The release from the human psyche

A synthesis of human life

The time has come to draw conclusions and attempt an interpretative synthesis of the adventure of human life. We started from a framework of knowledge based on scientific research, but then we had to confront the limits placed to our ability to understand by the intellectual resources at our disposition, both collectively, in the context of the social and cultural system of which we are members, and subjectively, based on the more or less high (or more or less poor, depending on the point of view) level of intelligence of which each of us is gifted. We have also pointed out the complexity of the phenomenon of the human psyche and the rather reduced range of tunings of the psyche that each person consciously experiences in the course of their life, in relation to the individual destiny and personal history, observing how within the psyche we can find everything, and how to any tuning, another can correspond which is antithetic, conflicting, and sometimes irreconcilable (at least so it seems). It is easy to understand how the navigation in this sea of the psyche's experiences can be risky and often marked by negative elements, such as sadness and suffering. In a nutshell, in life everyone makes do as they can, following their destiny with the available resources and carrying out a more or less interesting program in the context of a long-term project whose knowledge is precluded to us, but whose directives must be executed.       

Nostalgia for another reality

in the meeantime we realized how our own consciousness brings with it (at least for some of us) the nostalgia and yearning for a reality – different from that offered by earthly life – to which our own core feels to belong, in a certain sense, rightfully, while in this world we often have the impression of living by force majeure, conditioned as we are by our organism's needs, interpreted according to the tunings of the psyche that drive us. Urged by this recall, some humans go in search of tunings different from the ordinary ones, to test in an experimental way if they can obtain signals, clues or information about the possibility of accessing that dimension in which we would like to exist. Starting from dreams, we have traveled a journey of different mental tunings, variously oriented, culminating in those non-ordinary experiences more or less connected with our bodily death, which are the NDEs. At this point, our investigation was directed towards mediumistic phenomena, to see if they can offer us some indication of the possible survival of our individual consciousness to the brain's death. In the interpretation of these amazing and extraordinary phenomena we have found ourselves faced with difficulties and obstacles that are not easy to overcome, always in the light of the limited intellectual resources available to us in this life.   

The faculties of mediums

It is indeed evident that mediums are human beings endowed with non-ordinary faculties and powers: if not so, everyone (or at least a good number of people) would have the ability to obtain exceptional results such as those that occur through the most gifted mediums. In addition to the communications from spirit entities (some of which, as we have seen, offer a contribution that is not without interest to the survival hypothesis), physical phenomena such as apports, telekinesis and direct voice should not be forgotten. The question that still remains open is, what do mediumistic phenomena depend on, and why it is so difficult to find someone capable of producing them nowadays, when we have valid devices for recording physical phenomena? Although the prevailing cultural attitude in our age tries to persuade us that everything must be brought back to brain faculties, those who want to remain cling to this thesis are then forced to climb on mirrors when trying to attribute to the human mind (if considered as a product of brain activity) those extraordinary faculties that would make mediumistic phenomena possible. We do not have enough cognitive elements to be able to interpret these phenomena in an exclusively human perspective, and taking into account the survival hypothesis and the super-psi theory, it seems plausible to interpret mediumistic phenomena in the context of a contact with a different dimension.     

Links with separate realities

There could therefore exist other realities, distinct and separate from ours, in which those forms of consciousness and individual intelligence that we call entities or spirits dwell. If a group of us tries with constancy and perseverance to bridge our dimension and one of these different planes of existence, the experiment can be successful, provided a medium is present in the group, that is, a person whose mental faculties can establish a connection with those dimensions. Usually the contact occurs following a request intentionally advanced by our dimension, and the response of the entities manifests in many cases with a collaborative attitude. Once the contact has been established, the communicating entities can use the tunings of the psyche of the medium and the sitters, and hence a role game originates, made up of expectations and requests, fulfilled in all or in part, but also of misunderstandings, errors, inappropriate interferences and even of deceits and spites. In fact, from the moment when the contact between the two dimensions is established, these entities demonstrate that they have powers capable of interacting with our dimension using the energy resources of the bodies of the medium and the sitters.   

As we have seen, in some cases these entities manifest a clear connection with the personality of a deceased human being, so much so as to support the survival hypothesis, but in other cases this does not happen, and we get the distinct impression that through their powers they use conscious but also subliminal psychic elements drawn from the minds of the medium and the sitters to create fictitious personalities. Therefore, we cannot rule out either the hypothesis that these entities can successfully impersonate the identity of a deceased human being, nor, on the other hand, the possibility that a living person can be transformed, after death, into a spirit. The fact remains that something that cannot be excluded is not necessarily guaranteed, and at this point we can only hope for or believe in survival, if this is what we want or what we consider right. It is also possible to recognize the action of the entities in certain non-mediumistic paranormal phenomena, such as the poltergeist and psychokinesis, which involve the movement or displacement of even heavy objects without detecting normal physical causes. In cases of poltergeist, as in those of haunting, it can not be said that the entities have a particularly benevolent attitude towards humans, even if the triggering cause of this type of intervention is often to be found in the negative psychic tunings activated by a human subject, usually a teenager.      

The faculties attributed to the human spirit

But the interaction between spirits and humans is not limited to this. As we have seen, within the human psyche there are all those tunings, often defined as superior – such as reasoning thought, creativity, imagination, reflexive self-awareness, search for meaning and for knowledge, noble feelings, and so on – that in the common language have always been referred to the human spirit, thus implying a capacity by the brain to acquire, interpret and process elements coming from a dimension distinct from that of the physical world. From the nineteenth century on, however, there has been a strong cultural tendency to put the accent on the brain first, considering it to all effects as a complete and self-sufficient creative instrument, rather than as a receiver and processor of external signals coming both from the physical world and from the psyche. It is also evident that some persons are endowed with resources or faculties, such as creativity, that others have in a limited amount, and it is known that in the ancient world the artistic or literary invention was attributed not only to the artist as receptor, but mainly to the inspiration of a divine or semidivine entity (the muse or daemon) who represented the personification of what in the most recent age has been called spirit, genius, or the unconscious. Moreover, at least in the artistic field, creativity has always been correlated with fantasy, that is, with a complex form of imagination and thought more or less detached from the reality of the physical world. In the scientific and technical field, instead, creativity has been directly applied to the reality of the physical world, obtaining extraordinary results that allow us to live today in a world unimaginable even just a couple of centuries ago.   

We can easily recognize that the negation of any hypothesis concerning the existence of the spirit, or the spirits, does not lead anywhere, if we want to understand the origin and purpose of the higher faculties of the psyche, and less than ever it helps us in the search for a possible explanation of paranormal or mediumistic phenomena, as it forces us to resort to unknown and inexplicated unconscious powers of the brain, to explain not only the ability to capture and transmit information to and from other brains, but also to exert direct actions on the physical world. The acceptance of the hypothesis that takes into account the existence of something spiritual (that is, alien to our body instrument, as we know it) allows some glimpses – even if not a complete and satisfactory explanation – at least for a better understanding of these phenomena, since it establishes a certain gradual continuity between psychic manifestations considered normal, although non-ordinary, (like fantasy, creativity, dreams), and paranormal events.   

Taken together, they are phenomena for which we can hypothesize that a more or less intense influence is exerted on the instrument that determines the activity of our psyche by entities and energies that are alien to this physical dimension. In this respect, even terms such as soul and unconscious could be considered almost synonymous, being simply labels that each person, according to the orientation of their psyche, puts on a jar whose content is represented by enigmatic, even if active and effective, forces. We can also come to understand the reason for the unreliability of some communications of mediumistic origin, which can be attributed to the psychic realm of fantasy, although presented as reality, since neither the entities nor the psyche are linked to the objective reality of our physical world. True and false have a very precise value in relation to the objective human dimension, but their boundaries become much more blurred in the domain of subjective psyche, which can make us perceive as real what is not so on the objective plane, reminding us that our perception of reality is always a perception generated by our psyche, which must be corroborated by objective verification, even of an instrumental nature, to find valid confirmations in the physical world.    

How could the survival of the conscious Ego be made possible?

The hypothesis that the experience and tunings of the human psyche are at least partly determined by entities not directly perceivable in this physical dimension (outside the context of paranormal and mediumistic phenomena) should be elaborated in more depth if we want to consider it in relation to the eventual survival and continuity of our conscious Ego after death. The communicating entities often and explicitly state that something of our individual personality survives the death of the body, and in many cases try to offer concrete and verifiable evidence of having previously lived an earthly life. About the fact of wanting to believe or doubt what the entities affirm, everyone can choose as they feel and like better: as researchers have seen, from the point of view of our criterion of truth – as we mean it in this dimension – the entities' statements and indications are sometimes true, sometimes false, and not infrequently unverifiable. What really puts us in difficulty is the need to explain how an individual consciousness linked to a human organism, whose conscious experience is expressed through the brain activity, can then continue to exist even without the functionality of that organ. Since we know well what happens to the body of those who die, we can not doubt that at some point our physical instrument (including the brain) is subject to deterioration and dissolution. Therefore, if we wish to hypothesize the continuity of consciousness at the time of death, we must recognize the existence of a different instrument of tuning and mental elaboration that should replace the brain, so that the flow of experience does not stop or – if interrupted – is then reactivated by a link to our state of consciousness prior to death.     

As we have seen, this hypothesis has been supported and advanced in various forms, which mainly refer to the so-called double, or soul, or perispirit, or etheric body, that is, to an organ of an unidentified energetic nature that would exist alongside the physical body (but not in the physical dimension) already during human life. In other words, each of us would also be associated with a spirit endowed with a kind of energetic mind, which not only coexists with the physical brain and with it can sometimes connect, but which is able to continue its activity even when the physical brain ceases to function, generating continuity in our conscious experience. The tunings of the psyche to which our conscious Ego has access through the brain activity would prevent us, under ordinary conditions, to be aware of our spirit for a reason similar to that for which, by day, the sunlight prevents us from seeing the stars, which are present in the sky: the attractive force of the contents of the psyche normally tuned by the brain activity is too strong to allow us to perceive the tunings linked to the spirit. The brain, therefore, would be the instrument by which we are ensnared and bound to the tunings of the human psyche, and this is the reason why only by passing through the doors of death can we free ourselves from these bonds and access other mental tunings belonging to completely different realities. There is always, however, the problem already highlighted, of the dependence of the same consciousness on the brain functioning, in all those cases in which – in this life – our consciousness fades away without anything intervening to replace it.

A time to live and a time to die

Everyone is free to evaluate if and how much they feel attracted to the experiences of the human psyche: we have already dealt with this topic in the human psyche section, emphasizing the fact that – however satisfied people may be of their own experience in this life – we must not forget the vast amount of negative, painful and dramatic experiences that humankind as a whole faces day after day and has faced throughout its history. In general, each of us, living year after year, becomes so used to existing in this world that ends up behaving as if this life were to be eternal, considering death as the most negative event that could exist, because it puts an end to life. From this point of view it is possible to say, with a touch of irony, that at least those who died have already taken the worry away! Our culture of life prevents us from developing an adequate culture of death, which we miss. At the very least, we think we can rightly state that, just as there is a time to live, there is also a time to die, in which any positive and serene approach to a healthy and painless death should be welcome.   

Free from the troubles of the human psyche

The liberation from the grip of the human psyche thus becomes an opportunity to free our conscious Ego from those socio-cultural schemes which, in a dogmatic form, force us to consider this life as the only opportunity offered to our individual consciousness to make experiences. To discover that there could be a real dimension in which the entities or spirits enjoy a conscious existence, which in my opinion can be considered as possible even if not certain, helps us to evaluate as plausible the fact that we too, if we wish, may access that dimension, possibly with the help of those same entities that already dwell there.    

At the death of the physical body the spirit's mental activity could fully permeate the brain, allowing the consciousness to tune entirely new experiences, in a dimension in which space and time have completely different values from those we are accustomed to. A similar phenomenon could also occur in those particular conditions in which some NDEs are experienced: in this case the two activities could partly coexist, since the contents of the experience are transmitted also to the brain to be recorded. On the verge of death, or perhaps even during all life, the inverse could occur, that is, the transmission to the spirit's mind of the contents of our human memory, so that they can be used in the context of a new form of experience that replaces that of earthly life, in a dimension characterized by phenomena quite different from those we experience here. It may be that the fact that some people have an NDE and others do not depends on the opening of a channel of connection with the spirit, a channel that is usually obstructed or inhibited since childhood. When this channel opens, extraordinary things can happen: inner experiences that can substantially change our vision of the world, creations that can bring about new substantial cultural changes, or even active intervention in this dimension of forces and entities that normally dwell outside of it.   

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