[Carl Jung on the transformation of consciousness and reincarnation.]
Verily, through a hundred souls went I my way, and through a
hundred cradles and birth-throes. Many a farewell have I taken; I
know the heart-breaking last hours. [Nietzsche’s Zarathustra]
Here he is simply describing a series of transformations of consciousness.
You see, from the beginning, our individual consciousness only lives by a continuous series of pregnancies and births, a continuous series of transformations; and one can say that the belief in reincarnation of other races is merely a projection of the fact of the transformation of consciousness.
You know, inasmuch as our consciousness is not only our own accomplishment, since we are born with the faculty of having a certain intensity or a certain width of consciousness, we owe gratitude to our ancestors.
We repeat the life of our ancestors as we grow up; the child begins with an animal-like condition and repeats all the animal stages in the development of consciousness until it
reaches what is called the modern level of consciousness.
And naturally we can feel all those transformations as former lives just as well, because they were former lives; in former times people have repeated that development untold millions of times and naturally we have the deposit, the engrammata of all that.
Our mind was not made today. It was not a tabula rasa when we were born; we have even in its physical structure a brain in which all the former developments have been described or molded.
Therefore we have quite legitimately that feeling of having gone through many lives and endured their experiences, even the heart-breaking last hours, innumerable times. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 941-942.