Carl Jung on Children and Reincarnation
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Dr. Jung: Oh, yes, that is true.
You see children of a certain age, if they have any introspection at all, have far more knowledge of these things than adult people, who are getting blind.
Young children have a consciousness which is remarkable.
I find the psychology of little children exceedingly difficult; their dreams, for instance, are amazingly difficult.
One would assume that they would be quite simple but they are far from that.
Of course some are obvious, but they have an unusual number of great dreams, and great visions too, and to deal with them requires an
hypothesis which makes one quite dizzy.
One has to assume that they have a consciousness of the collective unconscious, an amazing thing.
It makes little children seem quite old, like people who have lived a full life and who have a very profound idea of what consciousness really is.
Hence the saying: fools and children speak the truth. It is because they know it.
Children have the vision still hanging over them of things which they have never seen, and could not possibly have seen, and which are in accordance with the theory of reincarnation.
It is just as if reminiscences of a former life were carried over into this life, or from the ancestral life perhaps, we don’t know.
I could tell you children’s dreams which are simply uncanny, and if you want to interpret them at all, you have to use uncanny means.
They cannot be explained even by the psychology of the parents.
They must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they were born, and that is really vision.
I know a case where a vision affected a whole life. Individuals can be stunted all through their lives by a vision in childhood.
Such children are not quite born-their birth takes place much later, when they can detach.
But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what
Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424-425
The wheel of reincarnation or of illusion-reincarnation being simply another stage of illusion.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Mrs. Fierz: Is it that Tibetan wheel with the monster outside and the people turning round?
Dr. Jung: Well, the wheel is a central symbol in Buddhism, it is practically everywhere on Buddhistic monuments or in pictures, and there it has two meanings.
One is the wheel of the law; in the Gazelle Garden of Benares, Buddha, the perfect one, sets in motion the wheel of the law that he evolves, and everything takes its law-abiding course.
Then the same concept, or picture, is used in the wheel of death and birth, the wheel of reincarnation or of illusion-reincarnation being simply another stage of illusion.
So whoever can let go of the revolving wheel will not be reborn, he will be annihilated; as an accomplished one, a perfect one, he will not return, he will extinguish himself utterly in nirvana, in the positive non-being.
Then, in the Lamaistic form of Buddhism particularly, mandalas are often depicted as wheels, despite the fact that they really come from another source, not from that Buddhistic wheel symbolism but from the Tantric cult of Shiva, which is older and quite different from Buddhism.
Yet these wheels have the meaning of the mandala there also, they are pictures of life and of the living being.
And you have read in The Secret of the Golden Flower that in China there is the idea of the mandala as revolving; it is a sort of vortex, like a rolling wheel.
So the wheel of life in this vision is life itself: it is the wheel of fortune, and it is the wheel of the law, it is the inevitable wheel to which everybody is clutching, and naturally they are swung round by its movement.
One would say there was no way of passing it, but our patient says:
At last I saw that on one side I could squeeze through, but I knew that to do this I would have to be clad in iron armor so that the swiftly revolving hands should not wound me or destroy the small flame which issued from my breast.
This passage is very enigmatical. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar, Page 852-853
