When people ask, “Do you believe in reincarnation,” I just have to say, “Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”
The metaphor in Christianity that corresponds to reincarnation is purgatory. If one dies with such a fixation on the things of this world that one’s spirit is not ready to behold the beatific vision, then one has to undergo a purgation, one has to be purged clean of one’s limitations. The limitations are what are called sins. Sin is simply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inappropriate condition.
In the Oriental metaphor, if you die in that condition, you come back again to have more experiences that will clarify, clarify, clarify, until you are released from these fixations. The reincarnation monad is the principal hero of Oriental myth. The monad puts on various personalities, life after life. Now the reincarnation idea is not that you and I as the personalities that we are will be reincarnated. The personality is what the monad throws off. Then the monad puts on another body, male or female, depending on what experiences are necessary for it to clear itself of this attachment to the field of time.
what does the idea of reincarnation suggest?
It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.
Now in every human being there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system…. We are taught to respond to certain signals positively, to others negatively or with fear; and most of these signals taught are not of the natural, but of some local social order. They are socially specific. Yet the im- pulses that they activate and control are of nature, biology, and instinct.
These are superior to the analytical talents of our mind.
Instincts are typical modes of action, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of action and reaction we are dealing with instinct, no matter whether it is associated with a conscious motive or not.
intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.eg.Suppose there are two different paths in the jungle,then an intuitive person gets a hunch that this route is safe.Intuition is a function by which you see round corners, which you really cannot do; yet the fellow will do it for you and you trust him. It is a function which normally you do not use if you live a regular life within four walls and do regular routine work. But if you are on the Stock Exchange or in Central Africa, you will use your hunches like anything. You cannot, for instance, calculate whether when you turn round a corner in the bush you will meet a rhinoceros or a tiger – but you get a hunch, and it will perhaps save your life… (pg. 14; Jung, 1968) Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.
We use the word “instinct” very frequently in ordinary . We speak of “instinctive actions,” meaning by that a mode of behaviour of which neither the motive nor the aim is fully conscious and which is prompted only by obscure inner necessity. This peculiarity has already been stressed by an older English writer, Thomas Reid, who says: “By instinct, I mean a natural impulse to certain actions, without having any end in view, without deliberation and without any conception of what we do.” Thus instinctive action is characterized by an unconsciousness of the psychological motive behind it, in contrast to the strictly conscious processes which are distinguished by the conscious continuity of their motives. Instinctive action sort of appears to be a more or less abrupt psychic occurrence, an interruption of the continuity of consciousness.
Accordingly, instinctive activity would have to be in-
cluded among the specifically unconscious processes, which are accessible to consciousness only through their results. But were we to rest content with this conception of in- stinct, we should soon discover its insufficiency: it merely marks off instinct from the conscious processes and char- acterizes it as unconscious. If, on the other hand, we survey the unconscious processes as a whole, we find it impossible to class them all as instinctive, even though no differentia- tion is made between them in ordinary speech. If you suddenly meet a snake and get a violent fright, you can legitimately call this impulse instinctive because it is no different from the instinctive fear of snakes in monkeys. It is just the uniformity of the phenomenon and the regularity of its recurrence which are the most characteristic qualities of instinctive action. As Lloyd Morgan aptly remarks, it would be as uninteresting to bet on an instinctive reaction as on the rising of the sun tomorrow. On the other hand, it may also happen that someone is regularly seized with fright whenever he meets a perfectly harmless hen. Al- though the mechanism of fright in this case is just as much an unconscious impulse as the instinct, we must neverthe- less distinguish between the two processes. In the former case the fear of snakes is a purposive process of general occurrence; the latter, when habitual, is a phobia and not an instinct, since it occurs only in isolation and is not a general peculiarity. There are many other unconscious compulsions of this kind-for instance, obsessive thoughts, musical obsessions, sudden ideas and moods, impulsive affects, depressions, anxiety states, etc. These phenomena are met with in normal as well as abnormal individuals. In so far as they occur only in isolation and are not repeated regularly they must be distinguished from instinctive processes,even though their psychological mechanism seems to correspond to that of an instinct.
Chhath fast was also observed for Draupadi In Hindu scripture (Mahabharata), when the Pandavas lost the entire kingdom in gambling, Draupadi observed Chhath fast. With this fast their wish was fulfilled and the Pandavas got everything back. According to folk tradition, Surya Dev and Chhathi Maiya have a brother-sister relationship. Therefore, worshiping the Sun on the occasion of Chhath was considered fruitful. Death and the resurrection is a common motif all over the world’s rituals.from death springs life,and out of death new birth.That’s why people worship the sun as well as rising sun in the same way.They sing about the journey between sunset and sunrise and patiently spending the night fasting.
Chhathi maiya is a savior figure in the field of duality_Death and resurrection just like Jesus is a savior figure,who evokes compassion in corrupted hearts.The old Jewish idea of the Messiah had nothing to do with the end of the world at all but with the king who would re-establish Israel among the nation .
People offering different types of fruits and vegetables to chhathi maiya.Here,idea associated with that out of rot comes life.So in the forest and planting culture,there is a sense of death as not death somehow,that death is required for new life.
In Egypt: After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down,the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world.
Look at the pyramid on the left.A pyramid has four sides.There are four points of compass. There is somebody at this point.,there is somebody at that point.when you are down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or another side,but when you get up to the top,the point all comes together,and their eyes of Gods opens.
If you look behind that pyramid,you see a desert . if you look before it.you see plants growing.Creation-Died and resurrection. That’s the sense of that part of the pyramid.
The imagery of rebirth is of two main orders. The moon which dies and is resurrected is the chief symbol of this miracle of rebirth in time. The moon sheds its shadow as the serpent sheds its skin. The serpent also plays a role as the symbol of this same principle of life that is reborn from its own death. In traditional mythologies, the sacrificial bull, too, is associated with this symbolism of death and rebirth. The horns of the moon are rendered in the horns of the bull. The sacrifice of the bull is symbolic of the sacrifice of that mortal part in us which leads to the release of the eternal.
The death and resurrection of a savior figure is a common motif in all of these legends. For example, in the story of the origin of maize, you have this benign figure who appears to the young boy in a vision, and gives him maize, and dies. The plant comes from his body. Somebody has had to die in order for life to emerge. I begin to see this incredible pattern of death giving rise to birth, and birth giving rise to death. Every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come.
The sun is our second symbol of rebirth, evoking that idea of not coming back at all, of not being reborn here but of passing beyond the spheres of rebirth altogether to a transcendent light. The typical image for this is the sun. The moon carries darkness within it but wherever the sun goes there is no darkness. There are only the shadows of those forces that do not open themselves to its light. The image of the sun- door speaks of yet another kind of rebirth, that of the return of the lost one-that is, the one who is lost in the spheres of shadows and time, who returns to that eternal root which is his own great root.
As the bull is symbolic of the moon, so the lion, with his great radiant solar face, is the symbolic animal of the sun. As the rising sun quenches the moon and the stars, so the lion’s roar scatters the grazing animals, just as the lion’s pouncing on the bull symbolizes the sun’s extinguishing the moon. If we recall the serpent, we recognize the eagle, the solar bird, as its counterpoint. So we have these parallels: eagle against serpent, lion against bull, Sun against moon.
The sun is symbolic of transcending energy pouring into the field of time.
Faminine power creates duality out of transcending energy.
Died and resurrection happens only into the field of time and space.space/time is symbolised by a womb in Egypt.and earth is symbolised by the father.
All the rituals are performed through different channels but referring to the same message behind it.
There is a ritual associated with the men’s societies in New Guinea that actually enacts the planting-society myth of death, resurrection, and cannibalistic consumption. There is a sacred field with drums going, and chants going, and then pauses. This goes on for four or five days, on and on. Rituals are boring, you know, they just wear you out, and then you break through to something else.
At last comes the great moment. There has been a celebration of real sexual orgy, the breaking of all rules. The young boys who are being initiated into manhood are now to have their first sexual experience. There is a great shed of enormous logs sup- ported by two uprights. A young woman comes in ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roof. The boys, six or so, with the drums going and chanting going, one after another, have their first experience of intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female again, as they were in the beginning, before the separation took place. There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing.
Then the little couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening. The ritual is the repetition of the original act of the killing of a god followed by the coming of food from the dead savior. In the sacrifice of the Mass, you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. You take it to you, and you turn inward, and there he works within you.
In Egypt: Isis and her husband Osiris were twins, born of the Goddess Nut. And their younger relatives were Seth and Nephthys, who were also twins born from Nut. One night, Osiris slept with Nephthys, thinking she was Isis-a kind of inattention to details, you might say. From that night’s event, Anubis was born, Osiris’ oldest son, but by the wrong wife. Seth, her husband, took this badly and planned to kill his older brother, Osiris. Secretly he took Osiris’ measurements and had a beautiful sarcophagus made that would exactly fit him. And then, one evening, when there was a lively party in progress among the gods, Seth came in with his sarcophagus and declared that anyone whom it perfectly fitted could have it as a gift for his tomb. Everyone at the party tried, and of course when Osiris got in, the sarcophagus fitted him perfectly. Immediately seventy-two accomplices came rushing out, and they clapped the lid on, strapped it together, and threw it into the Nile. So what we have here is the death of a god. And whenever you have the death of such a god as this, you may next expect a resurrection.
The death of Osiris was symbolically associated with the annual rising and flooding of the river Nile, by which the soil of Egypt was annually fertilized. It was as though the rotting of the body of Osiris fertilized and vitalized the land.
Osiris went floating down the Nile and was washed ashore on a beach in Syria. A beautiful tree with a wonderful aroma grew up and incorporated the sarcophagus in its trunk. The local king had just had a son born to him and happened at the time to be about to build a palace. And because the aroma of that tree was so wonderful, he had it cut down and brought in to become the central pillar in the main room of the palace.
Meanwhile the poor goddess Isis, whose husband had been thrown into the Nile, started off on a search for his body. This theme of the search for the God who is the spouse of the soul is a prime mythological theme of the period: of the Goddess who goes in quest of her lost spouse or lover and, through loyalty and a descent into the realm of death, becomes his redeemer.
Isis comes in time to the palace and there learns of the aromatic column in the royal palace. She suspects this may have something to do with Osiris, and she gets a job as nurse to the newborn child. Well, she lets the child nurse from her finger-after all, she’s a goddess, and there’s a limit to the degree of stooping to conquer. But she loves the little boy and decides to give him immortality by placing him in the fireplace to burn his mortal body away. As a goddess, she could prevent the fire from killing him, you understand. And every evening, while the child is in the fire, she transforms herself into a swallow and goes flying mournfully around the column in which her husband is enclosed.
One evening the child’s mother comes into the room while this little scene is in progress, sees her infant in the fireplace, lets out a scream, which breaks the spell, and the child has to be rescued from incineration. The swallow, meanwhile, has turned back into the gorgeous nurse and goddess, who explains the situation and says to the queen, “By the way, it’s my husband there in that column, and I’d be grateful if you would just let me take him home.” So the king, who has appeared on the scene, says, “Why, yes! Certainly.” He has the column removed, turns it over to Isis, and the beautiful sarcophagus containing Osiris is placed on a royal barge.
On the way back to the Nile Delta, Isis removes the lid of the coffin, lies upon her dead husband, and conceives. This is a motif that appears in the ancient mythologies all the time under many symbolic forms-out of death comes life. When the barge has landed, the Goddess gives birth in the papyrus swamp to her child, Horus; and it was the figure of this divine mother with her child conceived of God that became the model for the Madonna.
The mythologies here referred to were of the dead and resurrected god: Attis, Adonis, Gilgamesh, Osiris, one after the other. The death and resurrection of the god is everywhere associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. It is for two nights, or three days dark, and we have Christ for two nights, or three days in the tomb.
No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter solstice, December 25, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer. That is the moment of the rebirth of light. That was exactly the date of the birth of the Persian God of light, Mithra, Sol, the Sun.
