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TLDR Jung’s chapter “Concerning Rebirth” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious reads less like a psychology lecture and more like a secret initiation manual. He maps five ancient forms of rebirth, then describes how rebirth is actually experienced in the soul: diminishment, enlargement, inner restructuring, group fusion, hero-worship, magical striving, disciplined practice, and the slow, natural work of the Self. Along the way he introduces Khidr, the mysterious guide of Islamic mysticism, as a living example of the inner Christ-like companion. As I read, an old childhood story surfaced about an underwater gardener in a cave. I realized the Self had been planting images in me long before I had words like “archetype” or “individuation.” For Christians, Jung’s vision of rebirth becomes a deep psychological commentary on being “born again,” not as a one-time religious event, but as a lifelong conversation between the ego, the unconscious, and God.  (Reflections on CW 9i, pp. 116–146) Whenever I read Jung, like the Bible, it rarely lines up with what I’ve heard. You’d think that depth psychology has little connection with our sacred texts, but I’m coming to see that Scripture has simply continued on in another language, the language of psychology. Jesus did say he had more to teach, but that the Spirit would bring it after he died, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised (John 16:12–13). What I encounter in Jung feels closer to an ancient initiatory text than to a modern textbook. There are moments when The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious reads less like psychology and more like something hidden in a desert cave, passed quietly from hand to hand. As I moved into Chapter Three, “Concerning Rebirth,” that familiar sensation returned. This doesn’t sound like a university lecture. It sounds like something far older, far more dangerous, and far more alive.¹ Part of the strangeness is that Jung is not simply talking about rebirth as an idea that people believe. He’s tracking rebirth as something that happens. He’s less interested in whether a doctrine is printed in our creed and more interested in what actually moves in the psyche when someone says, “I am not who I used to be.” If Paul gave us the theological poetry of new creation, Jung walks around the edges of that same mystery with a psychological flashlight, saying, “Look. Here is what it feels like from the inside.” And just when you think this is going to be very German and clinical, Jung starts talking about a Somali Sufi headman in Kenya who claims to know Khidr personally. At that point you realize you’re not in Kansas any more. You’re somewhere between Mecca, Zurich, and the Gospel of John.  Mapping the Many Lives of Rebirth Jung starts with something practical. Before he can say what rebirth does in us, he has to clear up how we use the word. As a pastor I feel this. Ask ten Christians what it means to be “born again” and you’ll get twelve answers and a side conversation about baptism. Jung knows this confusion isn’t unique to church life. Humanity has been talking about new life for a very long time, and we haven’t always meant the same thing. So he lays out five main “forms of rebirth.” Think of it as a psychological field guide. If you find yourself in the wild and encounter a strange experience that looks like rebirth, you can look it up and see what type you are dealing with.² The first form is metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Life stretches across many incarnations. You die, but you also do not. You’re back in another body, another era, another drama. Jung doesn’t argue for or against it. He simply notes that this is one way the psyche imagines continuity. When modern people say, “I am sure I have known you before,” or, “This child has been here already,” they’re still speaking this ancient tongue without knowing its name.³ The second form is rebirth in the narrower sense. Here we stay in one lifetime, but undergo such a radical inner shift that it feels as if a new person has appeared. This is the territory of conversion, initiation, baptism, and all those moments when people say, “The old me is gone. I do not know how to explain it, but something in me has died and something else has come alive.”⁴ As a Christian minister, this is the language that sounds most familiar. Its Paul on the road to Damascus, John’s “born from above,” the alcoholic who says, “It was the bottom, and then it was different.” The third form is resurrection. This isn’t a new start in a series of lives. It’s the idea that the dead are raised to a new kind of life altogether, sometimes with a transformed body, sometimes in a spiritual mode of existence. Jung sees this in the myths of Osiris and Dionysus and in the proclamation of Christ risen from the dead. Resurrection is rebirth through death into a new order of being. If reincarnation is a wheel, resurrection is a door that opens somewhere entirely new. The fourth form is rebirth through participation in a transformation. Here the individual is reborn by entering into the life of a god, a hero, or a sacred story. A devotee is “in” Dionysus, “in” Mithras, “in” Christ. When Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” he’s speaking this language of participation. My small story is taken up into a much larger one, and I’m changed because of whose story I am now in. The fifth form is indirect rebirth, the kind that happens symbolically. We go through death and new life in our imagination before we go through it consciously. The hero descends into the underworld, the maiden is swallowed by a dragon, the child wanders into the woods and returns. Fairy tales, myths, and dreams rehearse the pattern of rebirth long before we are ready to live it explicitly. Jung argues that the psyche needs these symbolic rehearsals. Without them, the ego tends to cling to its old shape and call it “Christian maturity.”⁵ Already by the end of this opening section, you realize that Jung is less interested in whether people can pass a theological quiz and more interested in whether they are capable of being changed at all.  When Life Breaks the Frame: Experiencing Transcendence Once Jung has his map, he turns to the question that really matters: What does it feel like when life transcends the ego? He calls this “the experience of the transcendence of life.” The language is a little dry, but the reality is anything but. He distinguishes between ritual experiences and immediate ones. Ritual experiences are the ones churches organize. Baptism, confirmation, ordination, weddings, funerals. The world has its own version with graduations, inaugurations, award ceremonies, and retirement dinners. These are moments when a community gathers and says, “You are not who you were yesterday.” In the best cases, something in the soul agrees. An invisible shift happens alongside the public liturgy. In the worst cases, as many of us know, the soul doesn’t get the memo. The person goes through the ritual, smiles for the camera, and then drives home the same as they left. The outer form promised transcendence, but the inner life stayed flat. Jung is kind about this. He doesn’t blame the ritual, but says that without inner participation, rites cannot do their work. The ego has to cooperate. Grace is not a magic trick that God performs behind our backs. Then there are immediate experiences. These are the ones that nobody schedules. No one says, “Next Tuesday at three in the afternoon, I’ll have an encounter with the living God.” These are the “I was walking the dog and suddenly…” moments. The times when a person is sitting in a pew, not expecting anything, and a phrase from Scripture leaps off the page and cuts them open. Or they are driving, or washing dishes, or lying in a hospital bed, and for a few seconds the world becomes transparent to something more. Jung speaks of moments where a person senses that the boundary of their ego is not the boundary of their life. The soul becomes aware that it is held. As a pastor and therapist, I hear these stories often. Some of them are dramatic. Many are very quiet. They all carry the same flavor. Life has somehow exceeded its usual limits. The person glimpses that their story has another Author. The Many Ways a Self Can Fall Apart and Come Together The core of the chapter, and the part that feels most like Jung at his best, is his description of what he calls “subjective transformation.” On pages 126 to 140 he names eight characteristic experiences that often accompany rebirth. If you have ever sat with people in therapy or spiritual direction, this section feels uncannily accurate. It is like he stole our case notes. He begins with diminishment of personality. This is the experience of the ego shrinking. Energy drains away. The life that used to work does not work anymore. The spiritual life becomes dry. The job that once fit now feels impossible. Jung is clear that this can feel like illness or depression, and sometimes it is, but taken psychologically it can also be the first stage of rebirth. The grand old personality is losing air. The false self is deflating. Before the new life can come, the old one has to stop pretending it can carry everything. Then he moves to enlargement of personality. Sometimes people experience the opposite. A new energy enters. They feel inspired, “possessed” in the best sense by a message, a task, a vocation. They speak with a surprising authority. They create things they themselves could not have planned. Jung of course warns about inflation. The ego loves to confuse “Christ in me” with “I am secretly Christ,” and church history has more than enough examples of that confusion. But in healthy form, enlargement is what happens when someone is drawn into the life of the Self. There is more life in them than their ordinary ego could produce on its own. Jung also notes that rebirth often involves a change of internal structure. Values rearrange themselves. What once mattered no longer matters. What was safely pushed to the margins suddenly stands in the center. The person may still look the same from the outside, but the furniture of the soul has been moved. It is as if the house has turned so that new windows face the sun. From there he looks at more collective forms. One is identification with a group. This is rebirth by fusion with a movement or community. Anyone who has watched a stadium fill, or a revival meeting swell, or a political rally rise knows the power of this. The lonely ego feels itself carried by something larger. This can be beautiful when the group calls forth courage and compassion. It can be terrifying when the group decides that its reborn identity requires a scapegoat. Jung is painfully aware that the twentieth century gave us both versions. Another is identification with a cult hero. The individual places all hope and meaning on one figure. A guru, a pastor, a therapist, a singer, a charismatic leader. If the hero stands, the follower stands. If the hero falls, the follower’s world collapses. The early church actually wrestled with this problem. “I belong to Paul, I belong to Apollos…” and Paul says, “Was Paul crucified for you?” It turns out this is not a new issue. Magical procedures and technical transformations occupy the next two slots. Here Jung is talking about all the ways we try to engineer rebirth. If I just do this method, follow this program, chant this phrase, use this breathing technique, hack my morning routine, then I will finally become who I am meant to be. As someone who enjoys productivity YouTube videos, I felt that one personally. Jung is not dismissing practices. He actually has respect for disciplined paths like yoga, meditation, and analysis. His concern is with the attitude behind them. If my technique is really an attempt to avoid surrender, then I have not signed up for rebirth. I have signed up for spiritual self-improvement. There is a difference. Finally he comes to what he calls natural transformation, or individuation. This is rebirth as something the Self does across a lifetime, often in spite of our best efforts to get in the way. Dreams, symptoms, synchronicities, losses, friendships, illnesses, loves, and callings all become instruments of this slow work. The ego is not the architect here. The ego is the construction site. To illustrate it, Jung tells the story of an old man in a cave drawing circles on a wall. At first the man does not know why he is doing it. He simply feels compelled. Over time the circles begin to coalesce into a mandala. Eventually the old man realizes that the image he is drawing outside is the shape of something inside. The Self is quietly trying to show him who he is.⁶ Reading that passage I felt something shift in me, but not only because of the mandala. In the margin I suddenly wrote a memory I had not thought about in decades: “I wrote a picture book and won the Ezra Jack Keats contest with the story. I even got an award. It was about an old man who planted an underwater garden and lived in a cave. I must have been eleven or twelve.” I had forgotten that story completely. Apparently my unconscious had not. There he was. My own old man in a cave, tending life under the surface. He was gentle and patient and surrounded by water. If Jung had been sitting next to me he probably would have smiled that enigmatic Jung smile and said, “Yes. You met him early.” Looking back, I can see how Rumi, who I have been listening to for more than twenty years, and even Trevor Hall’s songs “Khabir,” were circling the same figure. The wise guide, the hidden friend, the gardener of the soul. Long before I knew words like “archetype,” the Self had already planted an image in my imagination and let it grow quietly at the bottom of the sea.  Khidr and the Eighteenth Sura: Rebirth with a Guide
The final section of the chapter turns explicitly to symbol. Jung chooses the Eighteenth Sura of the Qur’an as a “typical set of symbols illustrating the process of transformation.”⁷ He might just as easily have chosen an early Christian legend or a Gnostic gospel, but in classic Jung fashion he goes to Islam, because the psyche has never cared which religious passport a good symbol carries. Here Khidr steps fully into the light. Jung recounts a conversation with his Somali Sufi headman. For this man, Khidr is not a literary figure or a mythological curiosity. Khidr is a living presence. He can appear as a man, a light at the door of your tent, or even a blade of grass that catches your attention. He is friend, helper, and true messenger of God, the “First Angel,” a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Paraclete.⁸ The headman tells Jung how, at a time when he was unemployed and desperate, he dreamed of a bright, shining light near his tent flap. He knew it was Khidr. He greeted him with “salam aleikum.” Soon after, he found work as a safari headman in Nairobi. The story is told without fanfare. For him this is simply how God works. The guide appears. The path opens. Life takes a new turn. Jung hears more than folklore. He sees the Self revealing itself as a Thou. Khidr is an image of the inner Christlike companion, the “other” who is also mysteriously “more myself than I am.” The point is not that Khidr is secretly Jesus in Muslim disguise or that Jesus is secretly Khidr in Christian disguise. The point is that the psyche experiences guidance, and different traditions name and personify that experience according to their own symbolic vocabulary. Jung then reads the story of Dhulqarnein, the “Two Horned One,” usually identified with Alexander the Great. Dhulqarnein travels to the place where the sun sets in a pool of black mud, then to the place where it rises, and finally stands between two mountains building a rampart against Gog and Magog.⁹ Jung sees in this journey a symbolic map of the soul’s travels between light and darkness, east and west, known and unknown. The rampart is the boundary that protects the individual from being overwhelmed by collective chaos. Christians might call this boundary the peace of Christ guarding our hearts and minds (Philippians 4:7). When you put the pieces together, the picture is remarkable. Rebirth is not something the ego accomplishes by trying harder to be spiritual. It’s something that happens as the Self, often personified as a guide like Khidr, leads us through extremes and builds a wise boundary in us so that we can live in the world without being swallowed by it. Somewhere in that desert symbolism, my underwater gardener nodded knowingly and went back to tending his plants. Why This Matters for a Soul-Led Christian Life All of this might sound very mystical and far away from everyday discipleship in suburban Connecticut. But for me it actually brings the Christian language of being “born again” down into the place where people are actually trying to live. First, Jung’s five forms of rebirth help make sense of the variety of Christian experience. Not everyone has a dramatic conversion moment, but many have slow internal restructuring. Some are reborn through participation in the life of Christ, others through symbolic rehearsals that only later become conscious faith. Pastors and therapists see all of these and more. Jung’s map lets us say, “Yes, that belongs. That also is a way that the Spirit births new life.” Second, his description of subjective transformation names what most of us live through without words. People come into my office and say things like, “I feel like I am falling apart,” or, “There is a new energy in me and I do not know what to do with it,” or, “My values have shifted and my old life does not fit.” Others get swept up in movements, attach all hope to a leader, or try to engineer transformation with techniques and tools. Jung does not judge these experiences. He situates them within the larger work of the Self. That alone can be deeply relieving. It means that even our clumsy attempts at rebirth are happening within a much wiser conversation that God is having with our soul. Third, the figure of Khidr, read alongside the old man in my underwater garden story, reminds me that God seems quite comfortable appearing in all kinds of imaginative disguises until we are ready to recognize Him. The Spirit does not wait for us to pass Systematic Theology 101 before showing up. Most of the time the Spirit arrives as a character in a child’s story, as a dream figure, as a line in a Trevor Hall song, as a poem by Rumi, or as a stranger who sits down next to us on a plane and asks the question we were hoping no one would ask. Finally, Jung ends this chapter with a sentence that I can’t shake. He says that it’s only through an experience of symbolic reality that a person “can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.”¹⁰ In other words, if we lose contact with the symbolic patterns of death and rebirth, the world stops feeling like home. Everything becomes literal. Suffering becomes meaningless. Work becomes grind. Church becomes a set of beliefs about a God who seems to live somewhere else. But if the symbolic life opens up, if we begin to see that our own story is being shaped according to a pattern that Christ has already lived, then the world begins to feel strangely familiar again. The cross is not just a doctrine, it is the shape of our week. The resurrection is not just a historical claim, it’s the surprise that comes after the part of us we thought was essential finally dies. Khidr, Christ, the old man in the cave, the underwater gardener, the Spirit who groans within us with sighs too deep for words, all of them begin to feel like different ways of saying, “You are not alone in this. You are being led.” Rebirth, in this sense, isn’t something we manufacture. It’s something we consent to. The Self, or Christ in us, is already at work drawing circles on the wall of our cave, planting gardens on the ocean floor, showing up as a light in the night by the flap of our tent. Our part is to turn toward that presence, to listen, and to let ourselves be made new, again and again, until the life we live “in the flesh” is no longer only ours, but His. Notes
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S.M.GaranThe ramblings of a minister and psychotherapist who helps people hear the voice of the Soul, the Christ within. 
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