The mystery of human life

The mental desire to know

Many of the topics addressed on this site – and, to a certain extent, the motivations that led me to create the site – concern the meaning of human life for the conscious Ego, and in particular the search for clues about possible future experiences of the Ego once its organic life has ended. Of course, I must recognize the subjective element of my personal research, but at the same time I believe that the interest I feel can also be shared by other people, whose mental orientation is – at least within certain limits – similar to mine. The desire to know is not felt to the same extent by all humans: even if it happens to more or less everyone to ask themselves questions about the purpose of their life and the causes that determine their personal destiny, many are satisfied with ready-made answers provided by the one or the other cultural program, while others believe that life must be faced pragmatically, on the basis of the organic and social needs that gradually arise, without worrying too much about questions for which we cannot find satisfactory answers. For others, finally, human life translates into an experience so painful, desperate and disheartening, as to be unbearable for their conscious Ego, to the point of preferring to die, and to try to interrupt it voluntarily and consciously. We can certainly affirm that no human being has created the natural environmental conditions of this planet, and at the same time each of us contributes to determining, to a greater or lesser extent, the transformations of the physical and social environment in which human life takes place.

We have seen how the conscious Ego of every human being confronts itself with the more or less conflicting psychic dynamics that involve it – using the mental resources at its disposal – in an attempt to modify to its own advantage, or to the advantage of other human beings with whom it feels solidarity, the circumstances of life that determine these psychic dynamics. As can be seen, it is a very complex system of forces, in which the conscious Ego almost always has a subordinate (not to say irrelevant) role, and which in the dynamics that distinguish it involves competitions and sometimes individual and group conflicts, which determine winners and losers. While in the past these dynamics were usually attributed – at the psyche's suggestion – to the influence of higher entities, identified as divine, who were collectively recognized as having the power to determine and influence the destiny of every human being, about three centuries ago the prevailing orientation of the human psyche has started a rather rapid process of transformation, which has led a large part of humanity to favor and intensify the process of knowledge, also – or perhaps above all – in order to acquire a greater human control over the dynamics that determine the fate of billions of living people, in an attempt to free humans from their helpless submission to destiny and the mysterious forces that – consciously or not – rule it. It must be borne in mind that this desire to know – and therefore to have a greater ability to control – is anyway of mental origin (and therefore stimulated by the human psyche), and is linked to a state of fundamental dissatisfaction that the conscious Ego experiences precisely as a consequence of the organic life from which it originated and in which it feels involved, not infrequently as a prisoner.

The desire to know, and the acquisition of knowledge, imply that there is an unknown reality that can be mentally known, at least within certain limits, and that the data and information acquired through this process of mental investigation can be communicated by a mind to another, through the tools that human brains are equipped with. The conscious Ego is interested in knowledge precisely because it finds itself immersed in a reality that largely escapes its intentional control, and feels the (psychic) need to increase its own control abilities. However, this process does not normally take place through a conscious and reasoned elaboration by the conscious Ego of the dynamics that underlie its existential condition, but rather on the basis of a stimulus of a psychic nature that activates – in some people more than in others – the desire to know, and even more often as a result of the cultural programs that are transmitted in the interactions between the brains of a social system, which have the effect of influencing and conditioning, already at a young age, the choices of the conscious Ego. It is therefore a process of psychic origin determined by the human condition, in which the conscious Ego is involved even before having the resources to develop a form of self-knowledge and detachment from its own psychic experiences. The psychic origin of the cognitive process, and of the technological development deriving from it, is also confirmed by the bipolarity of the effects of the scientific discoveries, which entail both an increase in human well-being – in terms of satisfaction of the organism's needs and of the desires activated by the human psyche and the cultural programs it stimulates –, and a refinement of the efficiency of the weapons of mass destruction (and therefore of conflictual competition) and of the tools of environmental transformation.

The psychic directives of knowledge, as today it is mainly interpreted and more or less consciously institutionalized, orient it towards the physical and organic world, while the data and information relating to the Spirit dimension – which we have, as can be deduced from the facts presented on the pages of this site – have long been overlooked, if not denied, by mainstream science. The study of the psyche itself has undergone an inevitable disintegration between the organic research on the brain functioning, on the one hand, and the various observations of an empirical-interpretative (and therefore mainly subjective) nature on which the various psychological currents which still today thrive are based, influencing our culture, without any of the problems caused by the conflicting bipolarity of the psyche being truly resolved. It is obvious that if we had an authentic knowledge every aspect of life would be immediately and undoubtedly revealed to us with crystal clarity, while our very human condition implies a basic ignorance, which we try hardly and laboriously to remedy through the limited resources of our mind, under the inevitable guidance of some directives of the human psyche. A particularly interesting aspect of some NDEs is the certainty, stated by the experimenter, of having received in the Spirit dimension exhaustive, convincing and self-evident explanations, practically on every aspect of life, a corpus of indubitable knowledge which however are invariably forgotten in the phase of return to organic life.

Human cognitive activity, interpreted according to the psyche's positive pole (what is commonly perceived as the good), should pursue the following goals: 1) a greater control over the environmental conditions in which we live as organisms, and over the causes that determine the good functioning of our organism; 2) a better quality of life, from the general point of view of human happiness; 3) a reduction of the even extreme differences that characterize the individual destinies of humans. If this interpretation is extended to all mankind as a whole, it is evident that many centuries will still have to pass before these objectives can be achieved, at least in part, provided that it be possible to achieve them: in fact the very complexity of the human organization, determined by the acquired knowledge and the technological progress deriving from it, entails new difficulties and new problems that replace those just solved. But since humanity is still divided into more or less interconnected national organizations, each autonomous and sovereign in its own order – and therefore in its own way of functioning – we observe considerable differences between the conditions of life present in one or the other state, also in relation to the cultural programs there prevailing, whereby the individual destiny is still largely determined by the place where a human being comes into the world. As often happens for the motivations presented by the human psyche, the suspicion remains that our cognitive activity is due to an essentially psychic need, covered with socially convincing motivations, so that the conscious Ego can be fully involved. Obviously, according to the different places and the cultural programs there dominating, this new psychic need can clash with other pre-existing psychic dynamics, in an often conflictual way.

The history of mankind reminds us that entire populations have been destroyed or forced to change their culture, almost always with the justification of a glorious progress and in the name of the advantages offered by a social organization considered as more evolved, even when these alleged advantages were neither wanted nor requested by the members of the subjugated culture: the bipolar character of the human psyche always manifests itself through the hypocrisy of cloaking any substantially coercive, and often explicitly violent, intervention with good intentions and future advantages. As a matter of fact, the indisputable advantages that current scientific knowledge offers to humanity are still relative, in the sense that they are such when compared with the conditions of misery, suffering and slavery that afflicted in the past (and in part continue to afflict even today) large sections of the human population in different geographical areas. But even for most of those who live in scientifically advanced and technologically more developed nations, life currently remains a complex, risky and often tiring and stressful adventure, about the meaning and purpose of which official science is not able to offer any reliable knowledge, other than to consider our consciousness as the product of the natural evolutionary process that, for some unknown cause, occurred on planet Earth (an incontestable fact). Like all processes conditioned by the human psyche, science too has developed a capacity for an almost mythological fascination, assuming – in the collective culture – the role that religion had in the past: therefore there remains the doubt that not even science – elaborated according to the criteria and resouces of the human mind – may be completely immune to certain forms of dogmatism that have always characterized the psychic dynamics.

The identity of the conscious Ego

In an attempt to express myself with the greatest possible clarity regarding the involvement of the Ego in its own psychic experiences, I have always considered consciousness as a function that relates the psyche to an experiencer subject – what I define the conscious Ego – in the absence of which the dynamics produced by the brain functioning may also have certain effects on the organism, but these effects nevertheless remain unconscious. In order for a psychic experience to be considered conscious, it is also necessary that it be memorized, at least for the time necessary to integrate it into that continuity that constitutes the inner life and personal history of each Ego: later it can also be forgotten, as it happens for most of the experiences of our life to which we do not attribute particular importance, and which in any case we know we have forgotten, regardless of the fact that in some circumstances they may again emerge in our memory. As we have already observed, in the course of human life it is precisely memory that gives continuity to the personality and identity of the conscious Ego. We have also seen how the conscious Ego can undergo, as a result of the psychic experiences in which it is involved while living, a process of transformation and evolution that leads it to deepen the knowledge of itself, of its own true essence and of the meaning of the experience of human life, freeing it, at least in part, from the need to identify itself with its own psychic dynamics. However, there remain some aspects relating to the identity of the conscious Ego that deserve to be further elaborated, since they can widen our ability to understand the mystery of human life, even without pretending that it can be solved.

The condition in which the conscious Ego experiences, as a rule, the effects of the psychic dynamics that involve it, is what we call the ordinary waking state, during which the Ego – alone or interacting with other people – feels the need to exercise a more or less intense control over the behavior and functioning of its own organism. According to the directives that determine its orientation, the Ego can execute commands deriving from the cultural programs received from its social environment and sufficiently assimilated (as we usually do when we work), or it can act according to the bipolarity of the psychic experiences, trying to get the ones that give it pleasure and well-being and to avoid the ones that it thinks can cause mental pain or suffering (this is what people usually do in the so-called leisure, when they feel the need to get fun). Therefore the orientation of the Ego in the ordinary waking state makes it experience life both as a task to be performed and as an opportunity to be involved in more or less pleasant psychic attunements. Depending on personal destiny and resources, but also on the basis of a factor that almost always remains behind the scenes, the life of some people is increasingly oriented towards the need to fulfill a certain social, ethical or cultural task – which can be defined and felt as a duty of a higher order, which gives a meaning to life itself – while the life of other people remains more or less at the mercy of bipolar psychic dynamics, which induce the Ego to seek (almost always without success) some form of human happiness or satisfaction. These processes usually occur automatically as a person's life unfolds, without the Ego paying a particular attention to it or elaborating its meaning in the light of its own self-knowledge: they are the result of that particular individual destiny that is determined by the fragmentation of life, when the conscious subject is immersed in the complexity of the human psyche.

The psyche's bipolarity creates a gradient, within which the Ego learns how to move, more or less intentionally, in an attempt to improve its condition, based on the psychic dynamics that involve it. However, the Ego's control ability is limited, not infrequently the results do not correspond to its expectations, life events can always change the Ego's condition in a worse way, and the competition with other humans (each with its own Ego, subject to its own psychic attunements) and between social groups it is always strong. The fact that it has been possible to achieve a certain level of order and organization in such a complex framework, is in itself surprising, and has required (and constantly requires) a considerable commitment of intelligence and energy from many people: there is always the risk that the social organization will degrade as a result of the very complexity of the problems that gradually arise, also taking into account the different levels at which it manifests on our planet and the rapid increase in the world population that has occurred in the last century, and which is still ongoing. But even within this relative order, individual living conditions greatly vary, and individual personal histories can present bewildering aspects, which deviate considerably from what is believed to be the normal course of human life. As we have often pointed out in these pages, the bipolar character of the human psyche usually exerts a particular, almost hypnotic effect on the conscious Ego, who – having come into this world – becomes entangled in an organic and psychic process in which it participates with conviction and with which it very often identifies, without even questioning about the origin and purpose of this process, and about the causes that determined its personal and singular human destiny. In a very concise and approximate, but sufficiently effective way, we can say that every human, by the mere fact of living, play the role that has been assigned to them, even if they know neither the author nor the director of the work that is being staged, and therefore remain completely unaware about their intentions.

When the demands of life allow it, the Ego can – so to speak – put its organism on standby, suspending all activities that are not strictly physiological: if the will and intent of the Ego are oriented towards this goal, once the necessary conditions have been created to minimize the reactions to environmental stimuli, the conscious Ego can observe the mental states that manifest themselves and the particular effects of involvement that such experiences have on it. By becoming aware of its own reactions, whether positive or negative, the Ego progressively trains not to identify itself with its own psychic dynamics, observing them with interest but also with a certain critical detachment. If this contemplative activity of one's mental experiences, in the absence of external stimuli and the need to control the organism's activity, is repeated over time, it can undergo an evolution transforming into a meditative activity, aimed at acquiring some control over the mental activity by the conscious Ego, or it can modify the nature of the Ego itself as a subject of conscious experience, through a process akin to the oneiric one. In the section about non-ordinary states of consciousness we have examined some of these experiences, to which we can also add NDEs. In considering the Ego as a conscious subject, however, I attributed an identity to it based also on the continuity of memory: however, my opinion is that in some non-ordinary states of consciousness, and in the dream state itself, the Ego – while maintaining its own condition of conscious subject – somehow undergoes some changes to its own structure, which must be adapted to new psychic experiences tuned by consciousness. Let us examine, in particular, the changes between the dream Ego and the Ego of the waking state, beyond the intrinsic differences between the psychic experiences that manifest themselves in one or the other condition.

In the dream state the dream Ego experiences the psychic dynamics that manifest in dreams, but in order for those experiences to be recalled to the consciousness of the Ego in the waking state, it is first of all necessary that those dreams be remembered. Whenever we tell someone else about a dream of ours – as it happens for any other inner experience relating to a non-ordinary state of consciousness – we do it in accordance with what the conscious Ego remembers (and with what it is capable of expressing) in the waking state. Similarly, the conscious Ego can try to elaborate the content of a dream in the light of the psychic dynamics that involve it in the waking state. However, if the dream memorization is of good quality, the waking Ego also becomes aware of the fact that certain events, and the atmosphere itself, of the dream had a very different effect on the dream Ego than the one which the memory of the dream exerts on the conscious Ego. This effect is particularly evident in many NDEs, which begin with a separation of the conscious Ego from its organism – and consequently from the psychic experiences determined by the organism's conditions – so that consciousness can tune into other psychic experiences that the Ego, thus transformed, perceives as emanating from a completely different dimension than that of the human psyche, and much more in harmony with its most true essence. Therefore, not only do the dynamics of the human psyche experienced by the Ego are transformed with the changing environmental conditions that involve the organism, influencing the functioning of the brain, but the conscious Ego itself can undergo transformations determined by its greater or lesser state of connection with the organism in which it was formed, but from which it is destined in any case to detach itself.

In particular experiences, such as lucid dreams or conscious dreams, the condition of the Ego is much more similar to that of the waking state than the oneiric one, as the Ego is aware of being immersed in an alternative reality with which it can interact and about which it can ask itself questions and reflect, to the point of remembering the waking state's ordinary reality and making comparisons with the dream reality it is experiencing. Even some NDEs are characterized by a condition of this type, in which the conscious Ego reflects and questions about the situation in which it finds itself, the aspects of the environment that it is able to perceive and the events that happen there, up to deductively reaching, for instance, the conclusion that it is dead. There is therefore a connection between the condition in which the organism finds itself and the psychic attunements experienced by the conscious Ego: in particular, the control that the conscious Ego must exercise over the organism in the waking state, to satisfy its natural needs or cultural conditioning, on the basis of the acquired programs, implies a progressive limitation and – so to speak – a fixation of the range of possible experiences. Many people are so involved in the activities of the waking state, with all the responsibilities and worries that come with them, that they have difficulty even falling asleep and slipping into the dream state. The very condition of being sick, in critical situations or in danger of life, frees the conscious Ego – at least temporarily – from the task of having to control its organism, which is entrusted to the care of other people socially in charge of this function, allowing sometimes the Ego to experience alternative and unusual psychic tunings, which free it from the constraints constituted by the organic sensory functions and the painful experiences deriving from them: the return to normal existence in the waking state, conditioned by the needs of organic life, is then felt and interpreted by the Ego as being locked up in a prison again.

Most of the dreams that we experience through the dream Ego are not remembered by the Ego in the waking state, and there are people who are convinced that they are not dreaming at all, because they very rarely remember their dreams. There is therefore, as a rule, a dissociation between the dream Ego and the Ego of the waking state, which can only be partially filled by memory. The demands of life, and the socio-cultural programs that interpret them, ensure that we attribute a primary importance to the Ego of the waking state, through which we also implement all relationships and interactions with other people, which are managed by our body's control and the resulting behaviors, actions and communications. The cases of multiple personalities and the experiments with hypnosis show however that the Ego of the waking state can be completely unaware of what happens to the organism with which it is associated – in terms of experiences and actions – when another Ego, also endowed with a consciousness of its own, takes control of it. Experiences such as NDEs, which in many cases occur when the organism is in a critical condition, can show a more or less immediate continuity with the consciousness of the waking state, when they begin or when they end – in that phase which is perceived as a re-entry into the organism – but often the conscious Ego realizes that something essential has changed: for example, it no longer feels any pain, it acknowledges that it is dead and that it perceives reality in a different way from that to which it was used. This condition shows many similarities to that of conscious dreams, in which the Ego can experience a very intense perception of what is a real world for it. Finally, it should be noted that – as happens with dreams – NDEs are not always immediately remembered, in whole or in part, when the conscious Ego returns to the waking state: however, the fact that the organism continues to be in critical conditions, often sedated and sometimes in a coma, for a shorter or longer period, means that the moment of the Ego's stabilization in the waking state cannot be unequivocally established.

Life as a research and processing of experiences

In the pages of this blog, the role of main character in the drama (or the smart comedy) of human life has always been attributed to the conscious Ego, in its function as a subject associated with the life of an organism, to the events that fate has reserved for it and the resources at its disposal. The point of view to which I have turned my attention is that of the subjective experience of the psychic events in which the conscious Ego is involved – and which therefore it can also be forced, willingly or not, to experience – and of the particular (positive or negative) effects that these psychic dynamics exert on it. In particular, I have pointed out how the involvement of the conscious Ego in its own psychic experiences almost always involves a complete identification of the Ego with those aspects of the human psyche that it experiences: this identification hinders the evolution of consciousness, that is the possibility that is offered to the Ego – if it has the necessary resources – to use the same experiences of life to improve and fine-tune its own consciousness. Consciousness itself must therefore be considered as an instrument that – as it improves its performances – can tune psychic experiences of higher quality, in relation to a program of knowledge and processing that is already inserted in the conscious Ego, even if the latter may not realize it, precisely because of the limitations and inefficiency of its consciousness. The fact that the process of acquisition and elaboration of the psychic experiences is intrinsically subjective, makes any form of communication and objective interpretation of the same, of its causes and of its purposes, problematic and inadequate: however, psychic experiences, even in their subjectivity, must be considered as facts, of the reality of which every human being is aware, for that part of experiences in which they are directly involved.

In the first part of our life, the psyche imposes itself on the Ego with all its power, but not on everyone in the same way: for many people, life consists from the beginning in a series of tribulations and sufferings which the Ego, even with the flexibility and adaptability at its disposal, would like to escape. In these conditions, if the organism does not succumb prematurely, the Ego cannot help but proceed in life in an attempt to improve its state, or resign itself to patiently endure its own unfortunate fate and the sense of impotence that derives from it. Various cultures are still marked by an underlying fatalism that prevents them from implementing the resources of social organization needed to improve the living conditions of those who belong to them. I do not know if cultural evolution depends on the geographical and climatic conditions or on the psychic dynamics that stimulate the organizational skills and knowledge resources of a culture: the same cultural evolution that has led to the conditions of (relative) well-being currently present in some areas of the world started no more than a century ago, and such conditions are still not uniformly spread even in those areas, nor is it guaranteed that they will continue to spread in the future to other areas of our planet. Therefore, for many humans the experience of life still consists today in the alternative between surviving in hardship, tribulation and suffering, or dying. These conditions recall the concept of life as a valley of tears (lacrimarum valle) which has also marked our cultural history for many centuries. What is the meaning of the psychic experience for a conscious Ego that is in this situation, I am not able to say, precisely because this was not the destiny of my life: I believe that in such circumstances death can be more intensely perceived as a liberation, even if the attachment to life by the organism can determine psychic reactions of rancor, envy and hatred towards those who – for one reason or another – live in better conditions, possibly also taking advantage of the fatigue of those who are in a state of need.

As I have often pointed out in the pages of this blog, the process that underlies human life does not go much for the subtle about the needs of the conscious Ego: human organisms are produced in exuberant quantities through a psychic drive of natural origin, which is completely indifferent to the individual fate of each organism. Even today, several human organisms die at birth or in their childhood, or are subject to malformations, diseases or abuses during the growing phase, when they have not yet developed the resources to defend themselves. In these conditions, everyone experiences those psychic dynamics that fate imposes on them, even before the Ego be able to experience a form of self-consciousness. However, it is also not correct to arbitrarily attribute to others psychic experiences that we can only hypothesize in the light of our mental elaborations, based on our experiences and on the cultural programs we have acquired: everyone knows well their own psychic dynamics, those they have directly experienced during their life, and these experiences can be sad, painful and wretched even within the most advanced cultures. One of the weirdest aspects of organic life is that psychic experiences can also have the power to afflict the Ego: just think of physical pain. On the other hand, there are also psychic experiences associated with pleasure, joy and happiness, that is, with emotional attunements that show a resonance with what appears to be the very essence of the conscious Ego. But if we consider the psychic dynamics on which our social programs too are based, most of the energies we have at our disposal are used to prevent negative psychic dynamics from gaining the upper hand, and Leopardi's reflections on the «pleasure child of worry» are not lacking meaning. As for pleasure and some other psychic gratifications, we have already highlighted how often what is perceived as pleasant and rewarding by a person, or by a group of people, involves a negative experience for another person or another group: examples of these dynamics are all those cases in which a person feels satisfaction for exerting oppression or prevarication on another person, as also occurs in sexual abuse.

So the Ego, once it is sufficiently consolidated, experiences its involvement in the psychic dynamics that destiny has reserved for it and – on the basis of the resources it has at its disposal – it can become aware of its own sensitivity, vulnerability and fragility, or it can cope with the demands that organic life imposes upon it by adequately armoring as it can and orienting itself in the way that seems to it most appropriate among its own psychic dynamics and the events that activate them. A certain type of egocentric automatism is thus determined, based largely on the natural need to keep one's organism alive and to continue to get involved in one's bipolar psychic experiences in the most advantageous (or least disadvantageous) way possible. Through this process the Ego identifies itself more and more with that range of attunements of the human psyche that directly involves it, sometimes forcing it to enter into conflict or competition with others, precisely to serve and defend its own psychic dynamics. It must be recognized that this world was not created by any human being – even if each of us, some more and some less, contributes to the transformations that take place in it – and that survival in the condition of organic life is in itself a demanding and difficult task, which the conscious Ego faces with the resources at its disposal, which are obviously different from person to person. But all life situations have importance as they translate into psychic experiences that are transmitted to a conscious Ego, who is also called – at a certain point in its evolutionary process – to express its own evaluation and judgment on the psychic dynamics in which it has been involved and with which it has often identified itself to the point of approving, validating and defending them, instead of merely enduring and suffering them.

As the Ego manages to distance itself from the psychic dynamics that continue to involve it – but no longer being able to force or convince it to identify with them – it acquires a greater awareness of its aspiration to emancipate from the demands of organic life: the fragility, vulnerability and compromises that force the Ego to indulge the typically human psychic dynamics that involve it derive in fact, mostly, from the fact that the experiences of this life are made possible by the survival of an organism of which the Ego itself must take care: for this purpose it is adequately programmed both by natural instincts and by cultural programs, to the point that the latter go so far as to deny any possibility of existence of the conscious Ego released from the organism with which it is living. In our age, the predominance of these cultural instances contributes to making the conscious Ego more and more fragile and more and more subject to its organism's needs. From the contrast with this cultural condition originates that particular feeling of liberation and energetic renewal that many NDErs take with them, acquiring the certainty that the conscious Ego can continue to exist in new dimensions – and to be involved in other psychic dynamics more congenial to it – even after the death of the organism to which it is connected. These NDEs show how the mental aspect of consciously perceived experience prevails over the purely organic one, even if one wants to attribute to the brain an important role in determining the experience itself: the brain can be considered as a necessary tool for transferring these experiences into our physical dimension, also preserving (not infrequently indelibly) the memory of them, but the transcendent mental character of the experiences, and their amazing meaning for the conscious Ego, remain intact.

Organic life allows the conscious Ego to progressively orient itself towards the psychic dynamics that it can experience. In the first part of life, the psychic experiences in which the Ego is involved are usually determined by the organism and by the pleasant or painful emotional states that the Ego experiences when it turns its interest to organic stimuli. In the second part, when the organism has completed the growth phase, the Ego tends to identify with the psychic dynamics that determine the affirmation of its organism and the acquired mental programs within a more or less complex social structure, also starting – at least in some cases – a process of personal elaboration of the psychic experiences in which the Ego is involved. In the third part, the Ego – if it still has sufficient resources and energy – can undertake a path of differentiation from the psychic dynamics with which it has almost always identified itself, recognizing itself as an autonomous entity, connected to an organism but no longer integrally conditioned by needs of organic life. In the last part of life the Ego by then feels the call and the charm of an independent mental existence with respect to the needs of an organism now in decline – even when a particularly favorable destiny and the Ego's commitment manage to preserve a certain level of efficiency and lucidity, up to the moment of the final detachment – and above all, its interest in many aspects of the human psyche, with which it tended to identify in the early stages of life, is waning. The cycle of human life can thus end in a harmonious and smart way, and above all free from those conditions of suffering, disability and progressive decline of the mental faculties which unfortunately characterize the last part of the life of many people, even in our societies – who define themselves as advanced – the culture of which determines an extension of life that normally does not correspond to any adequate understanding of the meaning of life on the part of the conscious Ego.

When the cycle of life reaches its natural conclusion and the residual energies run out (usually between 80 and 90 years), the moment comes when the conscious Ego – if it has successfully engaged in its evolutionary path – feels that it has exhausted its interest (and also its patience) in the experiences determined by the human psyche, and is now ready to move to another dimension in a fully conscious way. In this case too, a social culture like the one in which we live – all focused on presenting life as an absolute value for its own sake – is of little help in facilitating the ways of this transfer, relating to which everyone can organize as they better can. If the conscious Ego feels that it has completed with sufficient commitment – even if not perfectly – the task that destiny had assigned it, it can leave this life serenely and even with joy: the task to be performed in human life is different for each of us, and one of the enigmatic aspects of our life consists precisely in discovering what is the task that has been reserved for us. If everything has worked properly, the exit of the conscious Ego from human life should be fluid and free from those torments and sufferings that characterize the phase that precedes the death of many people. In the next post we will examine the meaning of some of the more or less mythical interpretations that have been advanced regarding the psychic dynamics that influence human life and determine its course, and the elaboration of experiences related to the afterlife. In concluding this page, I would like to highlight how in any case human life represents an opportunity offered to the conscious Ego to form, consolidate, evolve and finally free itself from the now useless shell of the human organism, to meet a new form of existence. The ability to make the most of this opportunity is determined by the resources available to the Ego, resources which – as we'll see – may in turn depend on events and entities that intervene in a dimension distinct from the physical one in which our organic life takes place.

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