Exploring death with imagery

Workshop on All Souls Day, Saturday November 2, 2024

One certainty we have in life: one day our bodies will die, death.
What then happens to our (conscious) being is a great mystery. A mystery that plays a central role in all spiritual and religious traditions.

The fear of death – its inevitability and finality, its grotesque mysteriousness – is perhaps the source of more misery for more people than anything else. To revise our attitude towards death and modify the immense, dark hold it has on our psychic life must be counted a project of incalculable importance (Anees A. Sheikh in Healing with Death Imagery, 2007)

Some neurologists don’t consider it a mystery at all. They assume that we are nothing more than our brain. However, this ‘materialistic’ position is based on a fallacy. We have a material body but are more than that. The nature of consciousness is non-material. It is precisely the ‘hard’ scientific findings in the twentieth century that have shown this essential psychological truth.*
First, there is the theory of relativity at the macro-level: space and time, which include our bodies, are not fixed values.
Second at the micro level, there is quantum mechanics, which has shown the central role of perception with respect to ‘everything that exists’. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner summed it up succinctly as follows: ‘it takes consciousness for the universe (matter) to exist: mind over matter.
Third, looking back to the Big Bang, to the origin of time, physicists Stephen Hawkins and Thomas Hertog discovered that time disappears and the universe, existence, has no beginning.
It is an amazing scientific discovery that there is neither a beginning nor an end. There is only infinity in which ‘the now’ merges into existence.

* Cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss ,who studied ancient traditional cultures in the Amazon and elsewhere, found such a similarity between the myths of old traditional cultures and the language and concepts used by modern physics that he calls the findings of contemporary physicists our modern mythology.

And yet our bodies are dying . . . what happens to us?
According to (other) neuropsychologists, we hallucinate our bodies. The question remains ‘what do we hallucinate (imagine) after death, beyond the body’?

With imagery, being a proven way to open up deeper layers in our psyche, in this workshop we are going to ‘take a look’. It will not bring us ‘the truth’ about death, but it may let us experience how ‘death’ is deep inside us, beyond rationality and learned beliefs.
Reflection and in-depth imagery exercises on the theme will be conducted, accompanied by an exchange of experiences among the participants.

N.B. If you are in psychotherapeutic or psychiatric treatment, or have been in the past, please contact us before registering for the workshop. Death is a sensitive subject, which we want to be careful with, also because the workshop is online. We will discuss with you whether we think participation is appropriate. Send an e-mail to office@imaginatie.nl and we will get back to you.

Saturday November 2 2024
3:30 – 6:00 pm CET
2:30 – 5:00 pm GMT
9:30 -12:00 pm EST

The workshop is online via zoom.