against its will, to experience a temporary life condition which could cause it much suffering, it should be able to understand clearly how such suffering could represent a form of progress, and therefore an advantage, in relation to the attainment of its final goal.

However we may choose to view the matter, for the conscious Ego the question of the relationships between the Spirit dimension and that of the human psyche, as it is experienced during our organic life, always remains of fundamental importance. If we consider the human organism as an egg, to use a metaphor, in which the conscious Ego forms, grows and develops, and then passes into the Spirit dimension once freed from its organic shell, then we can well understand the meaning of this evolutionary progression. Much more difficult – at least for my intellectual resources, with all their limitations – is to understand the meaning and purpose of the reverse journey, through which the spiritual Ego should want to experience the dimension of the human psyche, so contrary to its essence, with the risk of remaining entangled in a condition of suffering which only the death of its organism can put an end to. It could be recognized that the spiritual Ego accepts this mission (perhaps with a spirit of sacrifice) to inform us humans about the existence of the Spirit dimension, or to help us face the tensions and tribulations of organic life (determined by the human psyche) with the resources offered by the Spirit's energy, which manifests itself as love. This, at least, seems to be the task assigned to the Ego of those who are brought back (reluctantly, in some cases) to organic life, after having experienced the Spirit dimension during their NDE. But if we look at things from the point of view of organic life, the sense of this mission doesn't appear very clear. In fact, in our dimension not only are the needs of the human organism by far predominant in determining the psyche's dynamics to which the Ego is subject, but the fragmentation of consciousness into a multitude of individuals chaotically involved in so many different destinies continuously feeds the tensions determined by the psyche's bipolar energy, creating conditions of existence completely different from those found in the Spirit dimension. Indulging in sarcasm, one could notice how, by a large majority, human creatures are much more interested in football matches or in the latest celebrity romances, than in what may happen to the conscious Ego after the death of its organism. But there is another problem: if the Spirit dimension is interpreted, as often happens, from the point of view of the positive polarity of the human psyche – almost as if it were the ultimate weapon that will allow good to prevail once and for all over evil – the very bipolarity of the psyche's energy will most likely provoke a counterreaction from its negative polarity, because, to put it trivially, evil is not simply going to stand by and do nothing. As I have repeated several times, in the Spirit dimension there is no form of bipolarity: the Spirit is not good, opposed to evil, nor paradise opposed to hell, but rather the absolute perfection of an energy that reflects and radiates nothing but itself.

I do not have the pretension (nor certainly the mental resources required to do so) to interpret – let alone to judge – what could be defined as the intentions of the Spirit, in case that the spiritual Ego was actually convinced or compelled to repeatedly experience the human condition of organic life and the effects of the psyche's bipolar energy. Of course, it is possible that one cannot say no to the Spirit, because the very affinity of the Ego towards the Spirit obliges it, in a sense, to align itself with the Spirit's mysterious purposes. One of those who experienced the Spirit dimension during his NDE reports that he learned that all conscious Egos are agents of the Spirit, sent to different worlds and different dimensions to experience all aspects of the cosmos and transfer their experiences to the Spirit dimension, where they are recorded and stored. Nor can it be ruled out that, in the long run, the influence exerted by the Spirit through the commitment of the various Egos sent on a mission to our world may be able to modify, to some extent, the very energy of the human psyche: however, it seems to me that this cannot happen in the next few centuries, for the reasons I have already explained. I would like to conclude with a mental visualization of how the interactions between the Spirit energy and that of the human psyche exert their effects on the multitude of conscious Egos that experience the various aspects of human life: it is only, as is evident, an exercise of my imagination, without any genuine value as a source of knowledge. The energy field of the human psyche can be represented as generated by two poles of opposite sign (such as those of a horseshoe magnet) within which contless energetic particles are continuously formed and interact with each other, each of which corresponds to the experience of a conscious Ego. Some of these particles, endowed with greater energy, are capable of influencing the orientation and trajectories of many other less energetic ones, determining the flows and turbulences that occur continuously within that field, whose overall cohesion is anyway ensured by the dominant energy produced by the two poles of the psyche. The particles within the field are continually forming and dying out, and their energy is recovered and recycled to keep the energy field active as a whole, increasing its power. At a certain distance from this energy field there is another completely different field (the Spirit dimension), non-bipolar, which exerts a force of attraction similar to that generated – in our physical dimension – by a gravitational field. Some of the particles generated by the psyche's bipolar field are endowed with a particular energy which allows them to be launched, so to speak, to the limits of that force field, where its influence is increasingly rarefied: in this case, when they become extinguished, their energy is drawn into the Spirit energy field. In the case of those NDEs in which the Spirit dimension is experienced, it is as if the particles followed a trajectory which, after having crossed the periphery of the Spirit's field of action, brought them back into the field of attraction of the psyche's energy. I wish I could conclude by stating that all energetic particles produced by the psyche's bipolar field, when dying out, are attracted to the Spirit's energetic field: I hope this may be the case, but I don't have enough cognitive resources to be able to support this statement with absolute certainty.