Coming to Terms with Mortality
Pillar Four: A reconciliation with the horizon that gives life its shape
One of the most repressed and least understood aspects of modern psychology is our attitude toward death. Contemporary culture tends to treat death primarily as a technical problem—something to be postponed, managed, or disguised as much as possible. This leaves almost no space for perceiving death as a profound psychological reality with which one must engage in conscious inner dialogue.
Carl Jung took a fundamentally different—and in many ways radical—position. He believed that the psyche prepares for death as naturally as it prepares for life. As we mature and age, the unconscious increasingly speaks in the language of dreams, symbols, images, and intuitive sensations, gradually introducing the themes of transition and completion. When this process is ignored or suppressed, the inner world becomes filled with anxiety and fear. But when a person allows this movement to unfold consciously, a deep and genuine calm can emerge.
It is important to emphasize that Jung did not claim to know what happens after death. His interest lay not in metaphysics, but in our psychological relationship to the inevitable. A life lived in denial of one’s own finitude inevitably becomes superficial—filled with distraction, vanity, and a constant flight from silence. In contrast, a life lived in awareness of mortality acquires density, sincerity, and inner composure.
Reconciliation with death does not mean striving for it or renouncing life. It means recognizing its rightful place in the overall understanding of human existence. Such recognition radically clarifies priorities. Petty anxieties and imposed worries lose their power. What truly matters comes to the foreground: genuine connection with others, fidelity to truth, inner integrity, and the ability to be present in each moment.
In this sense, death ceases to be life’s enemy and becomes its silent partner. It is death that gives shape to our values and depth to our choices.
People who have come to accept their own mortality often radiate a quiet, unmistakable calm—not because they possess final answers, but because they no longer run from the question itself.
This is the last and most difficult of all the pillars. It cannot be taught through technique or mastered through exercises. It develops slowly through reflection, loss, inner honesty, and the courage to face finitude. Yet when this reconciliation occurs, old age ceases to be experienced as decline and becomes a state of inner completion.
For Jung, a fulfilling old age is achieved not by clinging to youth, but by completing the inner journey—through individuation, the integration of the shadow, the attainment of mature meaning, and the acceptance of mortality. In this completion, life attains wholeness. And in this light, aging is not an ending, but the final act of becoming whole.
Comments