Christine - The Ouroboros represents the perpetual cyclic renewal of life and infinity, the concept of eternity and the eternal return, and represents the cycle of life, death and rebirth, leading to immortality, as in the Phoenix.
Here is my own take on it -
I looked up at the wall next to me. It was painted a dark green, and as I looked I had a vision of a huge mural on the wall - of what Jung calls a mandala, a great circle. And at the centre of the circle was nothing, emptiness, voidness. But out of that centre poured forms, animals, human beings, trees, rocks, and they moved towards a periphery of this circle. And as they moved, although they were each separate and distinct they seemed to move with a harmony between them. It was as if there was a dance. In that dance everything reached a point where they began to fall back, almost like a stone thrown in the air that falls back. So everything fell back into the nothingness, into the centre again. And that was going on all the time. It was all a process of creation/destruction, destruction/creation, and it seemed to summarise the overall impressions that I have of life, birth, death. I saw that everything occurs in a flurry of breaking down. So that was the first impression. I had the sense that this was about myself, my own being. At my centre was this emptiness, and yet it was everything. It was creating and pouring out everything.
Tony
