From human psyche to the Spirit dimension

The conscious Ego as a result of human life

In focusing on the importance of the conscious Ego as an experiencing subject, we have taken a position somewhat analogous to that of those who placed the Earth at the center of the universe, claiming that the whole cosmos revolved around it. There is no doubt that the Ego is the true and – for each of us – the only subject of our experiences, in that temporal development that distinguishes them and that also influences the changes that occur in the Ego in the course of its life. But, as we have repeatedly pointed out, the fragmentation of consciousness into a plurality of individual organisms causes the immediate experience of our Ego – as perceived by our consciousness – to be separated from a multitude of other individual experiences, each of which can be traced back to an autonomous center of consciousness, and therefore to an individual Ego. The complexity of this interpretation becomes more understandable if, as we are used to doing, we identify the Ego of others with a specific organism, distinct from ours, which manifests itself, expresses and behaves in a certain characteristic and particular way, interacting with other organisms. Similarly, we must recognize that we too are perceived by others only through the behavior and communications of our organism, while our Ego, which for each of us represents the core of our experiences of human life, remains for others to a large extent inaccessible, just as it is impossible for us to identify ourselves with the Ego of others, even when, with a certain conventional hypocrisy, we declare or believe we can do so.

The Ego is not only a conscious subject, but it is also a sensor which, through its involvement in the experiences determined by organic life and the human psyche, is affected over time by the emotional effects that its personal history reserves for it: these effects reflect the psyche's bipolar character, and therefore can cover the whole range from the most intense pain and suffering to an equally intense pleasure, up to an ecstatic state of happiness. However, it is necessary not to forget that this condition of the Ego is determined by its link with the organism and by the functioning of the nervous system. By chemically intervening on the organism, pain can be alleviated or eliminated, or a state of blissful euphoria can be obtained: states that are still subject to the inexorable flowing of time. The fact that certain events affecting the nervous system can even turn off the Ego, represents the main argument in favor of those who consider impossible any form of continuation of the Ego's existence to the death of its own organism, reducing the same Ego to a merely organic function. We must also consider the great differences we can find in the behaviors and ways of expressing themselves, and establishing relationships with other people, of the billions of humans who have lived or are currently living in this world: although it is not possible to directly experience the psyche's dynamics in which each Ego is individually involved, and with which it generally identifies itself, precisely the variety and diversity of behaviors and emotional manifestations allow us to guess the complexity of the human psyche and the multiplicity of conditions that determine the very constitution of the Ego as an entity endowed with consciousness, and its evolution over time.

A first difference in the way the Ego manifests and becomes aware of itself is found when, in interactions with others, the psyche's dynamics often prevail, also due to the speed with which the received signals are transmitted by the sensory system to the brain and processed by the latter, determining more or less immediate psychic reactions with which the Ego identifies or by which can be overwhelmed. People whose social role requires continuous and intense interactions with others – in politics, business and enterprises of all kinds – often have a natural disposition to control the psyche's dynamics, which also develops with training and practice. This does not mean, however, that their conscious Ego is particularly evolved, to the point of being able to get free of the psyche's dynamics: indeed, the very role that the particular and uncommon resources at their disposal determines for them, induces their Ego to completely identify with these dynamics. Great strategists, charismatic political leaders and creators of economic empires often belong to this category: their indisputable and exceptional capacity for action and the energy they possess are determined by particular and extraordinary psychic attunements, with which their Ego identifies, for good but also for bad. In this field, in fact, we move within the context of the dynamics that characterize the human psyche and its purposes, which are unfathomable for us. The Ego's condition is very different when it manages to find the time and resources to turn its conscious attention towards the observation of the dynamics of the psyche that involve it, and towards the complexity of its existential state, in the light of the intellectual and critical faculties at its disposal, and of the information obtained by comparing the interpretative programs developed by various human cultures, even belonging to different ages.

This introspective activity through which the Ego manages to engage in a role of attentive observer both of the psyche's dynamics in which it is involved as a sensor, and of the programs it has assimilated and which determine its functioning in social interactions, in the protection of its organism and in the search for well-being and the satisfaction of desires, involves an increase in the complexity of the very structure of the Ego and a remarkable expansion and strengthening of its consciousness. Once a sufficient degree of autonomy has been achieved with regard to the dynamics of its psyche, the Ego, in its function as an observer subject, is also able to examine its own formation and development in the various phases of organic life, through an accurate mnemonic reworking of its personal history. In this picture it is as if from the indistinct mists of an indecipherable condition some lines would emerge at the beginning, which progressively change, connect with each other, recompose themselves in various forms which are then filled with many colors, until a detailed and rather stable composition is obtained, the interpretation of which still remains, in several cases, enigmatic. As long as the Ego fully identifies itself with the dynamics of its own psyche – thus fulfilling, for better or for worse, that function at the service of the psyche that I have defined as human automaton – the enigma relating to the Ego's existence can be brought back to that of the splitting of consciousness into a plurality of individual organisms whose Egos move, in one direction or another, within the framework of the orientations, directives and rules that spring from the bipolar energy of the human psyche. But when the Ego manages to successfully undertake the introspective path that leads it to distance itself, at least in part, from the psyche's dynamics that involve it and with which it has also identified itself in its past personal history, it may glimpse in the picture that a project is being implemented, which includes complex and rather evolved forms of consciousness, which go far beyond what can be produced through its mere organic structure.

Among the aspects that distinguish one Ego from another there is also a more or less intense attachment to organic life, someway accentuated by those widespread cultural programs – also supported by a part of the scientific community – which deny any possibility of continuation of the existence of the conscious Ego when the organism to which it is connected definitively stops functioning. The intensity of the bond that links the conscious Ego to its own organism is very variable from one individual to another, and in part depends on the functioning of the same organism: there are in fact people for whom the fear of carrying out actions that seriously endanger the integrity of their organism and its functionality is much lower than the average, and others who do not even feel pain, and therefore are not able to protect themselves against those situations that involve the risk of organic lesions. Even toddlers must often be protected because, without being aware of it, they perform actions that can damage their organism, and in their development they are to be programmed – not always successfully – so that they keep their organism as fit and well functioning as possible. However, there are cases in which the exposure of the organism to a situation of risk, or its own destruction, seem to respond to a specific need of the Ego, the origin of which can be traced back to the psyche, but in some cases also to the spirit. For example, the need to stop the functioning of the organism can derive from the excruciating pain that the Ego is forced to suffer, as a consequence of incurable and debilitating traumas or diseases, or from particular circumstances that induce a conflicting psychic suffering that the Ego can neither resolve nor endure. But sometimes, in what can also be regarded as acts of heroism – at least within a certain human group – the integrity of a healthy and well-functioning organism is knowingly put at risk or sacrificed in the service of an ideal that the Ego can feel as noble or superior, or simply as a duty which it cannot shirk.

Therefore, in the course of organic life we can attribute to the Ego a plurality of functions and orientations, from the role of controlling its organism's activities and behaviour to that of perceiving and sensing the dynamics of its psyche, or of introspectively observing the mental activity that involves it and determines its reactions. The degree of complexity of the Ego can vary a lot from one person to another, but it is not infrequently higher than it seems to an external observer. Furthermore, as is understandable, it tends to increase in the course of our life, as the baggage of experiences determined by our personal history grows. We could also add to the noun «Ego» an adjective that indicates, albeit in a generic way, its role and function: we could thus refer to an organic Ego, a psychic Ego, an introspective or reflective Ego, a spiritual Ego, and so on, without however forgetting to always consider the Ego in its quality as a conscious subject. By training in its introspective role, the Ego can be able to observe with sufficient attention and precision the mental activity that involves it, often stimulated by its own will and interest: not infrequently, however, it will feel an unpleasant sense of uncertainty about the attribution of a psychic or spiritual origin to the products of its mental activity.  The positive polarity of the human psyche can also reflect the Spirit's influence, which is however always translated into the bipolar tension of the psyche's energy, for which good is opposed to evil (and vice versa), reward to punishment, pleasure to pain, and so on. We have seen instead that the Spirit's energy, as experienced by many of those who had an NDE, seems to be completely free from any bipolar tension. It may therefore be useful to try to better understand what are the forms of consciousness, individualized in their fragmentation, which coexist and manifest themselves under the dominion of the psyche's bipolar energy.

The psyche's domain: human and inorganic beings

For us who are currently experiencing organic life, the most evident manifestation of the psyche's power is constituted precisely by the dynamics that determine the events of humankind, in their current development and in the historical events of the past of which at least some traces are preserved. We must not forget that the humankind we know lives only on the surface of planet Earth, a place of infinitesimal dimensions when compared with the vastness of the universe, but large enough in relation to the size of the human organism. We therefore have no element that allows us to affirm that the psyche's domain – as we experience and know it in its various aspects – extends beyond that portion of space that surrounds our planet. The attentive observation of nature and of the interactions between individual organisms – both belonging to different species and within the same species – and the knowledge heritage laboriously acquired by human intelligence on the functioning and evolution of living organisms, allow us to establish a correlation between the largely unconscious dynamics that rule the world of nature, and the complex activity through which human psyche currently manifests itself through the conscious functioning of billions of people, each with their own Ego. It is precisely the strong connection that is established between the conscious Ego and its own organism, together with the power of the cultural programs of psychic origin that are formed through the interactions between the various organisms within social groups, that determine those modes of functioning that commit the Ego to consciously experience organic life, protecting, as far as possible, the integrity and well-being of its own organism and of those to which it feels intensely connected. As we have seen, there are also exceptions, represented by those who more or less consciously put the integrity of their organism at risk, or even decide to interrupt their experience of organic life: as a rule, however, protection, care and well-being of the organism are by far the Ego's prevailing orientations.

As a consequence of the organic bond, the Ego is forced to experience pain and suffering deriving both from natural causes (environmental and organic) that threaten the health and integrity of its body, as well as from injuries and traumas that other human organisms can cause to the same. The need to avoid these sufferings can turn into a sort of subordination that borders on cowardice, in the event that – especially in human interactions – the Ego feels compelled to renounce, for the survival or well-being of its body, those ideals that it should instead defend: on the other hand, contrary to what some maintain, a life mainly based on suffering (the valley of tears) hardly has any advantage for a harmonious evolution of the Ego in a spiritual sense. So it can happen that the Ego feels compelled to put an end to its organic life, because – for one reason or another – the conditions it imposes on it are in conflict with something that is part of its very essence, and to which it cannot renounce. Furthermore, when organic life approaches its natural end, the physical deterioration that also involves the mental faculties can induce the Ego to intentionally put an end to its own life in order not to be a burden to others. The only sensible reasons that can prolong the experience of organic life even in negative conditions and at the limit of endurance for the Ego, are constituted either by the certainty that the organism's death determines the annihilation of one's own consciousness and therefore of the same Ego's existence, or by the feeling of not yet having reached that level of development that allows the Ego to break the body shell in order to start a new non-organic existence in another dimension. Let us therefore try and examine with due attention the information we can get about this new form of existence in which the conscious Ego could transfer at the death of its organism.

The sources of information used on this site regarding the continuation of the experiences of the conscious Ego at the death of its organism are mediumistic communications and NDEs. While NDEs are subjective experiences lived in first person by the conscious Ego of those who tell us about them, mediumistic communications give us more or less plausible and convincing information on the existence of spiritual entities that dwell in a dimension that is normally separate from our physical world: to be more precise, we should refer to the existence of inorganic beings – in the sense that they lack an organism like the one through which we humans live – who, in particular circumstances and through the energy provided by a medium, can get in contact with our dimension and interact with objects and people. Various examples of these interactions, for which the most convincing explanation remains that of active intervention by these intelligent inorganic beings, have been presented on the pages of this site, including last month's one. We have also seen how in certain cases these inorganic beings have been able to offer very convincing identification proofs regarding their past life as human personalities: however it has also been shown how they are able to perceive, process and materialize the contents of the psyche and memory of the mediums and the sitters. But the most important aspect of these manifestations consists in the fact that when these inorganic beings come into contact and communicate with us, in addition to maintaining some characteristic traits of their human personality, not infrequently seem to still be under the psyche's control, except for those aspects related to the organism's needs that condition our human life. In particular, among those inorganic beings there is a different range of orientations towards one or the other polarity of the psyche, which leads us to believe that – as in our world – also in that dimension there are high and angelic entities, as well as other low-level, degraded and devilish beings.

The most relevant difference between our world and the dimension in which these inorganic personalities live is that while we humans live all together within a system controlled by the psyche, in which everyone can interact with anyone else, the dimension of disincarnate entities is described to us as divided into well separated levels, in each of which only beings whose Ego has reached a compatible level of spiritual evolution dwell together. These levels are then hierarchically organized according to a gradation that goes from the lowest ones, broadly coinciding with the negative polarity of the human psyche, to the higher ones, corresponding to the positive polarity: it seems that inorganic beings are free, if they wish, to visit the levels lower than their assigned one, without being contaminated by the entities that dwell there, but cannot access at will to any level higher than their own, unless they are promoted, so to speak, according to the rules established by some superior authority. We must therefore once again deal with a system that reflects the bipolar character of the human psyche, albeit in rather different ways from those we experience in the course of our organic life. The fact of transferring the bipolar contrast between good and evil to the dimension of inorganic existence does not help us to identify the reasons that determine the orientation of the conscious Ego towards one or the other polarity: in fact, if during human life we can somehow trace the attraction of the Ego towards the psyche's negative polarity to the fascination exerted on it by the psyche's dynamics in which it is involved and with which it identifies due to the weakness of its resources, the transfer of this personal destiny to what we should consider the spiritual dimension shifts the problem to a different level, but does not solve it. What can the different degree of evolution of the spiritual Ego actually depend on?

If the needs of the organic Ego, or the weakness of the Ego in relation to the psyche's dynamics that involve it, can be faced by a spiritual Ego capable of offering its support to the conscious Ego, of influencing its choices to some extent and to be of help and comfort in enduring the difficulties of this life, then we can understand the evolutionary meaning of the human adventure, through which the conscious Ego, once freed from its organism, is enabled to experience the Spirit dimension. But if also the spiritual Ego, weak and insecure, remains ensnared in the dynamics of the psyche's negative polarity, to the point of being forced to dwell in the lower levels of the dimension in which inorganic beings live, and even having to suffer the torments and sufferings that are inflicted on it by wicked entities, whose real existence it is forced to recognize, then things just do not add up: in fact, in the light of our ability to understand (which, with all its limitations, remains the only resource we have to orient ourselves in human life), the fact that the Ego remains bound to the psyche's bipolar dynamics, even once freed from the ties that bind it to its organism, means that human experience has been of little use. In order to try and solve this problem, an extension of time to the dimension of inorganic existence has also been hypothesized, in terms of cultural programs, by dividing the evolutionary path of the spiritual Ego into a succession of experiences of human life – each of which gives rise to its own autonomous conscious Ego – through which the spiritual Ego can be promoted from a lower to a higher level. It would therefore be a sort of school path similar to those we experience in our complex societies, with different levels of education and the passage from one class to the next based on the knowledge acquired and the scores attributed by teachers.

A weak point of this interpretation is given by the extreme simplification of the different conditions in which the individual experience of human life takes place, and therefore by the totally subordinate, aleatory and ephemeral role that is attributed to the conscious Ego – linked to the personal history of a single organic life – compared to a spiritual Ego that always remains in the background, as an entity substantially alien to the experiences in which the conscious Ego is involved, including the mystery of death. Furthermore, with the same initial conditions, a certain didactic cycle should be entirely practicable by any interested spiritual Ego, therefore the evolutionary differences to which the assignment to the various levels of this didactic cycle is attributed, from the lower to the higher ones, should be due only to the starting time or to the abilities and merits of the spiritual Ego. The variable starting period should imply time diversified spiritual births, so if my spiritual Ego is in this life in third grade – so to say – while another spirit is in the final year of high school, this depends only on the fact that I am younger because I was born later, but over time I too will attend the last year of high school, and maybe then I will go to college. But with regard to the abilities and the commitment with which the spiritual Ego participates in this cycle of teachings, a substantial difference in the distribution of these resources to the single individual entities – so that some are oriented towards the psyche's negative polarity and others towards the positive one – can only be attributed to the source from which the spiritual entities spring, which obviously would not be able to ensure the same initial conditions to everyone. In any case, we observe how these interpretative elaborations are contaminated by various elements that characterize the human psyche, and in particular by the time factor, which – in our human dimension – determines the succession of births and deaths and the generations turnover. If then the success or failure in the context of a learning cycle depends on the quality of each fragment of the spiritual Ego that springs from the original source, then the origin of the problem represented by the bipolarity of the human psyche shifts, but the problem is not solved.

Organic and inorganic manifestations of the human psyche

If the conscious Ego wants to have a chance to correctly interpret the meaning of its human experience and the opportunities offered to it by the evolutionary path that leads to liberation, it is first of all necessary that it should carry out a small Copernican revolution: despite being the center, the core and the sensor of life experiences that involve and concern it, it must be able to turn its attention to the psyche as a general phenomenon, forgetting the importance that the psyche's dynamics with which it usually identifies induce it to attribute to itself. The phenomenon of the psyche, in fact, is based on the fragmentation of consciousness into a plurality of individual organisms, each of which experiences – as a conscious Ego – its own personal history, in which it remains entangled to the point of not being able to free itself from it. Yet it is precisely the plurality of billions of individual stories – and the fact that each of them is experienced by a different conscious Ego bound to an organism that lives in a certain time and in a certain place – that allows the psyche's energy to carry out its activity through a bipolar tension. The very needs of organic life and the programs of cultural conditioning solicit or oblige the various Egos to interact with each other within organized human groups – through the behaviors of their organisms and the mutually induced psychic reactions – determining all those physical and mental effects that we can see in the reality of our world. The differences between the psyche's individual attunements with which every conscious Ego identifies itself generates the micro and macro tensions that can translate both into channeled, controlled and constructive motive energies, as well as into magmatic, destructive and violent forces, which go beyond the control ability of human organizations. The fact that these tensions can be felt as negative and painful experiences by the single individual Ego is completely irrelevant to the human psyche, just as the fate of a single living organism is irrelevant within Nature's order.

The psyche can rely on the production process of a multitude of human organisms developed by the natural evolution of life: theoretically the number of human organisms living in a certain period could grow exponentially, but in practice the fact of having to live on the surface of a planet with limited resources and with large areas not suitable for life puts limits on the uncontrolled expansion of human life. It is possible, nay it is probable, that in a not too distant future the alteration of the planet's natural equilibrium determined by the human psyche will cause a drastic increase in the conflicting tensions that characterize the psyche's energy. In any case, the fragmentation of consciousness determined by the psyche means that a conscious Ego is associated with each organism, usually subjected to the psyche's dynamics with which it identifies without having the slightest knowledge regarding the purposes of the psyche's phenomenon, to the point that it can doubt that it has a purpose: in our day, we can even doubt the existence of a god or a plurality of gods, but we cannot doubt the reality of the psyche's dynamics that involve our conscious Ego. Precisely the Ego's weakness and insecurity in the face of both events that threaten the integrity and good functioning of the organism to which it is bound, and the psychic reactions determined by life events and human interactions, force it to conform to those collective conditioning programs on which human groups of more or less large dimensions are based, up to the complexity of the organizations of the present sovereign nations. An individual Ego can extend the range of its consciousness to take into consideration the dynamics of the group to which it belongs, but as soon as it exceeds a certain limit it must recognize the intrinsic conflictuality of the psyche, which generates tensions and discord in the interactions between persons, organized human groups and nations. With these premises, when certain events occur the only resource available to the Ego to escape the dynamics of the human psyche is to untie the bond that links it to its own organism.

In the second half of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century there was a widespread interest, also cultural, towards mediumistic phenomena, especially when these allowed to establish a contact, even visual, with the deceased loved ones, and to obtain information both about the changes that took place at the moment of passing away, and on the experiences that the Ego could undergo in the afterlife, once freed from its organism. A particularly significant example of these contacts is given by the materializations obtained by New York banker Charles F. Livermore, who – in the course of over 300 séances with the medium Kate Fox (1837-1892) – was able for a period of five years, from April 1861 to April 1866, to visualize the features and also tangibly perceive the personal presence of his wife (called Estelle), much beloved and prematurely died in 1860. However, the information obtained through different mediumistic communications about the environment in which these deceased personalities dwelled – in their form of inorganic beings – and on their experiences, were partly consistent, but also showed many discrepancies: the cause of these discrepancies was partly to be found in the psychic contaminations of the medium's mind, which the entities necessarily had to use to establish a contact with our dimension, but whose connection often caused in them – as they themselves stated – a state of fogging, confusion and memory loss. This form of contamination on the part of the human psyche is easily understandable, once we consider how naive is the claim, by human people who receive mediumistic communications, to obtain a clear, direct and reliable contact from inorganic entities, without taking into account the difficulties that must be faced and resolved in order to establish a communication channel between two dimensions that remain well separated from each other. These difficulties can rightly be defined as technical, in a field in which we humans have no expertise.

To this impossibility of establishing with certainty which information coming from inorganic entities can be considered genuine and reliable, and which are contaminated by representations elaborated by the human psyche, tuned by the mind of the medium or the sitters, another element must be added that rather complicates the picture of the afterlife representations: it is the attribution of an ideoplastic power to the mind of disincarnate entities, who would be able to use their creative thinking to build various aspects of the reality of the world in which they live. Furthermore, a sort of mutual attraction generated by the psyche's affinity to which the conscious Ego is subject, would determine the distribution of inorganic entities within the various hierarchically organized levels and sub-levels into which that world is divided. As can be noticed, these representations do not imply a liberation of the conscious Ego from that condition of involvement in the dynamics of the human psyche that characterizes the experiences of our organic life, but extend the psyche's field of action – to some extent modified, in order to adapt to an inorganic form of existence – to the dimension in which disembodied beings dwell. In some cases the Spirit dimension is considered as a condition of a higher order, which can only be reached when the spiritual Ego manages to get rid of its psychic counterpart. We have already highlighted how, in the confused experiences of human life, the conscious Ego can derive satisfaction and pleasure from the psyche's dynamics, even when these are determined by the negative polarity, for example in the case in which the Ego feels satisfaction for an advantage gained at the expense of someone else. This satisfaction is determined by the power of the psyche, to which the Ego submits due to the condition of weakness in which its spiritual counterpart finds itself. It is naive, under these conditions, to refer to the Ego's free will, since the Ego – in its state of human automaton lacking a sufficiently developed spiritual counterpart, capable of dealing with the psyche's dynamics – can only function in the way it does.

The condition in which the conscious Ego associated with a human organism finds itself is well known to us: assuming that it can find the time and energy to become aware of its own essence through an accurate introspective analysis, each Ego will recognize that it is a more or less successful cocktail of its organism's needs (organic Ego), of the psyche's dynamic tensions (psychic Ego), the conditioning and demands of its human role (social Ego), the intellectual elaborations (mental Ego) and the attraction exerted by the Spirit (spiritual Ego). In the first part of life these components interact with each other in a more or less effervescent and sometimes conflictual way, depending on the prevalence of one or the other, but once we reach maturity and – even more – in the final stage of our life, all the ingredients that have contributed to forming the Ego's global personality can be clearly identified by its consciousness. Obviously, the diversity – not only quantitative, but also qualitative – between the different components, due to the fragmentation of consciousness into a plurality of human organisms, each endowed to a different extent with particular resources, and the personal history that destiny reserves for each organism, contribute to determine the individual essence of each Ego. This picture substantially changes when the Ego, once the experience of its human life is over, can possibly continue its conscious existence in the dimension of inorganic beings: the organic component completely disappears, while the social Ego changes according to the different modes of interaction between the individual entities that dwell in the new environment in which the Ego finds itself. These changes are also in part reflected on the psyche's dynamics that continue to involve the Ego – in a positive or negative sense, as it occurs during human life – but in themselves they do not seem to translate into a strengthening of the spiritual Ego, or in an advantage for its evolutionary progress. In fact, both in mediumistic communications and in some NDEs, there is no lack of representations and descriptions of experiences of distress, suffering and torment – sometimes even in punitive terms in relation to the behaviors, choices and actions carried out by the Ego in the course of its organic life – which show how the bipolarity that characterizes the psyche can continue to operate even in the inorganic dimension, at least at its lower levels.

If the psyche's domain also extends to the dimension in which inorganic beings dwell, that is, beyond human life, the reasons why the conscious Ego – in some of its forms – should still be involved in the same dynamics by which it was ensnared during its organic life, or tormented by experiences generated by the psyche's negative polarity, are incomprehensible to us. In the hypothesis that each Ego is endowed with a more or less developed spiritual component, as well as a psychic component that is usually prevalent, the Ego's possible orientation towards the psyche's negative polarity during human life can be partly explained with the needs of its organism, with the influence of certain cultural programs by which the Ego is conditioned, with the weakness of the spiritual component of the Ego and with the psychic sufferings that the Ego is forced to endure due to the environmental conditions and human interactions that its individual destiny imposes on it. Given this state of affairs, the end of organic life should in any case represent a liberation of the Ego from its subjection to the dynamics of the human psyche, and a possibility offered to the spiritual Ego to free itself from the constraints imposed on it by the psychic Ego: otherwise we should attribute to some forms of conscious Ego an intrinsically evil essence, devoid of any spiritual component. The bipolar character of the psyche's energy should therefore be extended, to the point of recognizing the existence of a negative counterpart of the Spirit, from which these irremediably evil-prone cores would emanate. I don't think this is the case, but neither do I believe in the value of suffering and torment as tools of liberation and evolution for the spiritual Ego: therefore I am puzzled by the fact that the bipolar energy of the human psyche can extend its field of action also to the dimension in which inorganic beings dwell. Evidently the conscious Ego must still go beyond that condition in order to access the experiences of the Spirit dimension.

The experience of the Spirit's energy

The impression we get from many NDE accounts is that the conscious Ego – while keeping its individual personality – can come into contact, through a path that is in some cases rather fast, with a form of energy that recharges, vivifies, transforms it, and make it enthusiastic (in the etymological sense of the term), completely freeing it from the tensions, conflicts and mental insecurities that characterized its subjection to human psyche: this energy, perceived as Light and described in human terms as infinite, absolute and unconditional love (probably due to the lack of more adequate terms), seems to be the ultimate goal to which every Ego aspires, regardless of the vicissitudes of human life in which it has been involved and by the psyche's dynamics – even the negative ones – with which it identified, which are in a sense washed away by spiritual energy. The experience turns out to be so satisfying for the Ego that its most intense and only desire remains that of being able to stay forever in that dimension and in that sublime state. This bliss condition experienced by the Ego is often associated with the feeling of having come back home, that is, to an existential dwelling perfectly harmonized with the very essence of the spiritual core of the conscious Ego. Regardless of the ways in which the experiences in the Spirit dimension take shape and develop – in a temporal dimension very different from the one we experience during our organic life – the creative and life-giving effect that the Spirit energy exerts on the Ego is such that the latter does not feel the need for anything else, except to be able to feed on that eternal Light. Even the most intense emotions or affective relationships experienced within the human psyche's domain pale in comparison with the energy radiated by the Spirit, which is able to reproduce them as renewed experiences at a much higher and more rewarding level.

The Spirit dimension has already been experienced by the conscious Ego of a remarkable number of people of different ages, who, up to the moment of the experience, had lived their lives in a more or less normal way, within the range of variants that destiny assigns to each individual life: some lives may be more troubled than others, more difficult and more marked by suffering; some people may have an intense religious faith, while others may be completely agnostic, convinced that the organism's death marks the end of the existence of the conscious Ego; in some cases the NDE occurs at an age in which the Ego is still in the development phase and lives spontaneously and immediately, without thinking about existential issues. Yet, apart from the changes that the contact with the Spirit energy induces in the Ego when the latter returns to organic life, in most cases the conviction, indeed the certainty, remains in those who have experienced an NDE, that what was an extraordinary and wonderful experience that at a certain point was interrupted – often leaving an intense feeling of regret and homesickness in the Ego – will occur again as a definitive and permanent condition when the conscious Ego will be freed from the constraint that binds it to its organism. In our age the impact of these positive NDEs, which can be considered as informative messages transmitted to us humans about the experiences that await the conscious Ego after the death of its organism, is far more prevalent and popular than the communications of mediumistic origin, which characterized the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the last century. At the same time, we also find that the conditions of human life have considerably improved compared to a century ago, at least in the context of our Western cultures, making human life on average more pleasant, and in any case much freer from those senses of guilt that still permeated many nineteenth-century cultural conditioning programs.

There is always a very close relationship between a form of reality and the conscious subject who experiences it as such: in the case of NDEs, those who tell us their experiences are convinced of the reality of the Spirit dimension because they have directly experienced it, even if then had to return to the reality of organic life. On the other hand, in the case of mediumistic communications, the narrating subjects remain alien entities for us humans, residing in a different and separate dimension from ours: we have no possibility of verifying whether what these inorganic beings affirm can be considered real by us, if first we too have not passed through the obligatory gate of death to see firsthand which of the different possible dimensions of the afterlife we are going to explore, and what experiences our Ego will encounter there. The preferences, expectations, hopes or fears that we may have about it during this organic life greatly vary from one Ego to another, and for each of us the reality of inorganic life might pleasantly conform to our human expectations, or it could be a surprise. This uncertainty in the knowledge of our personal post mortem destiny has always characterized the human condition, and must be considered as an essential element of our psyche: both mediumistic communications and NDEs represent attempts to shed light on the enigma of the experiences that await us once our human life is over, and can be more or less convincing for our conscious Ego, even if they cannot replace the evidence of direct experience (with the exception of those who had an NDE and therefore remember and know what they firsthand experienced). Anyway, I think that it is not useless, indeed that it can be advantageous, to cultivate and manifest expectations on what our conscious Ego would like to experience once it is freed from the constraints of the organism, in order to deepen the knowledge of its very essence and its aspirations beyond the boundaries (and limits) of human life.

It seems to me important to highlight an aspect that is found both in many NDEs and in various mediumistic communications: since death in any case marks the end of our experiences in the sphere of organic life in this world, in case we wanto to recognize the continuation of the existence of the conscious Ego (and of its personal memories produced by human experience), the Ego's post mortem condition determines the beginning of a new life, or a new phase of its existence, in a different dimension. This new phase of inorganic life will take place in conditions that are more advantageous and more pleasant for the Ego than those experienced during its human life: it can therefore be considered an improvement, a progress or an advancement, which could also exceed the expectations and hopes nurtured by the Ego during its organic life. In no case should the Ego fear being chastised, punished or demoted, precisely because death itself frees it from the conditioning and domain of the human psyche. The new condition experienced by the Ego, although relative to the level of spiritual evolution reached during its human life, will always be perceived and interpreted by the same as more beautiful, more pleasant, more harmonious and more in tune with its own essence than the organic life that is over. From this point of view, I believe that the experience of this organic life of ours should be considered as a starting point, a springboard or a launching pad, towards the experimentation of a series of different dimensions, each of which requires having first exhausted the opportunities presented from the previous stage. If it is true that the Ego can transit from one dimension to another while keeping the continuity of its own personalized essence and at least a part of the memories relating to its previous life, then organic life is configured as the initial stage of formation and development of the Ego, and of its subsequent evolution in the event that the duration of this life and the resources available to the Ego allow the implementation of this process.

Under the domain of the human psyche, the Ego's desire to be able to live a better life in the afterlife is often dismissed as a (vain) hope, or as an illusion that no reasonable and culturally educated person should believe: indeed, the programs of cultural conditioning, elaborated on the basis of what is considered as scientific knowledge, do their utmost to value human life as the supreme good, suggesting that the existence of the conscious Ego is linked to that of its organism and cannot be separated from it. Yet the desire for a better life is inherent in the very essence of the Ego and in its function as an experimenter and sensor. The fact that in many cases the different degree of development of the Ego's spiritual component causes this aspiration to manifest itself in forms naively linked to the satisfaction of desires pertaining to this physical dimension, also depends on the different conditions of life in which each Ego is involved, due to the fragmentation of human experiences and the psyche's dynamics that follow. Each Ego interprets in its own way the need to improve its condition and the aspiration to be happier (or less unhappy) than this life allows it to be. The various forms with which this need to be happier, in one way or another, manifests itself during our organic life – under the domain of the psyche's bipolar energy – exhaust their effects at the moment of death, and in many cases even earlier, when the deterioration of the organism in the terminal phase of life can in itself constitute a factor of unhappiness. At the end of this life the balance between the pleasure, joy and happiness marked by the Ego as assets, and the pain, suffering and unhappiness marked in the passive, can be very variable from one Ego to another, in a positive or negative sense, without anything or anyone – in the realm of human life – being able to offer explanations to any single Ego on the reasons and meaning of these differences.

For this reason it seems to me, beyond any other consideration, that the aspiration of the conscious Ego to a better life should in any case be recognized as reasonable, as this aspiration is part of the very essence of the Ego. If this right to search for better living conditions – that is, considered as more rewarding for the Ego – is already recognized during our life, despite the distortions and conflicts caused by the human psyche due to the needs of each organism and the interactions between billions of organisms, all the more reason to support and defend it in relation to the continuation of the Ego's existence after its organism's death. In fact, the experiences determined by the human psyche in the course of organic life often translate into a series of hopes, illusions, disappointments and deceptions – with the relative load of suffering that the Ego is forced to endure – that every Ego resigns itself to accept as its destiny, or refuse by killing its own body. But the fact that the experience of human life can represent a negative and disappointing balance for the Ego of a person does not erase the aspiration of the same towards a better life: when the reality of human life, with all its contradictions and conflicts, is presented as the only possible reality and as the only form of existence for the conscious Ego, even the hope of a future better life is denied to it, to force it to adapt in any case to the conditions that the needs of its organism and the psyche's dynamics impose on it. And since the acceptance of this dogmatic interpretation of reality implies the recognition of the power of the human psyche, which arbitrarily manages to ensnare, delude and deceive an Ego that is almost always weak and lacking adequate resources to successfully face the difficulties of organic life, it happens not infrequently that the Ego, in order to live the only life it knows, lets itself be attracted by the psyche's negative polarity, seeking its own advantage even to the detriment of other people, thus contributing to keep high the tension of the psyche's bipolar energy. Thus the conscious Ego should never give up the hope for a better life than the one lived through its organism and, above all, it should never be charmed by the psyche's attunements that try to convince it of the impossibility and unreality of that life.

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