My first post exposed the severe heart attack Jung suffered in Feb 44. He was several weeks between life and death, and probably owed his survival to Swiss greatest heart specialist, Theodor Haemmerli, called Dr H. in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR).
Jung had visions during his illness, and an experience in which we recognize now a NDE. The testimony he gives in MDR might be the first NDE case fully published.
Jung flew away high up in space, seeing far below the earth,
bathed in a gloriously blue light. Then he saw a tremendous dark block of stone, floating in space; a temple was there, and he knew he would receive inside all the answers to all his questions, but before he could enter the temple he met Dr H., delegated from the earth to tell him there was a protest against his going away. He had to return.The moment Jung heard that, the vision ceased, and he was profoundly disappointed.
I have shortened the report. Jung couldn't know in 44 a basic NDE case, where the subject meets on the other side dead members of his family, telling him the time is not yet come, but he was surprised to have met Dr H., a living person, in the other world:
I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him. "His life is in danger, for heaven's sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the 'greater company'!"He tried to warn him, but the doctor didn't care, taking Jung's visions as pure delirium. Maybe Dr H. was wrong, as
Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that Dr H. would have to die in my stead.
I was his last patient. On 4 April 1944 - I still remember the exact date - I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day Dr H. took to his bed and did not leave it again. Soon afterward he died of septicemia.Soon afterward might be unappropriate, as Haemmerli died on June 30, 87 days later (I found this date in a list of Swiss physicians, its URL is now invalid, here is another source). This was misunderstood by most biographers who didn't check this fact, which increases the strangeness of the case as June 30 might be the very day when Jung left the hospital (end of June or beginning of July).
(MDR, Visions)
I found a few days ago that this June 30, 44 is too the birthdate of Raymond Moody, the one who revealed the NDE phenomenon, with his Life after Life in 1975. This book was a revolution. Jung's case was not unique, but the people who lived such an experience were reluctant to share it, for obvious reasons. The progresses of medicine allowed more and more people to come back from clinical death, often with a strange story to tell...
Moody was the one who collected about 150 of these stories, and his book helped thousands of other people to share their experience.
Moody's later researches led him to believe in reincarnation, and to state he personally had nine past-lives.
It looks then incredible that the man who showed the reality of the NDE phenomenon was born a few hours after someone involved in what is probably the most famous historical NDE case, someone who maybe died because he was skeptical about it.
One could imagine Haemmerli's thoughts before his death, such as: Shit! this Jung was right. If I had a chance to live another life, I'll try my best to study this strange phenomenon.
In 1975 Moody only knew recent NDE cases, but his next book, Reflections on Life after Life, gives in 1977 some historical cases, such as Jung's one, briefly:
Also interesting is the fact that the renowned psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung had a near-death experience; he describes it in the section intitled Visions in the book Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
I came to a new interest in NDE's after a reading which mentioned the work of one of Moody's main followers, Kenneth Ring.
He subdivided the NDE on a five-stage continuum. The subdivisions were:
1) - Peace (60 %)
2) - Body separation (37 %)
3) - Entering darkness (23 %)
4) - Seeing the light (16 %)
5) - Entering the light (10 %)
I already read that long ago, but since that time I became acquainted with the Golden Ratio, and now I recognize in these numbers 60-37-23-16-10 something that looks like a golden sequence. Starting with 60, successive divisions by 1.618 (the Golden Ratio) give, in rounded numbers:
60 - 37 - 23 - 14 - 9
The last two numbers don't fit the percentages as perfectly as the first ones; it might be argued that the low percentages have not the same accuracy as the higher ones, but anyhow the similarity is striking.
I notice that 60 % is near the golden section of 100 %, and here is the golden sequence starting with 100, still in round numbers:
100 - 62 - 38 - 24 - 15 - 9
I'm afraid I cannot say if this similarity is a mere coincidence or if some mathematical correlation could explain it (notably Zipf's law). Some other studies about NDE's do not reflect exactly this first scientific approach.
Many false claims run about the golden ratio, yet it can appear in some mathematical processes, just because it's an important algebric number. I'm rather interested in cases where there is absolutely no reason for its presence, and yet it's there. My previous post was about the first maps of Philadelphia (Phi or φ symbolizes the Golden Ratio), a rectangle of 8 x 21 blocks in which Center Square (now Town Hall) is not at all in the center but divides these numbers in 3-5-8-13, that any reader of Da Vinci Code identifies today with the Fibonacci Sequence.
I shared it here because I saw a parallel with Jung's experience in 1944; I gave some hints and planned to work it up, but I failed to do it, for it was a big job.
I had a kind of NDE when I was about 19, around 1969. It was rather an altered state of consciousness as I was not at all in a near-death situation, but it had many points in common with a NDE, although I obviously didn't know such a phenomenon existed. Actually it troubled me a lot, and I kept it for myself during so many years that I was not sure then of what exactly happened.
So Tony or Phil had the feeling he met God during this experience, and he saw too a doorway with pleasing proportions, leading maybe to God's world, but he just admired the door and didn't think of going through it. He worried then all his life that he would never have such another chance.
In my experience I felt like Phil that the molecules of my mind ran very fast across the universe, until it slowed down to some rest, facing what might have been God's throne. Then I heard a sentence in an unknown language, but I could understand its meaning: I am not what people believe I am.
Then I got back into normality, and tried to find the previous state again. I had the vision of a narrow street, of a house in this street, of its door...
This disturbed me a lot as I was an unbeliever, having got rid of the Christian education I was raised in. So I mostly did as the experience didn't happen, until I found in my third reading of A Scanner Darkly how much Tony's experience looked like mine. It was so far away that I felt unable to remember if I ever thought of what was behind my door.
This experience is present too in the books of the so-called Divine Trilogy, as well as in the Exegesis, and in the three novels Dick precises that the doorway was a Golden Rectangle. It seems that in his mind the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence are privileged accesses to the other world; in The Divine Invasion, Zina and Emmanuel discuss about this doorway to Heaven:
The ratio, she said to Herb Asher, is that used in playing cards: three to five.5/3 is the first Fibonacci fraction (1.666) giving a valuable approximation of Phi (1.618), but it's quite amazing that, according to the usual numerology from A=1 to Z=26,
PHIL / DICK = 45/27 = 5/3
so Phil Dick might be a doorway for those who didn't live such an experience;-)
Later I found the case of Jung in 1944, in which there is too a doorway leading to a sacred place, but Haemmerli forbids Jung to get in. I calculated, using the same way as above,
HAEMMERLI / JUNG = 84/52 = 21/13 ≈ Phi
as 13 and 21 are two successive Fibo numbers.
Jung's report of his 1944 visions might have been the first NDE case depicted. Jung and Haemmerli met in the other world, the world of death, and both came back. In our Western tradition, what might seem the nearest could be the cases of Enoch and Elijah, the only two characters of the Old Testament that didn't die, and were raised directly to Heaven. In the Hebrew alphabet, using the traditional gematria, these two people have the same values as Haemmerli and Jung in our modern alphabet:
- חנוך (Enoch) = 84
- אליהו (Elijah) = 52
Another disturbing echo is given by the only dates known for the 44 events:
- from Feb 11, Jung's accident, to 4/4/44, there are 53 days;
- from 4/4/44 to Jun 30, Haemmerli's death, there are 87 days.
53-87 is the golden repartition of the sum 140
- חםה 'hama (sun) = 53
- לבנה levana (moon) = 87
Jung chiseled Sun and Moon on the Bollingen stone he engraved as a commemoration of his 44 recover.
I'm not trying to make any theory about a link between NDE's and Golden Ratio, I just point to these echoes which might be another trick of the Trickster. In chapter two of Synchronicity, Jung accounts of an astrological experiment he imagined to give an experimental proof of the phenomenon. A first batch showed a strong correlation between the sun-moon aspects of married people and the traditional astrological correspondence, but another batch didn't confirm the first results, and that led Jung to state the first results were a synchronicity, showing the phenomenon existed, but beyond any hope of a scientific analysis.
I don't feel I have to justify what made me calculate the values of the man who found the five stages of NDE's, with the percentages 60-37-23-16-10 :
KENNETH RING = 77-48
That's a golden name, and so is the usual diminutive
KEN RING = 30/48 = 5/8
The same ratio 8/5 (Fibonacci) appears for the last two stages of his typical NDE, 16-10.
I read long ago MDR, but in this rich book I didn't notice peculiarly the day 4/4/44. I saw its schematism much later in the book Les raisons de l'irrationnel (1976, but already published in 1970 with the title Plaidoyer pour l'extraordinaire), by Paul Misraki, a French composer who gave in the 30's the best known hits of Ray Ventura's orchestra, such as Tout va très bien, madame la marquise. I calculated
PAUL MISRAKI = 50/80 = 5/8,
a golden name, with the same Fibonacci ratio as Ken Ring.
In a footnote of this book, Misraki stated there was common points between the experience of Jung in 44 and another case he held from a relative. It might have been the first connection published between NDE's, but such connections were known before in the medical world, and Moody's enquiry started in 1965 when he heard about two similar cases.
Actually Misraki was the French translater of Moody's first books, published in France in 77 and 78.There is too a diminutive for Moody,
RAY MOODY = 44/72
and that's again a golden name.
For the two diminutives,
MOODY-RING / RAY-KEN = 120/74 = 60/37, the percentages obtained by Ring for the first two stages of the typical NDE.
In order to appreciate the probability for someone to have a golden name, I studied several lists of real names. My more important batches were two lists of 3700 actresses and 2700 actors found on the web, and both give exactly the same odds, 1 against 34.
This is just to give an idea, as I do not try to prove anything.
JOHN AUDETTE = 47 76
So, including all the forms of their names, 3 of these 5 founders have golden names, and another harmony appears between the 5 complete names:
JOHN AUDETTE = 47+76 = 123
KENNETH RING = 77+48 = 125
RAYMOND MOODY = 90+72 = 162
These are the ones with golden possibilities, giving the sum 123+125+162 = 410
The other two are
MICHAEL SABOM = 51+50 = 101
BRUCE GREYSON = 49+103 = 152
and 101+152 = 253 is the golden section of 410
There is also a golden harmony between the 4 experiencers, whose names are:
Nelson Wright = 79 85
Rachel Mannus = 47 82
David Labraccio = 40 64
Joe Hurley = 30 89
totals = 196 320 = 4 (49 80)
First names have for average value 49, second names 80, and 49-80 is the golden repartition of 129.
It can be noted too that they form a Jungian quaternion, 3 men and 1 woman, this woman having the value 129, average value of the group.
To give an example of how it is a big job to give an account of my golden researches, I recently tried to collect all the coincidences involving together numbers 13 and 21, and I soon came over 80 cases.
Good job with the whole post! Thank you so much for sharing.
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