The Soul Side of Death
Death is often used as an escape route, a means to an end, betting on a more desirable result. This anchors the illusion of a better "After Life".
The third half of life, Carl Jung 1st half = age 0-39 2nd half = 40-80 3rd half = 81+
Jung only provides some clues. One concerns the belief in immortality where he claims that "for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence," while immediately acknowledging, "There are people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand years!"). So, we are left dealing with the question of what myth encompasses this tension of opposites between immortality and the finality of life?
Jung further complicates the dilemma by noting in his Collected Works that "Among all my patients in the second half of life...there has not been one whose problem was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.
We are thus now left asking what view or myth, if any, can contain all these seeming contradictions? Is there some "transcendent function," a symbol like the Holy Grail, that can unite the conflict between immortality and mortality; the infinite and the finite; religion and agnosticism? Jung is suggesting that this last stage of life, our "final frontier," has a spiritual imperative or the need to find a spiritual connection to both one another and the mystery of the universe we are privileged to inhabit.
Pantheism or transcendence through a connectedness to nature and the cosmos where the physical laws of the universe represent the spiritual is one view that resolves the conflicts posed by Jung. He challenged us in concluding his thoughts "On Life after Death" by asking, "The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?" The spirituality of pantheism provides one answer It recognizes through the superordinate principle of tolerance that there are many paths to God and spirituality. We are temporal, finite creatures partaking through our consciousness in the eternal, infinite universe we inhabit. We are thus imbued with the compassionate connection to both one another and the infinite, whether or not you choose to call it a higher power or God.
The essence of pantheism is on a loving, compassionate connection between a man and a woman in the former and a father and son in the latter.