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Here’s how Bernardo Kastrup — a contemporary philosopher known for analytic idealism — would interpret Carl Jung’s “final visions,” especially Jung’s ideas about death, consciousness, and the transformation Jung described late in life:
1) Reality is fundamentally consciousness, not matter
Kastrup starts from the view that the physical world and bodies are appearances within a universal consciousness — not independent, material objects. Jung’s late-life sense of a cosmic perspective resonates with this because Jung was hinting that the psyche isn’t reducible to the brain. (bernardokastrup.com)
2) Jung’s views on death fit idealism naturally
Kastrup would see Jung’s final reflections — e.g. the ego dissolving while something deeper remains — as consistent with the idea that death is the end of the ego’s dissociation, not the end of consciousness itself. Kastrup often uses similar language: the body “stops being imagined” by mind, but mind persists. (bernardokastrup.com)
3) The “Self” Jung talked about = universal consciousness
For Jung, the Self archetype represented a deeper organizing principle in psyche. Kastrup interprets this metaphysically, not just psychologically: the underlying consciousness Jung pointed to is literally the ground of all being. (SEO KIOSK - digital phenomenology)
4) Death as waking up, not annihilation
Kastrup explicitly compares the death process to waking from a dream — your ego fades, but conscious awareness doesn’t disappear. He relates this directly to Jung’s idea that the Self would persist beyond the ego. (bernardokastrup.com)
5) NDE-like experiences are credible glimpses, not illusions
In his essay on consciousness and death, Kastrup suggests that near-death experiences (NDEs) may reflect a loosening of ego boundaries and an expansion of consciousness — something Jung’s final visions also hinted at. (jcer.com)
6) Jung’s visions aren’t just symbolic — they’re ontologically real
Where Jung might see visions as psychological phenomena, Kastrup frames them as pointers toward the true nature of reality: mind-as-fundamental. He believes such experiences can’t be dismissed as “brain artifacts” because reality itself is not brain-generated. (bernardokastrup.com)
7) The ego dissolves but consciousness remains
Kastrup reads Jung’s late-life emphasis on ego dissolution (less fear of death, more cosmic unity) as a literal description of how consciousness transitions: the particular egoic pattern fades while the underlying, undifferentiated consciousness continues. (bernardokastrup.com)
8) Time and identity are dream-like constructs
Like Jung’s sense of non-linear experience near death, Kastrup holds that time and individual identity are features of the dissociated ego-perspective, not fundamental structures of reality. After death, these vanish or are transformed. (bernardokastrup.com)
9) Personal identity survives only as a pattern within universal consciousness
He speculates that some aspects of the individual (memories, personality traces) might linger as patterns within deeper levels of consciousness, similar to Jung’s idea of the unconscious continuing beyond the body’s death. (bernardokastrup.com)
10) Jung’s mystical themes gain a philosophical grounding
Kastrup effectively philosophically grounds Jung’s mystical end-of-life insights: it’s not biological death that ends being, but rather the memory/ego loop dissolving within the ever-present universal consciousness. (jcer.com)
In short
Kastrup doesn’t just treat Jung’s final visions as symbolic psychology. He interprets them through analytic idealism — the view that:
Consciousness is fundamental,
Bodies and egos are temporary dissociated patterns within consciousness,
Death is the end of dissociation, not the end of awareness,
And what Jung described cosmically reflects actual ontological continuity of mind rather than mere neurobiology. (bernardokastrup.com)
If you’d like, I can turn this into a side-by-side comparison of Jung’s own words vs. Kastrup’s interpretation.
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