Rebirth
The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial question is whether a man’s karma is personal or not. If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and a personal continuity therefore exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity.
In my case it must have been
primarily a passionate urge toward understanding which brought about my birth.
For that is the strongest element in my nature. This insatiable drive
toward understanding has, as it were, created a
consciousness in order to know
what is and what happens, and in order to piece together
mythic conceptions from
the slender hints of the unknowable. MDR 322
Cont'd ... This state is then described as the "filiums regius." The "old dragon" who prepared the bath, a primeval creature dwelling in the caverns of the earth, is, psychologically, a personification of the instinctual psyche, generally symbolized by reptiles. It is as though the alchemists were trying to express the fact that the unconscious itself initiates the process of renewal. MC 384
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. A&CU 117
The mass is an extramundane and extratemporal act in which Christ is sacrificed and then resurrected in the transformed substances; and this rite of his sacrificial death is not a repetition of the historical event but the original, unique, and eternal act. A&CU 118
The idea that the child is a rebirth of the Father energy brings the notion of the child having begotten himself. When you read in Dante’s Divine Comedy St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin, the same role is assigned to her, and her son is the Father, the one God in two persons. We’re here at the beginning of the whole story of the Goddess.
The
moon carries within itself its own death in the form of its increasing shadow,
as we all do. It has, however, the power to throw off that
shadow and be reborn. So the moon represents to us the
promise of rebirth, of
the power of life engaged in the field of
time and space
to throw off death and be reborn. That’s the sense of these
representations – that in procreation death has been thrown off and the seed has
gone to rebirth through
the miracle of the woman’s body, which the navel represents.
G29
If
one were to write a prayer for that which is symbolized in that shrine (in Çatal
Hüyük) it would say, “May I whose body goes back to the Mother obtain rebirth as
the moon bull is reborn.” So, here we have an evident
doctrine of rebirth and reincarnation, with the moon symbolic of that which dies
and is resurrected. All of the dead and resurrected gods of
the Mediterranean area are associated with the moon: Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and
Jesus. The moon mythologically is three nights dark, just as
Jesus was three nights in the tomb with the dark rock over the door.
G 31
Rebirth & rites/rituals
The whole idea of the men’s sacred ground, the men’s cave, is continued in ceremonial huts which are associated with rebirth. You enter the tiny little door as though it were the vulva and go into the mother body and everything inside is magical. We’re a magical field. When you go into a cathedral today, you are in a magical field. TMTT 19