Dr. James Hollis

The fact that people have frozen their brains and wanting to be revived in some future era is a good example of denial, it seems to me.

Life means something because your choices are finite.

You don't live here forever.

Now, the more you identify with the ego, the more threatened you're going to be by that.

And then you begin to realize, all right, the center of my personality is not the ego.

There are several things to say about this, none of which is proof of anything, simply observations.

And Jung pointed this out in an essay once called The Soul in Death.

Psyche doesn't seem to recognize its own termination.

People who are overtly dying and they know they're dying.

And one of my patients right now is a glioblastoma client who's not going to be here in a few months.

who is purely aware of mortality, but the dreams have to do with journeys and crossings and things of that sort.

In other words, as if the human psyche is not bound by time and space per se, but the ego is.

So if there's another life, it's another life.

If there's a life after this, it's another life.

This is the only one we know about for sure.

And I would say in terms of the fear of death, which most people don't want to talk about, but sooner or later it comes up in therapy, no matter what stage of life one is involved in, is either there is another life of some kind which is larger than my imagination can conjure up,

or there's an annihilation of this ego identity.

Either case, my theories about it and my anxieties about it are rendered moot.

So again, the more I identify with the ego consciousness, the more I'm tied into its perpetuation.

The less I'm identified with that, the less it matters.