Everything stayed in the family

Jung, however, was immersed in the occult from the very beginning—it was literally in his DNA. His maternal grandfather, the venerable Samuel Preiswerk, who studied Hebrew, believing it was spoken in heaven, accepted the reality of spirits and led the investigation of the spirit of his deceased first wife, who often visited him. Jung's mother, Emilie, was said to have warded off the dead, who distracted him while he wrote his sermons.

Emilie herself, while still a teenager, developed mediumship. At 20, she fell into a coma for 36 hours; when a red-hot poker touched her forehead, she awoke and began speaking in foreign languages and predicting the future. Throughout her life, Emilie fell into trances during which she communicated with the dead. She also seemed to possess a "multiple personality." Jung occasionally heard Emilie conversing with herself in an alien voice, making profound observations expressed in a manner uncharacteristic of her. This "second voice" possessed a sense of a world far more strange than the one young Carl knew.

The "multiple" Carl observed in his own mother later appeared in him as well. Around the age of 12, he literally became two people. There was his normal boyish self, but also someone else. This "Other," as Carl called him, was a figure from the 18th century, an imperious man who wore a white wig and buckled shoes, rode in an imposing carriage, and spoke contemptuously of the young man. It's hard to escape the impression that, in some way, Jung felt he had been this man in a previous life. Seeing the old green carriage, Jung felt it came from his own time. The concept of the collective unconscious, which he later developed—the idea that—in his view—we inherit a psychic reservoir of symbols and images after birth—was in a sense a form of reincarnation. Besides, Jung himself believed in some kind of afterlife. Shortly after his father's passing in 1896, when Jung was 21, he had two dream visions in which his father appeared so vividly that Carl contemplated the existence of the afterlife. In another dream, Jung's father asked him for marital counseling because he wanted to prepare for his wife's arrival. Jung considered this a premonition that proved true—his mother died shortly thereafter. Years later, when his sister Gertrude passed away—a decade before his own near-death experience—Jung wrote that "what happens after death is so inexpressibly wonderful that our imagination and feelings cannot even come close to creating a concept comparable to it."[1]