Phenomenology of the Transcendence

of Space-time Coordinates
Evidence from “Death Announcements”

gustavo daniel beláustegui

The phenomenological exploration of the psyche’s relationship to the death of the

physical body, including the function of the Self, can be traced back to the pioneer-
ing work of C. G. Jung, Marie-Louise Von Franz (1984), and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
(1972, 1991). The Self ’s ontogenetic origin is contemporaneous with the remark-
able onset of multiple representations and metacognition at three or four years of
age (Perner 1991). Without this capacity, the human being would not be able to
experience—in a healthy and integrating way—nonordinary states of consciousness
(Bourguignon 1972; Grof 1992, 2001) and to be conscious of those states in order
to communicate them (Nuttin 1980). Owens (1972) writes about mystical experi-
ence and the values encountered during a transmutation along the lifespan up to the
“visible” end. The concept of acausal relationships in the “physical” world entered
the realm of theoretical physics in the twentieth-century, for example, in the work of
Wolfgang Paulí (the recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics), who clearly and
intuitively grasped the existence of synchronicity. A potent hypothesis arises: Might
the Self anticipate its continuous transformations through time, thus providing emer-
gent resources to elaborate on critical irruptions of the different stages in human life,
including death?
One of the fundamental proofs of the psyche’s capacity to anticipate change—
especially when this change is not predictable, such as an accident or sudden death—is
the appearance of death announcements. Such bordering experiences create challenges
for scientific study, even within a clinical methodology.

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 85–89, ISSN 1934-2039, ­e-ISSN 1934-2047.
© 2010 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the U­ niversity of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI:
10.1525/jung.2010.4.2.85.

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 86 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010

This article gives two examples in which an individual’s physical death appears to
be within the awareness of the Self: one is representational and the other written. Both
have a common denominator: the individual knows or anticipates the end of biological
life, in circumstances that were not known in ordinary reality. One might suggest that
both of these examples are from teenagers, who are often preoccupied in a symbolic
way with death and transformation, yet the specifics argue that these examples repre-
sent an acausal knowledge present in the Self.

Case 1. Drawing “Sent with Certain Uneasiness of Conscience”

In high school, this teenage girl took drawing classes with china ink as an extracurric-
ular activity. In this drawing, she shows a diurnal night, a destroyed Castle, a woman
on a cornice, and vegetation, symbols that are often associated with the anticipation
of death (Von Franz 1984). She died six months later, in October 1993, in a military
plane crash near the City of Paraná, Province of Entre Ríos, Argentina.

Case 2. Text Found in Personal Computer

The saddest thing of this . . . is that I don’t know if it is day, night or afternoon.
But, well . . . I have been in a lot of pain lately, and thank God, I mean, His gift was to
allow me write down this letter.
Today, I’m not here . . . I’m gone and won’t be back, I know this is difficult to understand
but let’s face it . . .

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 Gustavo Beláustegui, Death Announcements 87

As I write this down I feel like thinking that . . . nothing is funny about this, everything
ends here to me, and it’s not nice, you know.
It’s pretty hard to accept that I won’t come back, I can imagine it . . . I feel that, I can’t
explain it, everything just for this.
And I’ll miss you a lot, I’m leaving . . . and I won’t come back.
I’d like to tell you that I love you:
Daddy: You mean everything to me; you taught me many things, old man, and relax I’ve
learnt them in fact. I love you dad, just remember this . . .
Whenever you feel upset remember what I’ve told you and think about me, but don’t
enslave yourself, and if I see your dad I will hug him for you and for me.
Mom: Bye mom, you know that it’s hard for me to write this down because my hands are
shaking . . . but you taught me to write, and I love you did.
Take care mom; send my regards to the grandparents that . . . what a fool I was, I never
visited them.
Lots of kisses mom, I love you.
Nico: I know brother that almost always I pestered you . . . . but I did it because I needed
you to pay attention to me, you are cool little brother, and I deeply love you . . . I’d give
the world for you kiddo . . .
I loved to hang around with you, you know . . . I love you . . . and send a big kiss to Tona
and tell her that I love her.
Meli: Well . . . this is the hardest part to write down . . . you are a very, very important
woman to me, be always respected because you deserve it, and please remember me, and
read some of my poems . . . but don’t cry, because in truth I’ll read them with you.
I love you . . . a big kiss. Say hi to Román and Eric, to everyone, tell them I’ll miss them
and love them a lot.
Lauri: With you I spent the best time; you are my best friend besides being my sister, and
I imagine it’s hard for you to read this, but don’t be afraid, I’ll take care of you and I’ll
never leave you, you know, when you enter the field, think of me, and play thinking about
me, because I’ll be by your side there, you know?
Remember all advises I’ve given you, I deeply love you kiddo, you know . . . a kiss.
Well now, my heart aches a lot so I say a quick goodbye, because if it were for me I will
keep on writing this forever.
I want you to know that it is important to me that you read this, and that you remember
me as your son and brother.
Say my name, and don’t cry because if you do so I’ll cry too.
Enjoy as a family, go out and go on vacations since I can’t do so, have fun.
Fight always for what you want . . . never give up.
I love you with all my heart, and goodbye . . .

This seventeen-year-old did not give this note to his family but entered it into his
computer during November, as indicated in the computer’s memory. There were no
outward signs of difficulty or depression. His sudden death due to a brain aneurism
occurred on February 1 of the following year.
Living organisms cannot be fully understood from a mechanistic, materialistic point
of view (Behe 1996). To accept, however, that living beings have emergent organizational
capacities, made possible by their genetic makeup (Sheldrake 1988), is also to accept,

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 88 jung journal: culture & psyche 4:2 / spring 2010

from an ontological viewpoint, the existence of what we call the soul. We might also con-
sider the potent concept of a “morphic field” (Shermer 2005), which was developed by
Sheldrake (1988), as a conceptual counterpart to Jung’s psychology of the soul.
These two examples of “death announcements” show the anticipatory capacity of
the Self to bring to consciousness and perhaps to begin to integrate aspects of one’s
death. They lie beyond any ordinary knowledge of illness and reveal a property of the
human soul that transcends psychology as empirical science. An epistemological inter-
section of objective and subjective approaches is required to deal with the relationship
of the Self to biological death, which compromises the mind’s contents, including the
subjective warmth of what has been lived (Beláustegui 2001, 2008). We cannot know
what is left after the loss of spatial and temporal reality, and yet we know that in life it
can be transcended. As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross states in her work, we have an important
task—that is, to prepare ourselves to welcome this transformation.

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gustavo daniel beláustegui, lic., mg. is Head Professor, General Psychology and
Psychology of Personality at “Saint Thomas Aquinas,” Northern University. He graduated in
Licenciatura of Psychology from Pontificia Univesidad Católica Argentina and received his
Magister/Masters in Cognitive Psychology and Learning from the Universidad Atónoma de
Madrid. He was a Ph.D. candidate at Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. Correspondance:
Av. Del Libertador 5569 7 piso Dto. ¨C,¨ (1426) Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
E-mail: gustavodanielbelaustegui@gmail.com and belausteguidaniel@uca.edu.ar.

abstract
“Death announcements,” which are related to actual physical death in circumstances that could
not be rationally anticipated, challenge a materialistic view of the human psyche. Two instances
of this phenomenon are presented—one representational, the other written. Might there be
something that transcends the content of experience in time and space, perhaps a function of
the Self in an active principle named “soul,” or the “morphic fields” of contemporary science? A
phenomenology based upon lived experience includes “death announcements,” a knowledge of
one’s death that emerges without any rational explanation.

key words
accidents, death and dying, near-death experiences, phenomenology, precognition, rites of pas-
sage, self preservation

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