Yet death is an important interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Reason, Jung says here, shows nothing but the pit. That is not a failure of reason — it is reason doing exactly what it does, reporting faithfully on the evidence available to it. The problem is that a person descending toward death is not a problem reason can solve, and handing it one anyway produces only the despair Jung names: the man who marches toward nothingness is not irrational, he is simply using the only tool he trusts.
What Jung calls myth is not a consoling story layered over the pit to make it bearable. It is something the soul moves through rather than past — an image that carries the life-instinct forward when cognition has reached its limit. The tracks of life do not stop at the boundary; they continue into the territory reason cannot map. To follow them is not to claim knowledge about what lies beyond. Both men remain in uncertainty, Jung is careful to say. The difference is not epistemic. It is whether you live toward your death with the whole of what you are, or arrive at it already divided — the thinking self intact, the instinctive self abandoned somewhere back along the road where it stopped making logical sense to bring it.
That division is the quiet cost of the long preference for the clear over the dark.
Carl Gustav Jung·Memories, Dreams, Reflections·1963