In What Imagined World?...

... Will I achieve a final triumph of the spirit, and not sustain a final annihilation? (Metaphorical victories -- "You will live on through your children" -- don't count.)

Carl Jung treated his "primitives" with reverence and respect.  And yet, he said, they could not even process the question that he put to them -- "What will happen to you when you die?"  They told him that the bodies are always dragged into the bush, for the hyenas to eat.  (The Tibetans use birds instead, and the ritual is more elaborate.)

At dawn, the men of the tribe spit into their hands and turn their palms towards the Risen Sun.  The spittle is equivalent to their breath, the Breath of Life.  How is this different, Jung asked, from our own acknowledgement of powerlessness, taken from the Passion of Christ -- "Lord into Thy hands I commend my spirit"?