Just wanted to jot down some notes from a book I was revisiting the other night, On Dreams and Death, by Marie Louise Von Franz. This passage is super interesting:

Jung has expressed the assumption that psychic reality might lie on a supraluminous level of frequency, that is, it could exceed the speed of light. “Light,” in this case, would appropriately enough be the last transitional phenomenon of the process of becoming unobservable, before the psyche fully “irrealizes” the body, as Jung put its, and its first appearance after it incarnates itself in the space-time continuum by shifting its energy to a lower gear. (p. 146)

She goes on to talk a bit about how this is why people experience a mystical light at near-death experiences, because they are approaching the transitional frequency from matter, into light (energy), into pure psyche/consciousness.

Also, she cites a dream-passage from a book by J.B. Priestly, called Man and Time. It presents a very beautiful image:

I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. but now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw a generation of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would have been better if not one of them, if not one of us all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, still desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and tim ewent faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passes a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it, I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of beings. Birds, men, or creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought as tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt before such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds. (p. 14)

I really like that whole white flame thing… Also, that whole thing with the birds reminds me of this book I read in early highschool, called Bridge of Birds, which was (as far as I can remember) a really cool fantasy novel set in ancient China.