In the terms of Jungian psychology, the meditation enabling the individual to consciously follow the retrograde movement of life energy entails the withdrawal of projection. This is what it means to “integrate autonomous psychic contents.” In the first stages of life, when the movement of energy is “forward,” myriad identifications are formed that serve the development of the particular ego. The contents thus projected are free-floating or autonomous because the individual is unaware of the process of projecting them. For the individual to gain the degree of self-knowledge necessary to sustain her or him in the unus mundus, the projections must be retracted, drawn back in, proprioceived.

However, in the confrontation with death it will not suffice merely to retract the projections of particular contents, personal identifications that have hardened into “objective truths” so as to meet the needs of the particular subject. At a deeper level, it must be recognized that—along with the objects—subjectivity as such has been projected. And—with the realization of this deeper kind of projection, which we henceforth call Projection—it is Self or Being per se that is engaged in the backward movement of Proprioception.