Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth.
The sick were pulled through this hole and this is still secretly done to sick children.
I crept through it myself.
These things really do work just as well as our own chemist’s shop.
What affects the body has its influence on the soul, and vice versa. In a very difficult case of illness psycho-therapy is always called in.
There are many rebirth techniques.
Initiates, for instance, were drowned in a vessel and, when brought out, swaddled like newborn babies and given new names or new garments to emphasize that they had b e come different people.
Sometimes an adoption ceremony was used to symbolise rebirth, the initiates were reborn as children of different p parents.
And there is the ordeal of passing through the fire door ; rebirth can take place through fire or water, or through both.
Fire and water are inherent opposites and it is just this which causes rebirth.
When opposites come together new energy is born and this is the purpose of the whole procedure.
These things were originally just primitive manifestations, and in earlier times things were simply lived.
It is very remarkable how the human being acts without thinking; it thinks and we do.
The early form is simple experience, then man slowly begins to wonder why he does it ; then thinking people rationalize and find that what they do has a philosophical meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, 5th July 1935, Page 236.
Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth.
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious CW 9i
Natural transformation (individuation).
As I have pointed out, in addition to the technical processes of transformation there are also natural transformations.
All ideas of rebirth are founded on this fact.
Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth.
As the alchemist Democritus says: “Nature rejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature.”
There are natural transformation processes which simply happen to us, whether we like it or not, and whether we know it or not.
These processes develop considerable psychic effects, which would be sufficient in themselves to make any thoughtful person ask himself what really happened to him.
Like the old man in our fairytale, he, too, will draw mandalas and seek shelter in their protective circle; in the perplexity and anguish of his self-chosen prison, which he had deemed a refuge, he is transformed into a being akin to the gods.
Mandalas are birth-places, vessels of birth in the most literal sense, lotus-flowers in which a Buddha comes to life.
Sitting in the lotus-seat, the yogi sees himself transfigured into an immortal. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 234
Rebirth is not a process that we can in any way observe.
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Reb!rth is not a process that we can in any way observe.
We can neither measure nor weigh nor photograph it. It is entirely beyond sense perception.
We have to do here with a purely psychic reality, which is transmitted to us only indirectly through personal statements.
One speaks of rebirth; one professes rebirth; one is filled with rebirth. This we accept as sufficiently real.
We are not concerned here with the question: is rebirth a tangible process of some sort? We have to be content with its psychic reality.
I hasten to add that I am not alluding to the vulgar notion that anything “psychic” is either nothing at all or at best even more tenuous than a gas.
Quite the contrary; I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.
Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and of its destroyer, war. All this is at first psychic and invisible.
So long as it is “merely” psychic it cannot be experienced by the senses, but is nonetheless indisputably real.
The mere fact that people talk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must actually exist.
What these experiences are like we can only infer from the statements that have been made about them.
So, if we want to find out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in order to ascertain what “rebirth” has been understood to mean.
Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind.
These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes.
In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples.
There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss-without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. In order to obtain a general view of their phenomenology, it is necessary to sketch the whole field of transformation experiences in sharper outline.
Two main groups of experience may be distinguished: that of the transcendence of life, and that of one’s own transformation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 205-206