DEPTH GENEALOGY
Family Treehuggers:
An Ecology of Souls
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
Family Treehuggers:
An Ecology of Souls
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
Family Treehuggers: An Ecology of Souls
Links
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
JUNGIAN GENEALOGY
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/
SangREALITY
http://sangreality.weebly.com/
HERE BE DRAGONS
http://herebedragons.weebly.com/
DRAKENBERG DRAGON LABYRINTH
http://drakenberg.weebly.com/
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
JUNGIAN GENEALOGY
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/
SangREALITY
http://sangreality.weebly.com/
HERE BE DRAGONS
http://herebedragons.weebly.com/
DRAKENBERG DRAGON LABYRINTH
http://drakenberg.weebly.com/
TRUEBORN
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
"I am. Lo, I am alive"
Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
Henry Stapp calls consciousness "the felt quality of the manipulating actions of these symbols upon one another." Symbols refer to reality, and the anthropomorphizing, personification and projection of aspects of ourselves onto reality. Misunderstood, symbols are abstract ideas that enslave our minds.
Symbolism comes from trying to relate ourselves to reality, self-knowledge, and nature to understand ourselves and reality. First is reality. Second is knowledge from perception. Third are symbols of that knowledge from reality.
General human symbols:
Father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, sister, brother, child, wise old man, magician, king, queen, prince, princess, knight, teacher; the human heart, the human hand, the eye, the egg. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth, rejuvenation, or resurrection. The real purpose of religious ceremonial is to revivify.
"You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works." (Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.)
"Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created.
The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes.
Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb.
Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself
and is born from the mind, as befits a God."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
"I am. Lo, I am alive"
Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
Henry Stapp calls consciousness "the felt quality of the manipulating actions of these symbols upon one another." Symbols refer to reality, and the anthropomorphizing, personification and projection of aspects of ourselves onto reality. Misunderstood, symbols are abstract ideas that enslave our minds.
Symbolism comes from trying to relate ourselves to reality, self-knowledge, and nature to understand ourselves and reality. First is reality. Second is knowledge from perception. Third are symbols of that knowledge from reality.
General human symbols:
Father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, sister, brother, child, wise old man, magician, king, queen, prince, princess, knight, teacher; the human heart, the human hand, the eye, the egg. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth, rejuvenation, or resurrection. The real purpose of religious ceremonial is to revivify.
"You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works." (Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.)
"Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created.
The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes.
Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb.
Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself
and is born from the mind, as befits a God."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
DEPTH GENEALOGY
"From a barren list of names we learn who were the fathers or mothers, or more distant progenitors, of the select few, who are able to trace what is called their descent from antiquity." (Smollett, Tobias (1798).)
"Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival,
an individual may spontaneously merge with his ancestors AND descendants
and become, for a time, a single amplified entity." --Ken Thomas
"Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream.
Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak...
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is.
There is a mountain of symbolism. ...
The Great Man is something that reacts.
Analysis is a long discussion with the Great Man--
an unintelligent attempt to understand him.
It, the Great Man, can at one stroke put an entirely different face
on the thing — or anything can happen.
In that way you learn about the peculiar intelligence of the background;
you learn the nature of the Great Man.
You learn about yourself against the Great Man—against his postulates.
This is the way through things, things that look desperate and unanswerable.
The unconscious gives you that peculiar twist that makes the way possible.
The way is ineffable.
One needs faith, courage, and no end of honesty and patience.
You have added things you didn't dream of--
a new aspect of yourself and of the world.
If you are dishonest, you are nothing for your unconscious.
This you cannot regulate, or it would be misused.
It is not a conviction, not an assumption.
It is a Presence. It is a fact. It is there. ...
You have got to accept what the unconscious produces,
and you have to understand its language.
It is Nature, and it has to be translated into human forms."
(Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
Depth Perception
Today's world is complex. We may be disheartened by the current state of the world, including nasty politics, signs of eco-collapse, and relentless culture wars. Geneaology can be part of the re-enchantment of our world, an oasis or refuge honoring the heart and soul of our family's living emotional memory.
Genealogy is a natural and cultural artifact. A genealogy is a record of the descent of a person or group from an ancestor. Death fascinates us, and probably always has. It is a sniper that can strike anywhere, anytime and constantly informs us of our mortality. The oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, directly addresses the question of why death exists and the yearning for immortality.
In our family tree our 'depth perception' refers to how many generations are known to us, and how keenly we perceive the essence of each of their lives (face recognition) in our family history. The self emerges from seed fulfilling character and calling in our identity -- the innate genius of creativity and sublimity.
Living in touch with what our ancestors symbolize in the emotional language of the unconscious roots us in a far greater whole. The ancestors are an untapped potential to illuminate the perceptual/cognitive processes that underlie archetypal aesthetic experiences and complexity.
In genealogy we engage the unconscious and tend the living image. Our hunger is for connection, not more food, money, or status. When we know our ancestors we live in unbroken continuity with the past. This is grounding down to the molecular level.
Ideally, depth connections throughout deep time might help us to overcome stumbling blocks, move through loss, find deeper meaning and interpersonal connection, and function at our optimal potential. We break through ancient walls, listening to the archaic hum of the ancestors, what their souls are saying, that reminds us of the collective buzzing of bees.
Joseph Cambray, Provost of Pacifica, said, “So much of human suffering is very intimately tied up with non-conscious levels that it’s hard to imagine we could ameliorate symptoms without a depth perspective.”
Jung's "Great Man" can also appear as the Great woman -- Anima Mundi, the ancient worldview. It is the hermaphroditic fusion of all our ancestry into an omnipotent archetypal figure of soul and spirit.
Throughout much of human history, ancestors were revered and frequently visited in caves and barrows. People sat in these natural resonant echo chambers, chanting and drumming hypnotically and opening their altered psyches to the possibility of communication with the Beyond – voices of eternity.
People died so young, this youthful population needed shamanic guidance, needed primal wisdom. We are learning to understand that our immature culture can benefit by rooting ourselves in deep time and the wisdom of eternity. We still dream at night of connecting somehow with our departed loved ones. We are unconsciously entangled with our ancestral soul, but psychically dissociated.
Chopping Wood & Carrying Cosmic Water
Water is the great symbol of the primordial unconscious. And we are its water-bearers. We carry the ancestral psyche much like the bloodline. The dragon or serpent is another symbol of the universal unconscious, the psychic field, and renewal. It impregnates itself by biting its own tail. The depths conceive.
A feminine symbol, water also signifies emotions or psychic energy, fertility, growth, creative potential, new life, or healing. An integrative approach includes memory reconsolidation to maintain, strengthen, modify and stabilize memories of the unconscious and long-term memory. Our ancestors remain amnesiac agents as long as we are unconscious of them as a kinship system.
Psychologically, water means spirit that has become unconscious. The way of the soul leads to the water, to the dark mirror, the world of invisible perception, that reposes at its bottom. This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche. We descend into our depths, into that well of souls and perhaps return with a bit of its healing bounty.
The Tree, watered by the unconscious roots, is the great symbol of humanity. In the tree metaphor, these root systems that lie far beneath the surface of the Earth, which are just as extensive as the trunks and branches we have growing in plain view. We don't just look at the tree superficially, but examine its entire structure — perhaps, a metaphorical "chopping wood" -- including belief systems and subconscious patterns of thinking formed from birth.
We all "carry water" for the divine in our manifest embodiment -- not only in the fluids of our bodies, but the fluidity of the psyche and our epigenetic memories. But how many of us incorporate the numinous realms of the psyche—meaning the unconscious, spiritual beliefs, dream life, the imagination, our connection to mystery, myth, archetype and the natural world?
How do we function in society, what bonds us to one another, what causes our psychoses and neuroses, and what helps us to individuate and become the people we were meant to be? The Depth Approach includes Dual Process Theory and The Frame Problem, and some consequences for our research.
Dual Process Theory recognizes that the human mind has two disparate modes of thinking - Subconscious Intuitive Understanding on one hand and Conscious Logical Reasoning on the other. The depth perspective "frame" in this case is provided by genealogy. There is an aesthetic harmony to the layout of our genealogical displays, or grids, which comes in a variety of forms.
Combined Perspectives
Psychological life is aesthetic life. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance.
Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, re-membering, and reconnecting with soul and identity. In the phenomenological aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance -- communion of the soul with the mysteries of inner and outer world -- the naked awareness of divine self-revelation in a community of living presence. Traces of ancient art and adornment show aesthetics -- the felt-sense of form and beauty -- is inherent in the primal mind.
For example, we can be so caught up by beauty that everything stops in aesthetic arrest -- a seizure by the tremendum. We reflexively gasp for air in awe and wonder that precedes any thoughts or cognitive framing. "I breath, therefore I perceive." Aesthetics is a method of externalizing something of the inner quality of life, fusing the transcendent with the immanent, the personal with the impersonal, the inner with the outer.
Genealogy is an aesthetic discipline. Our ancestral practice has an inherently aesthetic base; we perceive them through our aesthetic sensibilities. We instinctually long for beauty; it affects the soul and can heal or restore our psychological senses. Aesthetics reveals spiritual and psychological significance. The depths of something helps us feel and make sense of our experiences.
Deep Primal Engagement
Ancestors appear as self-presenting, expressive forms that speak to us. We imbibe and re-dignify the soul and spirit of our early ancestors across time and place. Their communion with us asserts the fundamental continuity of our primal consciousness, imbued with the natural force of the mythic by our faithful attention.
The image remains as the face of things as they are when all else perishes -- a psychological aesthetic with patterns of meaning. This isn't formal aesthetics but an opportunity to "see through" to greater significance, to distinguish something from the shifting quality of the vortex of morphing imagery.
James Hillman said, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.” Bioevolutionary aesthetics includes the cognitive spectrum of sensation, perception, conceptualization, and thought as well as the basic emotions, pain, and sexuality.
Aesthetic space makes way for the beauty that presents itself to us. We pause, take a moment to notice and appreciate the particulars of some thing, and enter aesthetic space, increasing our awareness of larger patterns of purpose. Our aesthetic response may express as transformation.
Conversely, aesthetic frustration or oppression affects our bodily feeling, our emotional well-being, and we must ward ourselves from their influence--the despair they produce, and the exhaustion, outrage, repulsion, insult, if not assault, and a heightened irritability.
We deny our aesthetic responses by closing down our senses, our perceptions; we anesthetize ourselves -- we just go numb as in anesthesia. But ugliness, pain, or disgust can also jar us awake with a conscious shock, calling our attention to soul.
"If the aesthetic is seen in contrast to the anaesthetic - or numbness, it can be understood more correctly as ‘enlivened being'. Reclaiming the aesthetic in this way enables us to understand the link between the aesthetic and responsibility: response-ability not as a moral imperative, but as the ability to respond." (Shelley Sacks, UN Summit on Culture and Development, Stockholm 1998)
We can cultivate a capacity to open ourselves to 'the other' in all its forms. We bring our own sense of deep aesthetics to ancestral relationships, knowing that each of our living cells carries the experience of billions of years of experimentation by its ancestors. We can have an aesthetic appreciation of each life.
About 1/3 - 1/2 of each of the psychological types seem to enjoy genealogy. The 'analysts' (Intuitive and Thinking) enjoy a rigorous, fact-based treasure hunt through their ancestry. The visionary 'diplomats' (intuitive and feeling) are curious, imaginative, on the lookout for secrets, hidden meanings and new possibilities.
Conservative 'sentinels' (observant and judging) like to preserve order and security, are often focus on the bonds of family and the importance of history. Goal-oriented 'explorers' (observing and prospecting) tend to stick to the facts and have practical applications in the future - the past and the present are prologue.
Genealogical Heritage
An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
Direct-line research refers to genealogy research focused on one's direct-line ancestors. We follow both surnames at each generation (i.e. paternal and maternal lines), back as far as records allow. Family history, rather than just genealogy, includes extended families (biological marital, sociological) that often interact significantly with our own lines.
When our genealogy expresses more than one line of descent from a given ancestor, then it exhibits segmentation or branching. This is a "segmented genealogy." A segmented genealogy starts with a single parent and shows the relationship of children to each other. This kind of genealogy will have both a horizontal and vertical element to it.
If we go back 300 years, we have roughly 3,000 ancestors. Going back a thousand years results theoretically in billions of ancestors, more people than ever lived on the face of the earth! In reality, the same ancestors will show up in multiple places in your family tree as you have multiple lines of descent from many of these people.
"Linear genealogy" expresses only one line of descent, linking the genealogy to an older ancestor or group. Both segmented and linear genealogies exhibit depth (number of generations) and a sort of "cartography" of the unconscious. That map may lead us toward our greatest possible treasure–our inner gold -- the knowledge in our bones.
Maybe we also find a bit of fool's gold along the way. Family stories provide wonderful insights into the lives of our ancestors. However, not all family stories are true. Many such stories are fictional. Yet, even the stories that are either entirely or part fiction may contain clues to facts. Good genealogical practice requires that we admit the fiction to mine for its nuggets of truth.
In the domestic sphere, linear genealogy relates individuals to other individuals and kinship groups. They also function in the political and legal sphere to legitimate rulers, express progress, and support claims to recognition, status or power.
Some lines pass through or end (or begin) in legends or mythic figures. Already in the fifth century, the Macedonian kings claimed descent from Perdiccas, who descended from Temenos, a king of Argos; and he was great-grandchild of Hyllus, the son of Heracles.
Woden is consistently placed at nine removes from the founder of a dynasty. But is that the god, or Odin the man? In the 13th century, the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson wrote that Odin came to worshiped as a god, but he was originally a famous warrior who led his people out of Troy and into Scandinavia. Or was he?
In the 13th century, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote that Odin was a sorcerer from Byzantium. The other gods there stripped Odin of his rank and power, then banished him. He fooled the people of Scandinavia into worshiping him as a god. The old kings of Wessex and Mercia claimed him as ancestor.
Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807) might have been the first to formulate explicitly the idea that the historical Odin was a man named Sigge Fridulfsson. He says, "His true name was Sigge, son of Fridulph; but he assumed that of Odin, who was the Supreme God among the Scythians." Mallet's version claims, Sigge (also known as Odin) was an ally of Mithradates, a Persian king defeated by the Romans. (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1770, 1809).
On the other hand, as many as 3 million men worldwide may be descendants of the Irish warlord, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405. A 2003 study found that 8 percent of all Mongolian males are the descendants of Genghis Khan, sharing his Y chromosome. The Khan family may have as many as 16 million descendants in Asia today.
Even metaphorically, the most prestigious of all possible ancestry is descent from divinity itself. Descent from antiquity (DFA) is the project of establishing a well-researched, generation-by-generation descent of living persons from people living in antiquity. It is an ultimate challenge in genealogy. No prospective DFA is accepted at this time.
Irish legends and subsequently Scottish lines, claim royal descent from Milesius, King of Spain, husband of Scota, Princess of Egypt. The Welsh also have legends, which claim descent from Noah, while Charlemagne, the father of all European nobility, claims descent from Adam. Sometimes totems represent descent from Dragons, Lions, Eagles, or Serpents.
Hellenistic dynasties, such as the Ptolemies, claimed descent from gods and legendary heroes. In the Middle Ages, major royal dynasties of Europe sponsored compilations claiming their descent from Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, in particular the rulers of Troy. As propaganda, these claims glorified a royal patron by trumpeting the antiquity and nobility of his ancestry.
These descent lines included both mythical figures and outright fiction, much of which is still widely perpetuated today. The odds of royal ancestry are overwhelming. Virtually all people with European ancestry are descended from the usual royal suspects of 1000+ years ago.
Seeing ourselves in our archetypal nature helps us recognize our timeless parts and own our gifts. Having a mythic sensibility about ourselves offers a clue to how we might be unconsciously acting out archetypal patterns.
Apparently conflicting genealogies with different functions (and often without kinship terms) emerge from the religious or cultic sphere. That is, genealogies become fluid in accuracy according to their function. No generalizations are possible for a historiographic value of such genealogies with fragmentations and gaps.
For example, Sumerian and Akkadian elements were fused into Hellenistic and biblical narrative with questionable linkages, significant differences, and background stories. Of the nine descendants of Adam, only Enoch is described with particulars from traditions now lost to us (Genesis Apocryphon) though we know they are related to Mesopotamian "fish-shaped sages" and kings lists.
The exact form of such ancient determinative lines in royal or religious genealogies is not known, but historically conflated, confabulated, and altered by compilers at various times for various reasons. Jung suggested we "think diligently" about the images the ancients have left us, as they also intimate what is to come.
Depth is the most important feature of linear genealogy. That depth expresses the memories of the people who preserve it in practice, relating us to deep time, distance, and transcendence.
But, true nobility springs from the soul and spirit, rather than any genetic trail.
WE LIVE NOW
Breath & Blood
Genealogy is a recorded history of a person or family’s descent from an ancestor or ancestors. Soul is spiritual or emotional warmth, force or evidence. These combine so that knowing your roots and connecting with family are good for the soul. Our ancestors are also symbols. Jung noted, "If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know."(Liber Novus, Page 311)
"I Am. Lo, I Am Alive"
Genealogy is a written testament to the endurance of the archaic -- a historical epic of the flesh made word. Healing of the mind and body was practiced in prehistoric times and a vital part of it involved maintaining a living connection with the ancestors.
“Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. Jung reminds us “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit,” -- the Great Mother. If we repress nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, we depreciate the earth and lose our connection with nature and divinity.
Jung told Ira Progoff that, “individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human." He said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it. We do not have a sense of living history.
Incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, spans the archaic, natural, primordial, or original. Dissociation from our ancestors is unconscious dissociation from nature, our nature and the world soul. Rituals, such as genealogy, can help us reconnect, to awaken both spirit and nature to a new life -- spanning modern and archaic.
This quest for self is the yearning for soul and the healing power of nature. Jung believed when we touch nature we get clean, that natural life is the “nourishing soil of the soul." When we search for our ancestors we search for soul. The collective unconscious is the well of souls.
When our soul is touched, we know what we are here for. Our whole purpose and destiny is just to be. We do not need to lose the mystery by pretending to a knowledge that we do not have. If we just stay with the process, living the soul, our genealogy unfolds with our life's journey and meaning. The streaming continuity of life becomes clear in our lineage. Our ancestral legacy is the ancestral continuum or ancestral field.
We can listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. The land of the dead is the country of our ancestors. The images who walk in on us are our ancestors, ordinary and extraordinary. Genealogy is a tangible path to the soul and the sacred. In genealogy we have to go through the personal to get to the transcendent. Genealogy is a living mythology organically relevant to living the organic form and participating in myth.
Return of the Feminine
Unlike paternal line genealogy of inheritance, social norms and the Father Archetype, contemporary genealogy fully embraces the feminine, and the infusion of maternal lines and qualities into the family tree that speak on behalf of life.
The life value of the facts are related both to everyday and eternal images. The return to the Feminine is not focused on transcendence, but on the embodiment of the sacred, in life and in relationships. The grandmothers of our family tree embody the Mother Archetype.
The unification of the body, sexuality and emotions with the spirit heralds a return from striving to being. Myth is the transcendent in living relationship with the present -- the life wisdom that lives within us and is bound in our body. Myth points the way beyond the phenomenal field, and this role is demonstrated in the roots of our genealogical lines, where we find families of gods and goddesses.
Joseph Campbell explored three major themes of the sacred Feminine:
1) Initiation into the cosmos and nature; immanence and eternity, and thus existing outside the bounds of ordinary, lived experience.
2) Transformation; guiding the life cycle from birth to death.
3) Inspiration; the deep, felt sense of the aliveness and energy of all life.
”On the simplest level, the Goddess is the Earth. On the next, archaic level, She is the surrounding sky. On the philosophic level, She is Maya, the forms of sensibility, the limitations of the senses that enclose us so that all of our thinking takes place within her bounds—She is IT. The Goddess is the ultimate boundary of consciousness in the world of time and space.”
(Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine)
The Incredible Lightness of Breathing
Breath is life -- the life-giving presence. In Latin, Hebrew and Greek, 'breath' means 'soul.' When we breath we derive sustenance from the world around us. The breath of life is the symbol and medium of vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing and inspiration. On a cosmic level, breath symbolizes the spirit and the vital breath of the universe. In this way, to breathe is to assimilate spiritual power.
Breath is a symbol of freedom, quest, direction, and delivery. Inhalation and exhalation symbolize the alternating rhythm of life and death, of manifestation and reabsorption into the universe. In L'Air et les Songes, Bachelard notes that breathing is connected with circulation of the blood and with the important symbolic paths of involution and evolution.
There Will Be Blood
Blood and bloodline is of central significance in genealogy. Where Breath is flight, Blood is the ties that bind -- relativity, heredity, bloodlines, and self-realization -- life, sex, and death. Blood is the fiery 'water' of our body's rivers, always in motion, ceaseless in its circulation.
When we feel most alive, when we experience passion, jealousy, or other overpowering emotions, blood rushes through our veins, we breathe faster, our cheeks redden. Blood impresses the imagination, stimulating all sorts of beliefs beyond the rational -- for example, drinking blood for regeneration. Globally it represents not only heritage, but life force itself, as the element of divine life that functions within the human body.
Blood has carried extraordinary symbolic power since Neolithic times with the cyclic mysteries of the goddess and menstrual taboos, reflecting the magical meaning of women as sources of life, symbols of Eros and fertility, and the magical meaning of blood as vital fluid.. The "knot of Isis" funerary amulet placed at the neck of the deceased symbolized "the blood of Isis."
In ancient Greek medicine, each of the four humors became associated with an element. Blood was the humor identified with air, since both were hot and wet. And blood means kin from common ancestry. Eliphas Levi called blood "the great arcanum of life" and, "the first incarnation of the universal fluid; it is the materialized vital light. Its birth is the most marvelous of all nature’s marvels; it lives only by perpetually transforming itself, for it is the universal Proteus."
Archetypal beliefs, fantasies and notions concerning the significance of blood are among the oldest surviving concepts from the earliest days of human existence. Symbolically, blood is bonds, promises, responsibility, sacrifice, collective will and has many religious connotations. Childbirth and death often involve blood. Wars have been fought in the name of bloodlines. Blood rituals symbolize death and rebirth. Body piercing is also a blood ritual.
The notion that "life is in the blood" gave rise to its presumed divine nature, a gift of the gods. Dream meanings of blood include life, fluidity, passion and that which sustains us, but also emotional pain and hurtful things. Blood is said to have magic powers and it is also associated with a variety of irrational notions, including blood brotherhood, "royal blood," blood vengeance, "pure blood," blood baptism, "bad blood," bloodshed, and blood guilt.
Depth Approach
Jung thought his psychology contributed to a depth aesthetic that rests on the manifestation of the archetypal in all forms of creativity. As such, it is closely related to the spiritual and religious.
A Jungian approach to genealogy is not a requirement for practice, but it is a valid approach with its own coherence. Archetypal psychology is a legitimate 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach to genealogy.
Depth Psychology can help us explore the hidden parts of human experience with a deeper rather than reductive view. Looking beyond the surface level we find currents that run throughout our lives and those of our ancestors, connecting us and communicating greater meaning through imagery, dreams, and archetypal patterns.
The depth orientation brings a new lens to our transgenerational issues we may have overlooked. The ancestral field connects us with something larger that our everyday selves, raising what was unconscious into conscious awareness. Symbolism is the practice of representing peoples, places, objects, and ideas by means of symbols or of attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships.
A psychological approach is a trustworthy framework for understanding a more holistic genealogical process, with a clear sense of humanness or personhood, and irreal and quasi-real experience -- intangibles produced by psyche itself.
Intangibles
Our genealogical lines are ours alone, although we share some of them with others. When we begin our genealogical adventure, we enter our own exclusive path. As Jung suggests, "You can enter only into your own mysteries." How do we explore the depths of our reality and experience, seeing underneath that which appears on the surface?
Campbell noted, "Whenever a knight of the Grail tried to follow a path made by someone else, he went altogether astray. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's footsteps. Each of us has to find his own way, and this is what gives our Occidental world its initiative and creative quality. Nobody can give you a mythology. The images that mean something to you, you'll find in your dreams, in your visions, in your actions — and you'll find out what they are after you've passed them." (Joseph Campbell, interview by Joan Marler, Yoga Journal, Joseph Campbell Foundation)
Our ancestors are like intangible assets that lack physical substance and usually are very hard to evaluate. They are not constituted or represented by a physical object and their value is not measurable. But we can feel and even assess it despite lack of physical presence.
Modes of Apprehension
A depth approach addresses the feelings, significant dreams, and imagery that are naturally aroused in the self-discovery process, and describes the nature of synchronous events. Grounded theory has a particular conceptual and methodological foundation that doesn't reduce what it means to be human, embodied or incorporeal.
We need to separate our constructions from a delusory interpretation of the facts of reality, as available to experience. How can we integrate different theories relating to the basis of reality? No shortage of comparisons and correlations between spiritual notions,metaphysical ideas, and scientific theories has been made.
The normally unconscious functional layer of perceptional and emotional variants are only psychologically transcendent but by no means "transcendental," i.e., metaphysical. Perfectly normal people can have visions in certain moments. The heart of the labyrinth is the heart of all life; it is the womb of creation, rebirth, regeneration and metamorphosis. A labyrinth is a scrambled mandala.
In an idealist worldview, we act on the world through consciousness and, therefore, actively know and shape our world. In contrast, in a realist view, the world acts us and we react. Both perspectives tend to assume a dualist subject/object separation and directional relationship between person and world that does not exist in the world of actual lived experience.
We can describe at least three functional aspects of consciousness and focus of attention that relate to personal and collective conscious-unconscious phenomenology and models of reality — the way we perceive it, the way we imagine or interpret it, and the unified ground underlying existence.
1) Personal self-awareness fused with direct sensory experience and emotion (awake and aware of surroundings).
2) a fusion of imaginal memories, myths, dreams and conceptual interpretations of experience.
3) Non-dual unity and totality; the universal, suprapersonal or global aspect of dimensionless abstraction, we call “Consciousness,” or God in potentia.
A descriptive phenomenological method helps us grasp previously unrecognized assumptions regarding meaning -- the means to understand subjective matters. The psychological approach is neither idealist nor realist, but intimate. Like ourselves, most of our ancestors had a lifeworld, place and home that hold people and world together.
Place is a ontological structure of being-in-the world because of our existence as embodied beings. We are "bound by body to be in place." And the same holds true in the inner life. As with lifeworld and place, home as experience presupposes and sustains a taken-for-granted involvement between person and world. This bond is largely unself-conscious, and the phenomenological aim it to make that tacitness explicit and thereby understand it.
There many challenges in life, from catastrophes (war, famine, plague, disasters), to loss of autonomy, major illness and disabilities, to involuntary displacement‑-the families' experience of forced relocation and resettlement, metaphorically a forced journey and starting over or rebuilding. Our ancestors faced them all, mostly without modern conveniences.
The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 397.
The lifeworld includes both the routine and the unusual, the mundane and the surprising. Whether an experience is ordinary or extraordinary, however, the lifeworld in which the experience happens is normally out of sight. Each of our ancestors had their space in their landscape and in our genealogical descent. That place serves as the condition of all existing things --"To be is to be in place."
Typically, we do not make our experiences in the lifeworld an object of conscious awareness. Rather, these experiences just happen, and we do not consider how they happen in context. The natural attitude is to take the everyday world unquestioningly for granted. Inner and outer dimensions normally unfold automatically.
Phenomenology is the interpretive study of human experience. The aim is to examine and clarify spontaneous human situations, events, meanings, and experiences, including personal impact, urgency, and ambiguity. We bring our own style to the process. It is an innovative way for looking at the person-environment relationship and for identifying and understanding its complex, multi-dimensional structure.
Consciousness was not separate from the world and human existence. A primarily aesthetic, poetic enterprise need not attempt to achieve a degree of rigor and epistemological clarity like natural scientists. We have no need to "objectify" the human being, but to adopt a qualitative, interpretive approach and to explore environmental and inherited issues. Phenomenology is one style of qualitative inquiry that involves symbolic interaction as its conceptual and methodological foundation.
As in conventional genealogy, we should apply trustworthy and reliable protocols to our practice. Humanity and the environment are an indivisible whole we can describe phenomenologically. Three phenomenological methods include: (1) first-person phenomenological research; (2) existential-phenomenological research; and (3) hermeneutical-phenomenological research.
Once we ourselves are rooted in this fertile earth of the deep unconscious, we can plant our contemporary and traditional Family Tree with its potentially vital forms and structures and listen to souls being born in the future. The Tree grounds us in imaginal space. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor.
Dreaming the Earth, and Earthing the Dream
We can activate the deep knowing of the psyche as it is nourished and animated by intimacy with the natural world. Research suggests that interconnectivity manifests in our deep psychic bond with the earth, its creatures and plants, and the cosmos as a whole. Evidence of this interrelationship arises in our personal lives in dream images and synchronicities, and in the powerful and visceral sense of engagement we feel with the natural world.
In the beginning, the 'earth' was void and without form: "You have got to accept what the unconscious produces, and you have to understand its language. It is Nature, and it has to be translated into human forms." (Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
Joseph Campbell described four functions of myth:
(1) to help us through life passages, with ritual (baptism, marriage, initiation, job entry, funerals);
(2) to make connections with mysteries of the universe (spirituality, religion, arts);
(3) to explain the workings of nature (lightning, seasons, floods, birth, death); and
(4) to provide a way we find a place in the social community (family, clan, caste, ethnicity, social class, subculture).
Ovum Mundi
The longing for our origins is a metaphorical longing for paradise.
The primary myth, the seminal idea, is of our origins The egg is the universal symbol of the archetypal phenomenology of the child’s birth. This embryo of the universe has been called the world egg, formed by light itself, The Primordial Being is hatched from the serpent-entwined Cosmic Egg. This proverbial ‘Orphic Egg’ was the source of the generative power of the entire universe.
In mythology, eggs stand for the earth, the life, or the seat of the soul. They indicate the presence of the Goddess, “whose World Egg contains the universe in embryo.” In India, Egypt, Greece and Phoenicia the creator and mankind emerge from the Cosmic Egg. The egg is commonly considered as a symbol of fertility, the rebirth of nature and wholeness. In Sufism the central goal is the rediscovery of the root of one’s being through reintegration with the entirety.
Eliade insists that the egg never loses its primary meaning, but "ensures the repetition of the act of creation which gave birth in illo tempore to living forms. ...the egg guarantees the possibility of repeating the primeval act, the act of creation...In as much as it is linked with the scenarios for the New Year or the return of spring, the egg represents a manifestation of creation." This golden egg is the most Divine being on the whole earth and from this primeval Immortal golden embryo springs the fountain of Immortality.
The world egg or golden embryo born of cosmic being or the cosmic womb is a global theme. Egyptian language implies "egg" is naturally related to "goddess." The words "userit," "netrit," "hen-t,' and "shepsit," all mean "goddess" and use the egg hieroglyph as a determinative.
The cosmic egg of the Egyptians was also identified as Osiris, symbolizing life, death, renewal, rejuvination, rebirth, or immortality. As unconscious, Osiris is the paradoxical life/death ground where integrative impulses arise. His epic ordeals mirror our own.
We cannot speak of Osiris (Wasir) apart from the rejuvenating processes of Isis (Aset), who complements and completes him. He was called "the Great Egg" -- "the only egg" -- and was lauded as "thou egg who becometh as one renewed."
From the viewpoint of the ground we are refreshed each and every nanosecond of our existence. Human beings weave imaginal tales about the nature of nature, their experience and dreams. We still stave off our fears of death with hopes of eternal life when the existential fact remains that it is impossible for us to leave the sacred source field that undergirds both our corporeal existence and our potential immortalization in the virtual field, the groundstate of continuous creation.
The sarcophagus of Seti I depicts Osiris as "bent round in a circle with his toes touching his head..." Phoenician cosmogenesis says, "From the union of [Desire and Darkness] were born Aer (air) and Aura (breath)...This couple then produced the cosmic Egg, in conformity with the intelligible spirit."
Life comes from life. The egg, the universal germ of creation, with all its potency for transformation and its circular containment, is a mandala, a magic circle, a microverse.
Greek philosopher Epicurus described the cosmic egg as a circular band. "The All," he stated, "was from the beginning like an egg," and the pneuma as serpent winds around the egg in a tight band as a wreath or belt around the universe. This circle without beginning or end is a symbol of the parents of the world, portrayed in their equal stature as the original unity.
This ancient symbol of the Orphic Mysteries --the serpent-entwined egg -- signified Cosmos encircled by the fiery Creative Spirit. The egg also represents the soul of the philosopher; the serpent, the Mysteries. At the time of initiation the shell is broken and one emerges from the embryonic state of physical existence which is the fetal period of philosophic regeneration.
This germinal point is something great. Before our body is born of our parents, at the time of conception, this seed is first created where human nature and life dwell. The two intermingle forming a unity. Myth suggests: "In the state before the appearance there is an inexhaustible breath." Before the parents beget the child, the breath of life is complete and the embryo perfect.
Jung's incantation cries, "Oh light of the middle way, enclosed in the egg, embryonic, full of ardor, oppressed. Fully expectant, dreamlike, awaiting lost memories. As heavy as stone, hardened. Molten, transparent. Streaming bright, coiled on itself." (The Red Book; 53).
Alchemy describes the “Philosophers’ Child,” “Child of Wisdom,” “ Child of the Egg” or homunculus, born symbolically in a retort which represents the human Heart. Chinese Taoist alchemy calls it the “immortal foetus,” “embryo of the Tao,” “seed pearl” or “starseed embryo.”
In The Book of the Dead, Wallis Budge describes the primitive credo concerning the cosmic egg of the ancient Egyptians in these words:
"[In the beginning] nothing existed except a boundless primeval mass of water which was shrouded in darkness and which contained within itself the germs or beginnings, male and female, of everything which was to be in the future world. The divine primeval spirit which formed an essential part of the primeval matter felt within itself the desire to begin the work of creation, and its word woke to life the world, the form and shape of which it had already depicted to itself. The first act of creation began with the formation of an egg out of the primeval water..."
Paradise Myth
The search for our origins expressing a "longing for paradise."
The spirit of God moves upon the Face of the waters -- the embryo. Jung noted that Simon Magus considered the Garden of Eden a symbol or metaphor for corporeal uterine life. The fetus is surrounded by waters.
If paradise is the womb, then Eden is the placenta and the river branching into four is the umbilical with two arteries of breath and two veins of blood. Magus claims Moses allegorically referred to the cave/womb as The Garden from which in time we are expelled, as the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
"[P]aradise is the uterus, and the Garden of Eden the navel. Four flows emanate from the navel, two air- and two blood-vessels, so to speak, through which the growing child receives its food, the blood, and the pneuma.” (Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 365-367.)
The world navel is a symbol for Paradise, as Eliade (1991) tells us. "Paradise, where Adam was created from clay, is, of course, situated at the center of the cosmos. Paradise was the navel of the earth and according to a Syrian tradition, was established on a mountain higher than all other" (p. 16).
In biological terms, this mountain is the pregnant body of the mother and her navel as the center of the world, the connection between Heaven and Earth. The umbilical cord is the container for the river (water of life) that flows into Paradise or the womb, thereby nourishing it. Biologically, we can also compare the act of physical love and female orgasm (water of life) to the river flowing out of Paradise, leaving behind the egg that generates new life at conception.
The serpent in our archetypal tree is the unconscious with its painful, dangerous interventions and frightening effects. Though totally unconscious, it has a wisdom of its own that is foundational to our origins. But the path of knowledge is painful and bitter. The unconscious is not a separate sphere, but found in all things at all times. The soul has its own internal sources of knowledge.
Elemental Earth
The physical and chemical constituents of our bodies are the elemental earth in us. Here our acorn can grow into the oak it was meant to be. The future is affected by what we imagine. The challenge today is to sustain the vivacity of our culture and carry it into the future, maintaining a reciprocal relationship with nature, and connection to the ancestral past.
Consciously practiced, genealogy is a way to get in touch with the ground of being. It forms a great feedback loop between our present and our origins from the middle ground of imagery states that is our birthright. Interacting with one's genealogy becomes a rite of passage with three phases: severance (deciding to participate), threshold (entering uncharted territory), and incorporation, (literally, “to take on the body,” having gained new insights).
Our search is for our origins. Our lines take serpentine twists and turns mirroring the genetics of our DNA. Genealogy dignifies our existence as numinous, not merely derivative or reactive, nor is it prescriptive in any one-approach-fits-all manner.
"When the unconscious intrudes into spaces of consciousness, it is automatically split into its pairs of opposites." (Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 408.) Symbols mirror the nuclear family union of gender opposites and reconciliation in new birth. Images, like the union of opposites, cannot be willed.
"What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, always has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right… the only thing that helps us here is the symbol….with its paradoxical nature it represents the ‘third thing.” (Jung, CW 13, pp. 134)
"The Kingdom of Heaven is within ourselves. It is our innermost nature and something between ourselves. The Kingdom of Heaven is between people like cement." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 444.)
Recognition of soul images and incorporation into awareness is an ongoing process. In The Red Book, Jung notes, "Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other ...I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words." (Pg. 250.)
Jung cautions, "The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." (The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370)
Jung advised the incorporation of death into one's lived experience. In The Red Book, he says, “The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper like a smooth wave on a sea beach.”
Our ancestors are permanent living residents in our own psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance and embodied meaning. Bringing them back through remembrance is also a recollection -- a re-collection and differentiation. Tacitly welcoming us across the years, they have aesthetic and psychological qualities -- subtle bodies clothed with the presence of our deep memories.
Our thought is constrained and impaired if we think in terms of partial derivatives (time- and space-bound effects) instead of full function. The capacity for objective inner experience remains latent. We gradually develop "an eye to see and an ear to hear." We dialogue with figures of the soul. Their radical otherness, activities, and words affect us as they move with their own intentions.
Aesthetic Genealogy
Genealogy reconnects us with nature and our own nature. It is an aesthetic interaction in which both the Greek chorus of ancestors and ourselves are the medium that makes art of life's remnants. It is a tool we can use to change ourselves by turning into more of ourselves.
The evolutionary function of the aesthetic sense drew us toward conditions that made for survival and reproductive success and repelled us from conditions that impacted longevity and fertility negatively. Existence and the world are eternally joined as an aesthetic phenomena.
What we think and feel and the intensity of aesthetic engagement, is proportional to the depth of its unconscious content. Its imaginative texture cannot be fixed in meaning. Yet it is capable of moving us psychologically away from the temporal (human) present and towards the universal (divine) or archetypal constant. So, aesthetics is a form of transformation.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition through the ages. Genealogy is the basis for a configuration, re-configuration, and aesthetic appreciation of our life story. Genealogy is a 'mirror' of aesthetic engagement in the materially based image.
Addressing the needs of unconscious life is fundamental to aesthetic
appreciation. Implied inner needs drive the initial intention to physically create our genealogical image and to act this out imaginatively. We raise the ancestors who carry meaning and value to consciousness from the labyrinth of unconscious form production and creative instinct.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros -- felt-experience or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. Eros connects body and soul with vitality and passion born in the blood. Vivid libidinal participation connects our heart to the heart of the universe. It binds the ordinary and nonordinary worlds together by creating symbols of transcendence.
Genealogy becomes a homage to the power of love in our very creation. We heed the ancestors when we receive, listen, and contain. In that sense, genealogy becomes a temenos, or sacred space, the sanctuary of our holy grove -- the magic circle of extended family. The self-realizing motion performs the transformation. Our ancestors are a revelation. We need to reveal, not just know ourselves. Self-realization is self-revelation.
We have to accept that our genealogical 'dead ends' will remain unknown, will remain the 'road not taken.' We can relate to the blunt facts of our genesis and stop there as the genealogical 'realists' do, cutting off the fictional, legendary and mythic elements, but we may do so at our own psychological peril. A myth is not a dream; its archaic images and memories constitute a world.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording, analysis, and interpretation. The aesthetic approach does not rule out other perspectives on genealogy, which can be pursued as we are moved to do so.
But the archetypal approach probably makes the most 'sense' of the roots of our mythologically-based lines, and permits depth exploration without literalism, concretization, or symptomatic concretization. For example, when Native American cultures say they get their ancestral wisdom, ceremonies, guidance, and direction from the 'womb at the center of the universe,' they refer to the sacred Feminine.
Jung echoes such ancient sentiments: "For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it arises the picture of the world as we know it today." ( The Sacrifice; CW 5; Par 643.)
The archetypes are an aesthetic stimulus with their own properties and appeal, among other things. So is our aesthetic response to their symbolism and experience. The mythic is an expression of the larger whole. We often fail to realize that other fascinating possibilities exist.
Heuristic Method
Creative outpouring is the entrance to self-actualization. It is heuristic, preparing us for deeper understanding. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Like archetypes, they help us function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.
We find or discover things by experience and experiment. It stimulates interest in further investigation. As a problem-solving strategy, the heuristic method allows us to discover something for ourselves, to discover answers on our own and learn more about ourselves on our own.
A psychophysical approach is the secret behind the aesthetic experience. The ancestors feed the aesthetic formation of our living form. Aesthetic knowledge enables the psychological phenomena to link the body to the world.
Creativity points the way to the numinous, a high-voltage elemental force. Incubation brings new insights into ourselves and the ancestors. In our initial attempts to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations.
Psychic tensions accumulate and stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression.
Aesthetic Intuition
Genealogy offers direct traditional testimony that archetypes as aesthetic universals lie at the roots of the collective unconscious which Jung insisted was not a mystical idea. Our invisible connections go down deep, and to go deep is to go backward.
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul.
It means leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence -- the dead or missing parent, the grandparent never met, the unborn and miscarried. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’
Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
"dziadzia" English translation
dziadzia {noun}
dziadzia {m} [child.l.] (also: dziadek, dziadzio, dziadunio, dziadziuś)
grandpa {noun} [child.l.]dziad {noun}
dziad {m} (also: starzec, stary, staruszek, starszy człowiek)old man {noun} dziad {m} (also: przodek, antenat)
ancestor {noun} dziad {m} [pej.] (also: żebrak)
beggar {noun} dziad {m} [arch.] (also: dziadek)
grandfather {noun}
Dziadzia is the Americanized Polish word for grandpa, which in Polish is dziadek or dziadziu.
AN ECOLOGY OF SOULS
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Archetypal psychology is a 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our contemporary and traditional family tree with its potentially vital forms and structures.
The Tree grounds us in imaginal space. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor. The serpent in our archetypal tree is the unconscious with its painful, dangerous interventions and frightening effects. Though totally unconscious, it has a wisdom of its own that is foundational to our origins.
The physical and chemical constituents of our bodies are the elemental earth in us. Here our acorn can grow into the oak it was meant to be. The future is affected by what we imagine. The challenge today is to sustain the vivacity of our culture and carry it into the future, maintaining a reciprocal relationship with nature, and connection to the ancestral past.
Consciously practiced, genealogy is a way to get in touch with the ground of being. It forms a great feedback loop between our present and our origins from the middle ground of imagery states that is our birthright. Interacting with one's genealogy becomes a rite of passage with three phases: severance (deciding to participate), threshold (entering uncharted territory), and incorporation, (literally, “to take on the body,” having gained new insights).
Our search is for our origins. Our lines take serpentine twists and turns mirroring the genetics of our DNA. Genealogy dignifies our existence as numinous, not merely derivative or reactive, nor is it prescriptive in any one-approach-fits-all manner. Symbols mirror the nuclear family union of opposites and reconciliation in new birth. Images, like the union of opposites, cannot be willed.
"What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, always has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right… the only thing that helps us here is the symbol….with its paradoxical nature it represents the ‘third thing” (Jung, CW 13, pp. 134)
Recognition of soul images and incorporation into awareness is an ongoing process. In The Red Book, Jung notes, "Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other ...I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words." (Pg. 250.)
Jung cautions, "The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." (The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370)
Jung advised the incorporation of death into one's lived experience. In the Red Book, he says, “The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper like a smooth wave on a sea beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.”
Our ancestors are permanent living residents in our own psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance and embodied meaning. Bringing them back through remembrance is also a recollection -- a re-collection and differentiation. Tacitly welcoming us across the years, they have aesthetic and psychological qualities -- subtle bodies clothed with the presence of our deep memories.
Our thought is constrained and impaired if we think in terms of partial derivatives (time- and space-bound effects) instead of full function. The capacity for objective inner experience remains latent. We gradually develop "an eye to see and an ear to hear." We dialogue with figures of the soul. Their radical otherness, activities, and words affect us as they move with their own intentions.
Aesthetic Genealogy
Genealogy reconnects us with nature and our own nature. It is an aesthetic interaction in which both the Greek chorus of ancestors and ourselves are the medium that makes art of life's remnants. It is a tool we can use to change ourselves by turning into more of ourselves.
The evolutionary function of the aesthetic sense drew us toward conditions that made for survival and reproductive success and repelled us from conditions that impacted longevity and fertility negatively. Existence and the world are eternally joined as an aesthetic phenomena.
What we think and feel and the intensity of aesthetic engagement, is proportional to the depth of its unconscious content. Its imaginative texture cannot be fixed in meaning. Yet it is capable of moving us psychologically away from the temporal (human) present and towards the universal (divine) or archetypal constant. So, aesthetics is a form of transformation.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition through the ages. Genealogy is the basis for a configuration, re-configuration, and aesthetic appreciation of our life story. Genealogy is a 'mirror' of aesthetic engagement in the materially based image.
Addressing the needs of unconscious life is fundamental to aesthetic
appreciation. Implied inner needs drive the initial intention to physically create our genealogical image and to act this out imaginatively. We raise the ancestors who carry meaning and value to consciousness from the labyrinth of unconscious form production and creative instinct.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros -- felt-experience or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. Eros connects body and soul with vitality and passion born in the blood. Vivid libidinal participation connects our heart to the heart of the universe. It binds the ordinary and nonordinary worlds together by creating symbols of transcendence.
Genealogy becomes a homage to the power of love in our very creation. We heed the ancestors when we receive, listen, and contain. In that sense, genealogy becomes a temenos, or sacred space, the sanctuary of our holy grove -- the magic circle of extended family. The self-realizing motion performs the transformation. Our ancestors are a revelation. We need to reveal, not just know ourselves. Self-realization is self-revelation.
We can relate to the blunt facts of our genesis and stop there as the genealogical 'realists' do, cutting off the fictional, legendary and mythic elements, but we may do so at our own psychological peril. A myth is not a dream; its archaic images and memories constitute a world.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording. The aesthetic approach does not rule out other perspectives on genealogy, which can be pursued as we are moved to do so.
But the archetypal approach probably makes the most 'sense' of the roots of our mythologically-based lines, and permits depth exploration without literalism, concretization, or symptomatic concretization. For example, when Native American cultures say they get their ancestral wisdom, ceremonies, guidance, and direction from the 'womb at the center of the universe,' they refer to the sacred Feminine.
Jung echoes such ancient sentiments: "For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it arises the picture of the world as we know it today." (The Sacrifice; CW 5; Par 643.)
The archetypes are an aesthetic stimulus with their own properties and appeal, among other things. So is our aesthetic response to their symbolism and experience. The mythic is an expression of the larger whole. We often fail to realize that other fascinating possibilities exist.
Heuristic Method
Creative outpouring is the entrance to self-actualization. It is heuristic, preparing us for deeper understanding. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Like archetypes, they help us function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.
We find or discover things by experience and experiment. It stimulates interest in further investigation. As a problem-solving strategy, the heuristic method allows us to discover something for ourselves, to discover answers on our own and learn more about ourselves on our own.
A psychophysical approach is the secret behind the aesthetic experience. The ancestors feed the aesthetic formation of our living form. Aesthetic knowledge enables the psychological phenomena to link the body to the world.
Creativity points the way to the numinous, a high-voltage elemental force. Incubation brings new insights into ourselves and the ancestors. In our initial attempts to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations.
Psychic tensions accumulate and stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression.
Aesthetic Intuition
Genealogy offers direct traditional testimony that archetypes as aesthetic universals lie at the roots of the collective unconscious which Jung insisted was not a mystical idea. Our invisible connections go down deep, and to go deep is to go backward.
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul.
It mean leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Archetypal psychology is a 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our contemporary and traditional family tree with its potentially vital forms and structures.
The Tree grounds us in imaginal space. We learn to "stand our ground" in the deep interiority of the psychological field with new vigor. The serpent in our archetypal tree is the unconscious with its painful, dangerous interventions and frightening effects. Though totally unconscious, it has a wisdom of its own that is foundational to our origins.
The physical and chemical constituents of our bodies are the elemental earth in us. Here our acorn can grow into the oak it was meant to be. The future is affected by what we imagine. The challenge today is to sustain the vivacity of our culture and carry it into the future, maintaining a reciprocal relationship with nature, and connection to the ancestral past.
Consciously practiced, genealogy is a way to get in touch with the ground of being. It forms a great feedback loop between our present and our origins from the middle ground of imagery states that is our birthright. Interacting with one's genealogy becomes a rite of passage with three phases: severance (deciding to participate), threshold (entering uncharted territory), and incorporation, (literally, “to take on the body,” having gained new insights).
Our search is for our origins. Our lines take serpentine twists and turns mirroring the genetics of our DNA. Genealogy dignifies our existence as numinous, not merely derivative or reactive, nor is it prescriptive in any one-approach-fits-all manner. Symbols mirror the nuclear family union of opposites and reconciliation in new birth. Images, like the union of opposites, cannot be willed.
"What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, always has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right… the only thing that helps us here is the symbol….with its paradoxical nature it represents the ‘third thing” (Jung, CW 13, pp. 134)
Recognition of soul images and incorporation into awareness is an ongoing process. In The Red Book, Jung notes, "Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other ...I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words." (Pg. 250.)
Jung cautions, "The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." (The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370)
Jung advised the incorporation of death into one's lived experience. In the Red Book, he says, “The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper like a smooth wave on a sea beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.”
Our ancestors are permanent living residents in our own psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance and embodied meaning. Bringing them back through remembrance is also a recollection -- a re-collection and differentiation. Tacitly welcoming us across the years, they have aesthetic and psychological qualities -- subtle bodies clothed with the presence of our deep memories.
Our thought is constrained and impaired if we think in terms of partial derivatives (time- and space-bound effects) instead of full function. The capacity for objective inner experience remains latent. We gradually develop "an eye to see and an ear to hear." We dialogue with figures of the soul. Their radical otherness, activities, and words affect us as they move with their own intentions.
Aesthetic Genealogy
Genealogy reconnects us with nature and our own nature. It is an aesthetic interaction in which both the Greek chorus of ancestors and ourselves are the medium that makes art of life's remnants. It is a tool we can use to change ourselves by turning into more of ourselves.
The evolutionary function of the aesthetic sense drew us toward conditions that made for survival and reproductive success and repelled us from conditions that impacted longevity and fertility negatively. Existence and the world are eternally joined as an aesthetic phenomena.
What we think and feel and the intensity of aesthetic engagement, is proportional to the depth of its unconscious content. Its imaginative texture cannot be fixed in meaning. Yet it is capable of moving us psychologically away from the temporal (human) present and towards the universal (divine) or archetypal constant. So, aesthetics is a form of transformation.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition through the ages. Genealogy is the basis for a configuration, re-configuration, and aesthetic appreciation of our life story. Genealogy is a 'mirror' of aesthetic engagement in the materially based image.
Addressing the needs of unconscious life is fundamental to aesthetic
appreciation. Implied inner needs drive the initial intention to physically create our genealogical image and to act this out imaginatively. We raise the ancestors who carry meaning and value to consciousness from the labyrinth of unconscious form production and creative instinct.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros -- felt-experience or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. Eros connects body and soul with vitality and passion born in the blood. Vivid libidinal participation connects our heart to the heart of the universe. It binds the ordinary and nonordinary worlds together by creating symbols of transcendence.
Genealogy becomes a homage to the power of love in our very creation. We heed the ancestors when we receive, listen, and contain. In that sense, genealogy becomes a temenos, or sacred space, the sanctuary of our holy grove -- the magic circle of extended family. The self-realizing motion performs the transformation. Our ancestors are a revelation. We need to reveal, not just know ourselves. Self-realization is self-revelation.
We can relate to the blunt facts of our genesis and stop there as the genealogical 'realists' do, cutting off the fictional, legendary and mythic elements, but we may do so at our own psychological peril. A myth is not a dream; its archaic images and memories constitute a world.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording. The aesthetic approach does not rule out other perspectives on genealogy, which can be pursued as we are moved to do so.
But the archetypal approach probably makes the most 'sense' of the roots of our mythologically-based lines, and permits depth exploration without literalism, concretization, or symptomatic concretization. For example, when Native American cultures say they get their ancestral wisdom, ceremonies, guidance, and direction from the 'womb at the center of the universe,' they refer to the sacred Feminine.
Jung echoes such ancient sentiments: "For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it arises the picture of the world as we know it today." (The Sacrifice; CW 5; Par 643.)
The archetypes are an aesthetic stimulus with their own properties and appeal, among other things. So is our aesthetic response to their symbolism and experience. The mythic is an expression of the larger whole. We often fail to realize that other fascinating possibilities exist.
Heuristic Method
Creative outpouring is the entrance to self-actualization. It is heuristic, preparing us for deeper understanding. In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes. Like archetypes, they help us function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.
We find or discover things by experience and experiment. It stimulates interest in further investigation. As a problem-solving strategy, the heuristic method allows us to discover something for ourselves, to discover answers on our own and learn more about ourselves on our own.
A psychophysical approach is the secret behind the aesthetic experience. The ancestors feed the aesthetic formation of our living form. Aesthetic knowledge enables the psychological phenomena to link the body to the world.
Creativity points the way to the numinous, a high-voltage elemental force. Incubation brings new insights into ourselves and the ancestors. In our initial attempts to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations.
Psychic tensions accumulate and stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression.
Aesthetic Intuition
Genealogy offers direct traditional testimony that archetypes as aesthetic universals lie at the roots of the collective unconscious which Jung insisted was not a mystical idea. Our invisible connections go down deep, and to go deep is to go backward.
Our aesthetic response, a psychic sensuality and sensitivity, to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making,' subjective interrelation. Reflection makes consciousness, but only love makes soul.
It mean leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
ANCESTRAL DEVOTIONS
by Iona Miller, (c) 2016
Dead Serious Genealogy
The Ancestors are Integral Parts of the Soul's Symbolism
and Calibrators of Time
That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom... ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
As if we know nature! Or about the psyche! The 2,000,000-year-old man may know something. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
"To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified."
~Carl Jung; Red Book.
The Great House:
Mankind, Migrations & Meaning
We're Born; We Mate; We Die
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
THE HOUSE OF LIFE
When Air Becomes Breath
Breathing Life Into Your Ancestors
The ancient Egyptian mystery school, the Per Ankh is the inspiration for a hermeneutic and healing approach to genealogy. Every hermeneutical perspective constructs and reconstructs more or less coherent and meaningful pictures of the past, based on the particular spiritual needs and expectations of their real or imagined audiences. It is a soulful approach to psyche and our forebears and the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, honoring soul and body.
The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air, from our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life. Psyche is that divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning. Wisdom is not as concerned with a particular kind of thought, as a wisdom about thinking, and an analysis of what it means to think, and an inquiry into the nature of the ultimate reference of thought.
Our family tree is rooted in narrative and history which traces back to ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Biblical traditions, and spans continents and conflicts. We study the psychological and metaphysical meanings of the mythologies that anchor our longest lines of lineage. It includes mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns that give us image and form.
The Transgenerational Effect
Our psychological approach is Transgenerational Integration.
Trans- is a prefix meaning: across, beyond, through, on the other side of, to go beyond, while state is a condition or way of being that exists at a particular time. It functions as a feedback loop acting across multiple generations, including transgenerational conflict. Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring. Some transgenerational consequences are epigenetic.
The hallmark of the transgenerational models of family therapy is their emphasis on the powerful influences that past generations have on the present. Unresolved conflicts, beliefs, and roles in an individual impact an individual's relationships and interactions in his/her family of origin. They unconsciously continue to influence our current relationships and level of functioning. Healing across lifetimes is possible without any metaphysical model or belief in past lives or reincarnation, but within the genealogical model of direct descent and multigenerational influence.
So, the trans- state is, among other things, a coincidentia oppositorum. An alchemical wedding defines the fixed place, where boundaries are actively transgressed. In many ways, this very undertaking is where the role of the magician, mystic, artist, and healer collide. Down at the crossroads, where possibilities are collapsed into actualities, by the wondrous act of a conscious decision lies the place of suffering and surrender -- of realization and redemption.
We seek, not only ancestors, but signs, symbols, and symbolic meaning -- our origin in the foundation of being -- with an eye to restoring sacred harmony and transformative connection to Cosmos, an indissoluble unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light. Systems of archetypal symbolism come from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and related cosmogonical theories.
Many of these ideas had their roots in Egyptian philosophy. Philosophy is a rite of rebirth, the very essence of which is participation in divine reality and, therefore, its activities are primarily those of inner vision rather than mere logic. The Tree of Life is a logically coherent meta-structure of metaphysical knowledge -- its own body of wisdom. And it lives within us.
Per Ankh
Ankh is the Egyptian term meaning “life.”The hieroglyph ankh, originally perhaps representing a knot or a bow, is a symbol for divine life, for the “breath of life,” provided by Shu and other gods, and for regenerating the power of water.
Ankh also designates a floral bouquet (offered to the gods) and a mirror, itself an important metaphysical symbol., also seen in the sistrum and later the crux ansata.
Per ankh means the House of Life -- a temple scriptorium and advanced school for esoteric training whose priests maintained an oral tradition of initiation and also produced writings in different branches of knowledge. This included theology, mathematics, ritual expertise, hieratic liturgy, hermeneutics, genealogy, astrology, sacred geography, mineralogy, medicine, mythography, architecture, the science of theurgic talismans and image-making.
The staff of every per ankh were lector-priests (heri heb) whose role was associated with sacred books and the heka-power, as well as with preservation of maat, the cosmic order, and maintaining the theurgic tradition of mystical ascent and assimilation to the gods.
Only through esoteric knowledge and initiation into the invisible realm, that is, through symbolic death and rebirth, accomplished in the House of Life, was one able to reveal one sakh-identity and be united with immortal divine principles. In the diagram of the per ankh (Pap. Salt 825) it is depicted as a symbolic mandala with Osiris at the center.
Isis and Nepthys occupy the corners at the side of his feet, Horus and Thoth are at the corners at the side of the head, Geb represents the ground, Nut–the sky. The priests of the House of Life follow “the secret way of Thoth.” One of the chief lector-priests (heri tep) said regarding the formula imbued with the heka-power: “Do not reveal it to the common man–it is a mystery of the House of Life.” (Pap. Leiden344r)
The House of Life was the center of cultural endeavor to preserve and ensure progress of cosmic, political, and social life. A holy place and scriptorium, The House of Life contained secret, magical writings the Egyptians believed had the power to renew and sustain life and further the rebirth of Osiris at his annual festival.
The significance of the House of Life and the rituals performed there was universal. Like the temples it stood for the whole creation, just as the reborn Osiris symbolized eternal life in general. According to tradition, time and again people went to the House of Life to consult ancient writings when they needed answers to problems of their day.
In ancient Egyptian writings and architecture, the House of Life was an institution aligned with kingship, preserving and creating knowledge in written and pictorial form. The overseer of the private rooms of the king, bore the title of 'overseer of writing in the House of Life, a man to whom all sacred matters are revealed', and 'keeper of secrets of the House of Life.'
The ancient Egyptian civilization was strongly connected with nature and the Universe that surrounded them. The school of Abydos House of Life, attracted many healers in the course of time and was an important base of knowledge about healing and medicines. They knew mind and body were strongly connected. Therefore they created various ways to maintain a sound physical body. They analyzed the plants in their neighborhood and built various schools.
The Per Ankh, House of Life, is a solar temple of sacred science (mystery school) and an institution of learning, healing and training. The House of Life, (Per Ankh), is an organization of Egyptian Magicians, founded by the God of Learning, Thoth.
The Per-Ankh texts were transcribed and kept by scribes, including the “books of the dead”. The House of Life was also a restricted access center of esoteric training where students may have undertaken a course of spiritual development, resulting in initiations into “various degrees of symbolic death and rebirth."
https://books.google.com/books?id=WRfHSnGlX7QC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=per+ankh+house+of+life&source=bl&ots=kjNlwISk85&sig=frZYvP2n-r_h2Scl3GlywnqjXBc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiLr_Ch_KLLAhXH6CYKHWVKATg4FBDoAQgzMAU#v=onepage&q=per%20ankh%20house%20of%20life&f=false
I REVERENCE YOU
LABYRINTHINE LINES
THE QUICK & THE DEAD
The Last Branch Supports Me
Lost Histories from the Book of Life
Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree. That is individuation.
--Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
"Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind"
The family is a symbol, as well as a history, and social category. Primeval kinship and bonding gave birth to human society.
Because of the way genetics and family trees work, every single human alive on the planet today can trace their family lines back to one common ancestor, one who lived from 8,000-2,000 years ago. As observed in a 2004 paper on the Most Recent Common Ancestor:
“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
LAND OF THE DEAD
ANCIENT LIVES & LIVING LINES
Alone, Yet Not Alone
Living With the Time You Have Given Me
'Chronesthesia'
"The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
(C. G. Jung, Hans Schmid-Guisan, The Question of Psychological Types)
Mental Time Travel
In nature, we look up and see the past, stars and galaxies millions of years old; then we look down and see the past in the earth, in the bones of dinosaurs and the dust of ancestors, and fossils. Time is the raw material of creation.
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale.
It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life -- lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Self-Referential Memory
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts.
Semiotics & Symptomatics
Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory, including memory, physiological (unconscious) memories (spinal cord and ganglia) and embedded tissue memories, unconscious motivation, unconscious conceptualization, and aesthetic unconscious (art, myth, and dream).
Jung said, "The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through." And that hole or portal is our genealogy -- our family tree, a site of potential transformation.
We are each the sentinel who guards and keeps watch on our end of the lines that are anchored by the genealogies of gods and goddesses which have passed into the 'collective unconscious.' First and foremost our genealogical quest is informed by multidimensional, autonomous psyche.
Mute Signs & Voiceless Speech
We should be confidantes of our own mysteries and ancestors. We must cross our own Acheron, or river of woe and pain to reach that psychological underworld. We plunge from raw life into the encounter with the powers of darkness. We follow our chthonic serpentine lines back through primal generativity and fertility.
Jung claims, "The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Our ancestors guide us on our journey, handing us along, one by one to their forebears. We ritualize the science and art of parting. We step into the mythological plot through the world of the afterlife immersed in our hordes of ancestors, without being fictionalized ourselves.
We retrieve the treasure, 'hard to attain,' whose presence we suspected in the dark prima materia -- self-knowledge. The treasure is variously symbolized in myth and fairy tale as a ring or golden egg, white feather, coat of many colors, fountain of youth, elixir of Life. We gain experiential knowledge of all known realms by
confronting, or identifying with subterrestrial, terrestrial and cosmic energies.
Jung suggested that the assimilation of the objective and subjective collective unconscious is achieved by realizing both the outer and inner meaning: 1. concrete actions and 2. subjective thinking and feeling as purely inner experience, or experience via the subject (inwardly lived). "Undeveloped, therefore archaic, symbolic, ambiguous, phenomenal, irrational, actus purus naturae, can only imperfectly be formulated and grasped intellectually, projected."
The symbolic unconscious content is "not exclusively valid either (1) for the outer or (2) for the inner realm, but for both together, that is, for their operating together." "The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
Paraphrasing Jung, genealogy helps us "to come to those hidden and unopenable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Page 9)
Autonoetic Consciousness
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. While Jung's approach was largely scientific, he also spoke of “living” knowledge as opposed to “scientific” knowledge.
Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
We all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. The transcendental future time perspective affects philosophical problems of personality, the process of self-knowledge, the formation of value orientations and life course of constructing identity.
Inroads in Mental Time;
Feeling & Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief in some future Utopia.
The latest dream of immortality is paradoxically couched under Transhumanism, an overcoming of limited organic nature with technology and designer bodies. The outer universe becomes subjective, from the outer reality the person emerges in what the scientists call reality. The outer universe become the subjective controllable reality.
People often have firm ideas related to a transcendental future but notions of 'new time after death' [or its absence] remain controversial, being rooted in faith. It is an aspect of worldview with behavioral imperatives, prohibitions, values, and consequences. The transcendental future encompasses different events that include divine judgment, reunion with loved ones, eternal life, achieving oneness with nature or cosmos.
Transcendence is existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level. It encompasses the time from the imaginal death of the physical body to infinity. It may include goals, such as reunion with deceased loved ones, reincarnation, eternal life, avoidance of damnation, and elimination of poverty, suffering, pain, and shame. It signifies belief in something larger than life, including immanent or transcendent beings beyond the self.
Out of Time
Transcendental future is a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Transcendental Future Time is one of the dimensions of subjective time and is related to individual beliefs about the time period after physical death. It partitions the psychological future into pre- and post-death time frames, transcending life and living.
An `extraordinary' time perspective, one that partitions the future into pre- and post-death time frames. The `transcendental-future' extends from the point of imagined death of the physical body to infinity, yet may influence present behavior.
Related to numerous psychological variables, the transcendental-future is a component of, but not synonymous with, many religious beliefs. From the perspective of the transcendental-future, behaviors often seen as irrational, such as suicide, extreme heroism, and excessive tithing, are transformed into rational behaviors expected to lead to fulfillment of transcendental-future goals.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
Making Your Time Matter
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions which are are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. The left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
‘Supernatural’ is a word that conjures spine-tingling feelings of mystical awe, fear, and joy. Does it exist as a concept, or as a phenomenon, however, among all peoples? What does it mean as a cultural construction and as a response to reality? What is its relationship to religion and spirituality, to experiences of ghosts and ideas about gods? What part of the ineffable world that informs cosmologies is captured by the term ‘supernatural’, and what is distorted or left out when we use it? Why is it such a contentious term in anthropology, vigorously condemned by some, championed by others, and blithely used by the rest?
Cupid & Psyche, Van Dyke
A LONG WAY HOME
NEXT OF KIN
Last Twig On the Branch
The 'Spirit' or Ruach of the Tree of Life which corresponds to the Intellect and Yetzirah (the Formative World) also corresponds with the Psyche. The Formative World) also corresponds with the Psyche. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines of 'Psyche' as soul, mind, and "The specialized cognitive, conative, and affective aspects of a psychosomatic unity : mind; specifically : the totality of the id, ego, and superego including both conscious and unconscious components."
Death also is in Paradise
Therefore, the Ruach/Breath of life (vital breath) and the Psyche are essentially one and the same. In psychology, the psyche is the totality of the mind (conscious and unconscious) and states stemming from the six types of senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind; the breath of life; the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing; life, a living being: ψυχή ζῶσα, a living soul, the seat of the feelings, desires, affections, aversions. a moral being designed for everlasting life; an essence which differs from the body and is not dissolved by death.
ψυχή (Psyche) is Psyxḗ (from psyxō, "to breathe, blow" which is the root of the English words "psyche," "psychology") – soul (psyche); a person's distinct identity (unique personhood), i.e. individual personality. And that identity, that psyche comes to us through manifestation of our essence in our family tree.
Genealogy allows us to engrave our lines in history. As we journey up through our lines of descent we are always asking Who, Where, and When -- the questions that define the next of kin in our search pattern as we flesh out our family tree as its genealogical midwives.
Who from the family tree am I looking for at the moment?
The particular form the genealogical tree takes depends on who is identified as genealogical father and who is identified as genealogical mother to whom.
That identification is the basis upon which a conceptual system expressed in terms of symbols and relationships among symbols. When invaders become ancestors it reconfigures ethnicities, embodying systematic changes.
"The tree has a cosmic significance—it is the worldtree, the world-pillar, the world-axis.
Only think of Yggdrasill, the world-ash of Nordic mythology, a majestic, evergreen tree growing at the center of the world.
The tree, particularly its crown, is the abode of the gods. the world-tree.
But, as the alchemical symbolism clearly shows, it is also a transformation symbol, a symbol of the process of self-realization.
According to certain alchemical sources, the adept climbs the tree—a very ancient shamanistic motif.
The shaman, in an ecstasy, climbs the magical tree in order to reach the upper world where he will find his true self.
By climbing the magical tree, which is at the same time a tree of knowledge, he gains possession of his spiritual personality.
To the eye of the psychologist, the shamanistic and alchemical symbolism is a projected representation of the process of individuation.
(Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 353-358.)
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, according to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows. "
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life . This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy .
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus.
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge.
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology, that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe, the face of everything."
Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
The scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino made his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi syntonic with the Christian vision. He understood the sacred junction between the upper and the lower world. Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul, and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center, and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual.
For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension.
In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae, universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi."
Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe, understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies, but also as a node of all things, in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula, " i.e. union, the world itself with the divine. (La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ).
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan-enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten, and severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions. Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit . The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified.
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious.
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious. James Hillman (1926 - 2011) re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche Member of the mind , not as merely rational , but as Anima (original meaning of the word Psyche) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as they represented the Anima Mundi.
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and, above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance. We share the same Unus Mundus.
Things ' transparent '
who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth.
The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol. So every finite thing can become a symbol, ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it, as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its own image and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art means the art. The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art."
The soul of the world, life and death.
In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes. - Vincenzo Guzzo.
STAY WITH THE LIVING
We Are Alive; It's All We Know
Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries,
which themselves are one. --C.G. Jung
Over the course of the millennia, all these ancestors in your tree, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time--to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind? History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all. --Laurence Overmire
“The neurosis is as a rule a pathological, one-sided development of the personality, the imperceptible beginnings of which can be traced back almost indefinitely into the earliest years of childhood. Only a very arbitrary judgment can say where the neurosis actually begins. If we were to relegate the determining cause as far back as the patient’s prenatal life, thus involving the physical and psychic disposition of the parents at the time of conception and pregnancy—a view that seems not at all improbable in certain cases—such an attitude would be more justifiable than the arbitrary selection of a definite point of neurotic origin in the individual life of the patient” (Jung, CW 16, 257-258).
"It isn’t primarily a practice of thinking of one’s last hour, or of death as a physical phenomenon; it is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive."
—Brother David Steindl-Rast Parabola, 1977.
Assemblage theory
"Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.
What is appealing to me about this way of talking about the social world is that it takes us away from the presuppositions we often bring about the social world as consisting of a range of discrete social objects or things. According to this static way of thinking, the state is a thing composed of other things; likewise Islam is an extended social thing; likewise Chicago; and so on. The assemblage approach suggests a different set of metaphors for the social world: mosaic, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity, transitory configuration. And this seems like a more realistic way of characterizing large extended social formation like states or regulatory agencies.
The downside of this way of talking and thinking about the social world is precisely the indefiniteness and indeterminacy it suggests for the composition relation. This poses a very hard problem for explanation. How are we to explain the properties and behavior of the composite entity if there is so much contingency in its parts and the ways in which they interact? The strategy of aggregative explanation seems to be a non-starter, since it is stipulated that composition is not a strongly rule-governed process. But so do the comparative and generalizing strategies. If the composites are indeed sui generis and unique configurations we can't generalize across instances and can't usefully compare them."
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.nl/…/assemblage-theory…
INVISIBLE LOYALTIES
Legacies of invisible loyalties and obligations from the past that are passed on through generations, including unconscious limitations. The invisible fibers of loyalty consist of consanguinity, maintenance of biological life and family lineage on the one hand and earned merit among members on the other. (1973, p. 52) Loyalty is a mark of belonging to a group and therefore manifests itself both as a group characteristic and as an individual attitude. Loyalty, as an individual attitude, goes beyond mere identification with the group.
To be a loyal member of the group implies internalizing the spirit of its expectations and complying with its internalized injunctions. Failure to live up to the demands of loyalty leads to feelings of existential guilt which constitute a system of secondary regulative forces which play a part in maintaining the homeostasis of the family system. The development of loyalty is determined by the history of the family group, the type of justice in force within it and its myths. The nature of each of the group members’ obligations depends on his/her emotional disposition and his/ her position in respect of the family ledger , which recapitulates what each member of the family owes.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
When We Are No More
Mysteries are primal 'secrets' regarding all human evolution. We can mine our ancestral memories. But those secrets are in the experiential aspects of the process. It is not the conceptual part that is secret, but the lived reality unique to each individual -- the realization of self and spirit. They are the signposts along the primal path of alchemy leading to Gnosis. The first masters on Earth were all Dragons and Serpents. They bestowed wisdom and the means of experiencing Gnosis. Unbound consciousness is the basis of metaphysics.
Physics and metaphysics are not so separate as some philosophers and physicists indicate. In fact they are in a sense symbiotic. Physics cannot exist without metaphysical postulates upon which it can rest its own theories, while metaphysics can, in turn, be directly influenced by physical experiments. The meaning of this is that there is nothing unscientific about spirituality and its arts. Ultimately it is fully empirical. The only issue is perception. It is only in perception that materiality "appears" to separated from the divine or spiritual oncology. This also means that there is no mysterious "magic" about the higher realm of spirituality.
The search for truths in metaphysics should be supplemented by progress and advances that occur in physics, while physics should regard itself as being able to provide not final truths about reality, but truths that are dependent upon a more general metaphysical scheme. If metaphysics rejects physics as a valid partner in the search for truth, then its explanations can be valid to those who need final and ultimate answers, but the goal of metaphysics should not be to pose as any arbiter, but as the one that provides the best final and ultimate answers. Where do explanations cease?
Hermes says, “The upper open spirit is hidden in the earth. Work the open upper spirit with the lower secret one,
so will the living one awaken the dead,
and be to it a well of life and work great wonders.”
IN A SIMILAR VEIN
Because You're Mine, I "Walk the Lines"
But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
--Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556, Para 906.
"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished." -- Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.” --Erich Fromm
Because You're Mine, I Walk the Lineage
Genealogy uses historical, phenomenological, and psychological methods. By "walking the lines" backward in each of the tangled branches of our Family Tree, we can engage layers of multidimensional imagery.
Our family tree emerges from each couple and their own respective networked lines of ancestors and their interpersonal relational interaction. Metaphorically, we walk in their footsteps in a 'magical' circumabulation of our ancestral field. The principle involves making a clear and conscious connection with the ancestors and the idea of oneness. 'Walking the Way' is a form of deep veneration.
Ensouled Body
Genealogy clears a walkway through the ancestral landscape. It is a comparative phenomenology of the imagination with an openness to Being. This is a hermeneutic phenomenology (description and interpretation of meaning), an empirical, transcendental, or psychological phenomenology of lived experiences and themes. Here, “transcendental” implies everything is perceived freshly, as if for the first time, without assumptions.
We immerse ourselves in the cosmic wisdom of matter, in the immanence of indeterminate, enigmatic, mysterious phenomena and its own language -- open, visionary, poetic, aesthetic, erotic, sensuous, spiritual, transformative, vocational. We can't decide if it's the right or only path until we travel along it but it informs our genealogical search at every point. One key to achieving that understand is establishing context.
Hermeneutics refers to the liminal nature of Hermes as an interpreter and soul guide (psychopomp) who connects heaven and earth, the realm of the living and the dead. He guides the soul into dreams and the dead to the underworld. The alchemists' defined the prima materia as the "land of the dead."
Jung describes Hermes as, "the arch-authority of Greek alchemy. He is "Hermes Trismegistos" (thrice-greatest Hermes), and is identical with the Egyptian Thoth, the god of learning. Hermes was a leader of souls, a god of revelation and understanding, connected with the human mind, and also the source of dreams.
He was actually the god of the unconscious, and the being who determined the human intellect." (ETH, Alchemy, Lecture XI 11th July, 1941, 224-231)
Jung said he wasn't well-versed in philosophy, but "had to make use of philosophical concepts to formulate my findings." Phenomenology brings to light what would otherwise remain hidden and helps us interpret what it means to exist in the world. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when its method is taken to be interpretive, rather than purely descriptive as in transcendental phenomenology.
Hermeneutic phenomenology enables access to subconscious phenomena and provides a means of interpreting our experiences of personal learning journeys. We acknowledge the complexity of a lived experience and subjective validation of it as an integration of our thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and experiences.
Meaning is encoded in cultural symbolism deposited and mediated through myth, religion, art, and language. In a prolonged engagement with a topic, such as genealogy, language itself is an appearance of being -- a means of being manifest and 'seeing' meaning.
With deep questioning of the phenomena, we become attentive to how things appear and speak for themselves, including the ancestors, connecting with the visceral world of attunement, resonance, and sensation. Sympathetic resonance includes physical, emotional, aesthetic, and intuitive responses, not just the verification of cognition.
The moment of vision embodies authentic temporality, illuminating the full meaning of the present in terms of our fate, our mortal future, with a simultaneous retrieval of our past heritage. Language and storytelling have a narrative function that ultimately return to the question of the meaning of being, the self and self-identity.
"...[T]here is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.)
Evocations of remembrance embody the essential nature of the sensuous radiance of absence. The far greater and darker regions of the unknown give way to becoming, transforming emotional experience. The archetype is not “in” a person but “between” them, within the imaginal space that opens, for example, in evocative moments between ourselves and our ancestors with a sense of presence and place.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. (Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 559-560.)
Condensing Meaning
A narrative reports the life of a single individual, while a phenomenology describes the collective meaning of lived experiences, of a concept, or a phenomenon. Life themes are divided into subthemes describing different dimensions of the process of understanding connected by the guiding theme “narrative.”
Our approach is phenomenal or qualitative rather than analytic. When phenomenology informs narrative analysis, the image is allowed to speak through form, stories and intuition. There is no predetermined framework of meaning. The comparative approach usefully challenges taken-for-granted understandings. Rooted in philosophy, it studies conscious awareness of the world as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.
Emotion As Epiphany
Phenomenology is an experiential approach to subjective experience. "Experience" (being or existence) is a complex concept -- an "in-relation-to" phenomenon. We can approach our ancestors with phenomenology, and also reflexively consider what we bring to the process from our own perspective and worldview.
As in the case of dreams we must stick as closely to the image as given as possible. Image is the primary phenomenon of psychic life, mytho-poetic imagination, and the prima materia of the phenomenology of the soul.
The phenomenal field focuses on perceptions, feelings, and "how one feels right now." The intergenerational field is a phenomenal field. Hillman referred to soul's self-expression as, “what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but ...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” (We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62)
He sees death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “loss of soul, not loss of life, should be [the analyst’s] main dread.” Hillman advocates the development of a conscious philosophy of death. He argues that death and life are not psychological opposites and that “...any act which holds off death prevents life” (Suicide and the Soul, p. 61).
"We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back." (Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.)
With the phenomenal approach, Mircea Eliade identified “the sacred” as a kind of independent variable—unchanging and timeless even though manifest in completely different times and cultures. “Pure” phenomenology describes the intentional objects of consciousness.
Human experiences are phenomena -- what they experienced and how they experienced it, in holistic and embedded or qualitative perspectives. Hermeneutics renders the object accessible to interpretation, opening new possibilities. Naturally, we have to take account of our own bias, conceptions, and assumed truths into the interpretative activity involved.
We must distinguished interpretation from explanation and causes, focusing on a description of reasons. There is no firm boundary between the dimensions of description and interpretation. Deeper understanding demands more complexity-sensitive ways of thinking and a method that allows interpretation, exploration of dynamics and processes, and involvement of the context.
Presence & Absence
We synthesize the lived-experience from comparative transformations. General psychological structure is deduced from the psychological constituents of the experience. Constituents are context dependent and are necessarily part of the whole structure.
The purpose of this procedure is grounded in the phenomenological concept of parts and wholes. The meaning units are transformed using imaginative variation within the phenomenological attitude and psychological perspective to elucidate their essential psychological meanings.
The eidetic nature of the data or mental image, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory, is brought forth through the imaginative variation. We can create and explore eidetic images as a way of coming to terms with transgenerational and traumatic life events.
The phenomenological concept of presences and absences is an important one to use with imaginative variation. Explicit data can reveal implicit meanings [subtext] without them being concretely expressed. During the transformations, we can “see” the explicit meanings, and also uncover the implicit meanings.
Imaginative variation gives us a “sense of the whole.” In this way, the descriptive phenomenological approach is more comprehensive than mere empirical approaches in the natural attitude. This is justified through understanding that what is “present” often implies or indicates an “absent” quality.
In the phenomenological approach, each transformation describes what the meaning unit expresses psychologically without any interpretation or assumptions about its “truth.” The phenomenological approach represents different approaches, from focus on rich description to those more informed by interpretation.
We describe how it was experienced and understood from the subject's point of view without explanation of “why” it was experienced in the way it was. The phenomenological attitude of the researcher in the psychological analysis of the data is what makes the results both phenomenological and psychological.
We can reduce the information to significant statements or quotes and combine the statements into themes. Then we develop a textural description of the experiences of the persons (what participants experienced), a structural description of their experiences (how they experienced it in terms of the conditions, situations, or context), and a combination of the textural and structural descriptions to convey an overall essence of the experience.
We can describe what all participants have in common as they experience a phenomenon (e.g., grief is universally experienced). The basic purpose of phenomenology is to reduce individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of the universal essence, to “grasp of the very nature of the thing.”
Contextualization
There is only one method: the comparative method. There are five core approaches to qualitative research: narrative study, a phenomenology, a grounded theory, an ethnography, and a case study. At the fundamental level, the five differ in what they are trying to accomplish with their foci or the primary objectives of the studies.
Exploring a life is different from generating a theory or describing the behavior of a cultural group. Narrative is both a method and phenomenon of study. Individuals are enabled and constrained by social resources, socially situated in interactive performances, and how narrators develop interpretations of the multileveled context of a life. A first-person psychological perspective is sought so that an empathetic position can be adopted.
In genealogy we are gathering data through the collection of their stories (biographical study), reporting individual experiences, and chronologically ordering (or using life course stages) the timeline and meaning of those experiences. Restoring them means re-storying them, reframing them with sensitive descriptions and imaginative variation.
We need to collect extensive information about each ancestor, and to have a clear understanding of the context of the individual’s life. It takes a keen eye to identify in the source material gathered the particular stories that capture the individual’s experiences. Narrative study tells the story of individuals unfolding in a chronology of their experiences, set within their personal, social, and historical context, and includes the important themes in those lived experiences.
Narrative inquiry concerns stories lived and told. A phenomenological perspective of the mind acknowledges consciousness as the most fundamental life-quality that coexists with the body. A person is regarded as an embodied consciousness. People know one another’s consciousness through their physical bodies. This means that we know our own consciousness by reflection but cannot know the consciousness of the other except through the body.
Three-dimensional narrative inquiry space includes the personal and social (the interaction); the past, present, and future (continuity); and the place (situation). This story line may include information about the setting or context of the participants’ experiences. Beyond the chronology, we might detail themes that arise from the story to provide a more detailed discussion of the meaning of the story.
Tracing the Path
'Walking the lines' is a ritual situated in the imaginal landscape suggested by our genealogical ascent which leads into our collective ancestral past. Along the path, or circuits of ancestral nodes, the secret meaning of life is discovered. Our ancient path of pilgrimage is rich with meaning and is a powerful tool for seeking soul and spirit in a movement toward transcendence. Perhaps facing our mortality inspires us to live more fully.
The main quest in the oldest myths is for immortality. We search for immortality. We cannot know anything final about that and all the possible means of 'living', but many strive for germline immortality, an ersatz-immortality in their offspring. The immortality of the soul is concerned with personal identity, not just in conscious and unconscious states, but in mutable conditions and alternating states of being.
Embodied & Disembodied Soul
In the Phaedo, Plato describes an immortal soul. Thus, while the natural body and the experiential mind are merely phenomenal clothing of the ontological soul, the latter is immortal as a living entity. Aristotle distinguishes between ontological and experiential soul.
As Danish physicist Niels Bohr quipped, "A Great Truth is a Truth the opposite of which is also a Great Truth." In the paradoxical nature of reality, immortality remains largely a concept and source of ontological argument. For example, Buddhism does not conceive of the soul as ultimately real.
Perhaps the latest version of the soul describes a field ontology and a functional dualism (mind/matter). Our form emerges from a primordial field of consciousness/energy (groundstate) in which we remain embedded, and to which we return.
Ancestral Field
This zero-point field has many names. That field is the energetic “void”, or “vacuum”, the space of the “ether”, the subtle but ultra-powerful energy potential. The Heart Sutra tells us that, "Form is not other than Void, Void is not other than Form." This implies that our human form is not other than void, and biophysics shows this to be true. This notion differs from survival of personal identity (self-movement) or soul, but is a conservation of primordial information.
Jung contends the archetype of rebirth and resurrection is a metaphorical experiences of [ego] death as a metaphorical precursor to five forms of rebirth:
1. Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls.
2. Reincarnation, human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory; re-birth in a human body.
3. Resurrection means a reestablishment of human existence in an incorruptible carnal or subtle body after death.
4. Rebirth within the span of individual life. Renovation, renewal or total rebirth of the essential nature (transmutation).
5. Indirect rebirth via participation in death-rebirth, the rite of transformation. (Jung, CW 9I, para 200- 205)
Experiential psychology is not pure ontology, and relies mostly on the rebirth experience and the truth and beauty of intuition for transformation. We have to be content with its psychic reality. Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams. There is a contrast between phenomenal and noumenal, experiential and eternal, relative and absolute, biological and ontological.
Psychologically, immortality is the attempt to grant distinct ontological status to the symbolic self, to deny the finality of organic death. In other words, it is a denial of death. Soul beliefs, discreetly or indiscreetly, transform the ontology of creativity into an immortality ideology.
James Hillman shifted Jung's conversation from individuation to "soul-making," a way of seeing and reflection that makes meaning possible. "By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself." He describes five things about the nature of soul as the imaginative possibilities of nature: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi; Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
Hillman's anima mundi is at home in the 'real' world -- the imaginal realm where real world spirit regains its zest and vision, addressing our sufferings after transformation. In the everyday, the best of the "unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative highly intentional and necessary" archetypal world of both the "noumenal" and the "phenomenal" manifests itself in the everyday tribal and familial context. Family history is transformed into myth.
Facts & Artifacts
In terms of ontological wholeness, immortality of one's being expressed in the continuance of one's proper name or even dynasty falls short of the unconscious belief in life after death. Immortality is an organic philosophical desire for life that should always be lived. It is a religious desire for another life, affirming an act of faith in a transcendent existence, or renewal without end of what is here in this world. This is the difference between cosmic pantheism and theistic (theosophic or transcendental) ontology.
Von Franz notes, "The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. …The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death." (von Franz (1987), ix.)
Like the shamans of old who ascended and descended the archetypal World Tree, genealogists can "walk the tree" -- "The Big Tree" or the "World Family Tree" -- from one end to the other, or "up" toward the past and then back "down" to the present on another line. Timelines help us arrange the numerous names and events that take place simultaneously and sequentially.
Some family trees will look like stumpy, dead sticks with a few twigs, while others will shared vast underground connections and vigorous thick growth, like as a yew tree. Within the Family Tree and World Tree, people are either connected by "bloodlines" or through marriage. Bloodlines can include adoptions and illegitimacy, either acknowledged or unacknowledged. Ancestors are only those from whom you directly descend, though cousin lines may share blood.
Spirit People
Family is the midwife of the soul. Jung reminds us that the source of unifying images which animated our ancestors and linked them to Mystery are generated by the symbol-making function we all possess. The same mysterious dream place gives birth to those mediating images which arise when we encounter the mysterious Other, the animated presence in our lives.
The family is the primordial psychophysical initiatory vessel or vehicle of our destiny -- the archetypal family and biological self. Family births us, develops us, procreates us, and buries us. Regardless of the pain and travail it may create for us, family is the grail within which the sacred nectar of our physical and psychic DNA is carried from the lips and organs of one generation to the next.
Long lines, about 13 generations back lead into medieval times. "Walking the path" means you MUST visit every profile in both paths, no shortcuts. We find ourselves walking the lines and paths around and up to legendary figures, and further back, purely mythic characters -- liminal entities.
Three modalities -- resonance, depth and numinosity -- describe the presence of that autonomous Other which we call soul and an experiential psychic connection to the Other, and a sense of self grounded in a transcendent order. Those images are conduits into the natural world, with its specific tribal mythos, and assist in later moving the community members into a world beyond mortality.
Genealogy is a sort of psychic archaeology where we dig up the dead with their own information and 'advice' -- hidden historical crumbs and clues, synchronicities, and intuitions. Genealogy reveals complex behaviors of distributed systems. Naturally they lead backwards to origins vastly different from the kinds of practices present in different time frames.
Genealogy is an archaeology of the individual and a therapeutic art -- optimally coordinated interpersonal synchronicity and optimized subsequent interactions. Similar personality traits align in rapport and return with greater simultaneous coordination. The interaction of pairs displays complementary simultaneous coordination. Coherent emotional charge states converge under effective conditions after an interval of time.
Archaeology of Knowledge
The archaeological level is what made an event or a situation possible. Archaeology and genealogy alternate and support each other. Archaeology is structuralist. It tries to take an objective neutral position and it avoids causal theories of change.
Foucault calls it, "the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today." (Genealogy and Social Criticism, p.42)
The genealogical side of analysis tries to grasp the power of constituting a domain of objects. Genealogy uncovers the creation of tangible objects. A society institutes the role of medicine man and gives him special privileges. Then we establish and institutionalize this practice, the psychosocial role of a "medicine man."
Treading the Path
Walking a path is symbolically a spiritual practice, a pilgrimage, like walking or tracing a labyrinth -- a contemplative spiritual exercise of circumnavigating a sacred path. We turn back to our center, to our origin, by a devotional path. A walk through the World Tree or a walk in the labyrinth is a cosmic journey through the heavens.
There is no right or wrong way; we have to enter and follow a path with presence. Our attitudes, focus, experience, consolation, and reflection may shift each time, or as we follow path. Traversing the labyrinth brings us into wholeness with all parts of our being. When we walk the labyrinth it recreates a very ancient expression of thanks and remembrance of the divine in all things. So does the family tree, expressing our completeness outwardly.
Like labyrinth, your genealogy has one way in and one way out -- you. Such an initiation, shifting perspectives, awakens the knowledge encoded within. Walking the labyrinth and walking our lines share a spirit. The circuits of the labyrinth pattern and genealogy share the same meaning -- a maze of ancestors, and a way to meander through them -- spiritual umbilical cords.
We walk a labyrinth by stepping into the entrance and putting one foot in front of the other. After traveling through all the paths and windings, the walker comes into the center - the six - petal rosette - the rose line, a symbol of the Holy Grail. Like walking the labyrinth, genealogy can be an exercise in self-healing. Both are journeys to the center and back out again to the ordinary world.
Seeking the Ancestors
Our genealogy is a sensorium of multisensory informational content. Relationship paths connect you to closest blood relationships via a given ancestor through several families, via either parent, male or female, or combinations thereof. There can be many relationship paths to the same ancestors.
Intergenerational Encounter
Collapsing the space between us, each ancestor, or avatar of our descent, touches us with an imaginal poem that is a product of their embedding in our ancestral history - layer after emerging layer of our augmented reality. They begin to talk to us in many ways: ambiance, serendipity, synchronicity, personal, contextual, instructively and artistically.
The image of the World Tree invites us to explore the vertical or depth dimension, while Family is the most prominent landmark on the horizontal plane of relational otherness. Family mediates this world and its essential, phenomenal reality and can enhance or dampen, devastatingly, our interaction with this dimension of psyche. The family seeds imagination.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.
He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. --Carl Jung, MDR, Page 325
by Iona Miller, (c) 2016
Dead Serious Genealogy
The Ancestors are Integral Parts of the Soul's Symbolism
and Calibrators of Time
That higher and "complete" man is begotten by the "unknown" father and born from Wisdom... ~Carl Jung; Answer to Job, R. Hull, trans. (1984), pp. 157-158
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
As if we know nature! Or about the psyche! The 2,000,000-year-old man may know something. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
"To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. Therefore say that you are reluctant to live yourself The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt, and shatters the sanctified."
~Carl Jung; Red Book.
The Great House:
Mankind, Migrations & Meaning
We're Born; We Mate; We Die
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
THE HOUSE OF LIFE
When Air Becomes Breath
Breathing Life Into Your Ancestors
The ancient Egyptian mystery school, the Per Ankh is the inspiration for a hermeneutic and healing approach to genealogy. Every hermeneutical perspective constructs and reconstructs more or less coherent and meaningful pictures of the past, based on the particular spiritual needs and expectations of their real or imagined audiences. It is a soulful approach to psyche and our forebears and the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, honoring soul and body.
The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air, from our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life. Psyche is that divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning. Wisdom is not as concerned with a particular kind of thought, as a wisdom about thinking, and an analysis of what it means to think, and an inquiry into the nature of the ultimate reference of thought.
Our family tree is rooted in narrative and history which traces back to ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Biblical traditions, and spans continents and conflicts. We study the psychological and metaphysical meanings of the mythologies that anchor our longest lines of lineage. It includes mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns that give us image and form.
The Transgenerational Effect
Our psychological approach is Transgenerational Integration.
Trans- is a prefix meaning: across, beyond, through, on the other side of, to go beyond, while state is a condition or way of being that exists at a particular time. It functions as a feedback loop acting across multiple generations, including transgenerational conflict. Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring. Some transgenerational consequences are epigenetic.
The hallmark of the transgenerational models of family therapy is their emphasis on the powerful influences that past generations have on the present. Unresolved conflicts, beliefs, and roles in an individual impact an individual's relationships and interactions in his/her family of origin. They unconsciously continue to influence our current relationships and level of functioning. Healing across lifetimes is possible without any metaphysical model or belief in past lives or reincarnation, but within the genealogical model of direct descent and multigenerational influence.
So, the trans- state is, among other things, a coincidentia oppositorum. An alchemical wedding defines the fixed place, where boundaries are actively transgressed. In many ways, this very undertaking is where the role of the magician, mystic, artist, and healer collide. Down at the crossroads, where possibilities are collapsed into actualities, by the wondrous act of a conscious decision lies the place of suffering and surrender -- of realization and redemption.
We seek, not only ancestors, but signs, symbols, and symbolic meaning -- our origin in the foundation of being -- with an eye to restoring sacred harmony and transformative connection to Cosmos, an indissoluble unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light. Systems of archetypal symbolism come from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and related cosmogonical theories.
Many of these ideas had their roots in Egyptian philosophy. Philosophy is a rite of rebirth, the very essence of which is participation in divine reality and, therefore, its activities are primarily those of inner vision rather than mere logic. The Tree of Life is a logically coherent meta-structure of metaphysical knowledge -- its own body of wisdom. And it lives within us.
Per Ankh
Ankh is the Egyptian term meaning “life.”The hieroglyph ankh, originally perhaps representing a knot or a bow, is a symbol for divine life, for the “breath of life,” provided by Shu and other gods, and for regenerating the power of water.
Ankh also designates a floral bouquet (offered to the gods) and a mirror, itself an important metaphysical symbol., also seen in the sistrum and later the crux ansata.
Per ankh means the House of Life -- a temple scriptorium and advanced school for esoteric training whose priests maintained an oral tradition of initiation and also produced writings in different branches of knowledge. This included theology, mathematics, ritual expertise, hieratic liturgy, hermeneutics, genealogy, astrology, sacred geography, mineralogy, medicine, mythography, architecture, the science of theurgic talismans and image-making.
The staff of every per ankh were lector-priests (heri heb) whose role was associated with sacred books and the heka-power, as well as with preservation of maat, the cosmic order, and maintaining the theurgic tradition of mystical ascent and assimilation to the gods.
Only through esoteric knowledge and initiation into the invisible realm, that is, through symbolic death and rebirth, accomplished in the House of Life, was one able to reveal one sakh-identity and be united with immortal divine principles. In the diagram of the per ankh (Pap. Salt 825) it is depicted as a symbolic mandala with Osiris at the center.
Isis and Nepthys occupy the corners at the side of his feet, Horus and Thoth are at the corners at the side of the head, Geb represents the ground, Nut–the sky. The priests of the House of Life follow “the secret way of Thoth.” One of the chief lector-priests (heri tep) said regarding the formula imbued with the heka-power: “Do not reveal it to the common man–it is a mystery of the House of Life.” (Pap. Leiden344r)
The House of Life was the center of cultural endeavor to preserve and ensure progress of cosmic, political, and social life. A holy place and scriptorium, The House of Life contained secret, magical writings the Egyptians believed had the power to renew and sustain life and further the rebirth of Osiris at his annual festival.
The significance of the House of Life and the rituals performed there was universal. Like the temples it stood for the whole creation, just as the reborn Osiris symbolized eternal life in general. According to tradition, time and again people went to the House of Life to consult ancient writings when they needed answers to problems of their day.
In ancient Egyptian writings and architecture, the House of Life was an institution aligned with kingship, preserving and creating knowledge in written and pictorial form. The overseer of the private rooms of the king, bore the title of 'overseer of writing in the House of Life, a man to whom all sacred matters are revealed', and 'keeper of secrets of the House of Life.'
The ancient Egyptian civilization was strongly connected with nature and the Universe that surrounded them. The school of Abydos House of Life, attracted many healers in the course of time and was an important base of knowledge about healing and medicines. They knew mind and body were strongly connected. Therefore they created various ways to maintain a sound physical body. They analyzed the plants in their neighborhood and built various schools.
The Per Ankh, House of Life, is a solar temple of sacred science (mystery school) and an institution of learning, healing and training. The House of Life, (Per Ankh), is an organization of Egyptian Magicians, founded by the God of Learning, Thoth.
The Per-Ankh texts were transcribed and kept by scribes, including the “books of the dead”. The House of Life was also a restricted access center of esoteric training where students may have undertaken a course of spiritual development, resulting in initiations into “various degrees of symbolic death and rebirth."
https://books.google.com/books?id=WRfHSnGlX7QC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=per+ankh+house+of+life&source=bl&ots=kjNlwISk85&sig=frZYvP2n-r_h2Scl3GlywnqjXBc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiLr_Ch_KLLAhXH6CYKHWVKATg4FBDoAQgzMAU#v=onepage&q=per%20ankh%20house%20of%20life&f=false
I REVERENCE YOU
LABYRINTHINE LINES
THE QUICK & THE DEAD
The Last Branch Supports Me
Lost Histories from the Book of Life
Individuation is a natural process. It is what makes a tree turn into a tree; if it is interfered with, then it becomes sick and cannot function as a tree, but left to itself it develops into a tree. That is individuation.
--Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters, Pages 205-218
Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
"Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind"
The family is a symbol, as well as a history, and social category. Primeval kinship and bonding gave birth to human society.
Because of the way genetics and family trees work, every single human alive on the planet today can trace their family lines back to one common ancestor, one who lived from 8,000-2,000 years ago. As observed in a 2004 paper on the Most Recent Common Ancestor:
“No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
LAND OF THE DEAD
ANCIENT LIVES & LIVING LINES
Alone, Yet Not Alone
Living With the Time You Have Given Me
'Chronesthesia'
"The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
(C. G. Jung, Hans Schmid-Guisan, The Question of Psychological Types)
Mental Time Travel
In nature, we look up and see the past, stars and galaxies millions of years old; then we look down and see the past in the earth, in the bones of dinosaurs and the dust of ancestors, and fossils. Time is the raw material of creation.
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale.
It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life -- lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Self-Referential Memory
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts.
Semiotics & Symptomatics
Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory, including memory, physiological (unconscious) memories (spinal cord and ganglia) and embedded tissue memories, unconscious motivation, unconscious conceptualization, and aesthetic unconscious (art, myth, and dream).
Jung said, "The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through." And that hole or portal is our genealogy -- our family tree, a site of potential transformation.
We are each the sentinel who guards and keeps watch on our end of the lines that are anchored by the genealogies of gods and goddesses which have passed into the 'collective unconscious.' First and foremost our genealogical quest is informed by multidimensional, autonomous psyche.
Mute Signs & Voiceless Speech
We should be confidantes of our own mysteries and ancestors. We must cross our own Acheron, or river of woe and pain to reach that psychological underworld. We plunge from raw life into the encounter with the powers of darkness. We follow our chthonic serpentine lines back through primal generativity and fertility.
Jung claims, "The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Our ancestors guide us on our journey, handing us along, one by one to their forebears. We ritualize the science and art of parting. We step into the mythological plot through the world of the afterlife immersed in our hordes of ancestors, without being fictionalized ourselves.
We retrieve the treasure, 'hard to attain,' whose presence we suspected in the dark prima materia -- self-knowledge. The treasure is variously symbolized in myth and fairy tale as a ring or golden egg, white feather, coat of many colors, fountain of youth, elixir of Life. We gain experiential knowledge of all known realms by
confronting, or identifying with subterrestrial, terrestrial and cosmic energies.
Jung suggested that the assimilation of the objective and subjective collective unconscious is achieved by realizing both the outer and inner meaning: 1. concrete actions and 2. subjective thinking and feeling as purely inner experience, or experience via the subject (inwardly lived). "Undeveloped, therefore archaic, symbolic, ambiguous, phenomenal, irrational, actus purus naturae, can only imperfectly be formulated and grasped intellectually, projected."
The symbolic unconscious content is "not exclusively valid either (1) for the outer or (2) for the inner realm, but for both together, that is, for their operating together." "The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
Paraphrasing Jung, genealogy helps us "to come to those hidden and unopenable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Page 9)
Autonoetic Consciousness
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. While Jung's approach was largely scientific, he also spoke of “living” knowledge as opposed to “scientific” knowledge.
Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
We all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. The transcendental future time perspective affects philosophical problems of personality, the process of self-knowledge, the formation of value orientations and life course of constructing identity.
Inroads in Mental Time;
Feeling & Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief in some future Utopia.
The latest dream of immortality is paradoxically couched under Transhumanism, an overcoming of limited organic nature with technology and designer bodies. The outer universe becomes subjective, from the outer reality the person emerges in what the scientists call reality. The outer universe become the subjective controllable reality.
People often have firm ideas related to a transcendental future but notions of 'new time after death' [or its absence] remain controversial, being rooted in faith. It is an aspect of worldview with behavioral imperatives, prohibitions, values, and consequences. The transcendental future encompasses different events that include divine judgment, reunion with loved ones, eternal life, achieving oneness with nature or cosmos.
Transcendence is existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level. It encompasses the time from the imaginal death of the physical body to infinity. It may include goals, such as reunion with deceased loved ones, reincarnation, eternal life, avoidance of damnation, and elimination of poverty, suffering, pain, and shame. It signifies belief in something larger than life, including immanent or transcendent beings beyond the self.
Out of Time
Transcendental future is a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Transcendental Future Time is one of the dimensions of subjective time and is related to individual beliefs about the time period after physical death. It partitions the psychological future into pre- and post-death time frames, transcending life and living.
An `extraordinary' time perspective, one that partitions the future into pre- and post-death time frames. The `transcendental-future' extends from the point of imagined death of the physical body to infinity, yet may influence present behavior.
Related to numerous psychological variables, the transcendental-future is a component of, but not synonymous with, many religious beliefs. From the perspective of the transcendental-future, behaviors often seen as irrational, such as suicide, extreme heroism, and excessive tithing, are transformed into rational behaviors expected to lead to fulfillment of transcendental-future goals.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
Making Your Time Matter
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions which are are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. The left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
‘Supernatural’ is a word that conjures spine-tingling feelings of mystical awe, fear, and joy. Does it exist as a concept, or as a phenomenon, however, among all peoples? What does it mean as a cultural construction and as a response to reality? What is its relationship to religion and spirituality, to experiences of ghosts and ideas about gods? What part of the ineffable world that informs cosmologies is captured by the term ‘supernatural’, and what is distorted or left out when we use it? Why is it such a contentious term in anthropology, vigorously condemned by some, championed by others, and blithely used by the rest?
Cupid & Psyche, Van Dyke
A LONG WAY HOME
NEXT OF KIN
Last Twig On the Branch
The 'Spirit' or Ruach of the Tree of Life which corresponds to the Intellect and Yetzirah (the Formative World) also corresponds with the Psyche. The Formative World) also corresponds with the Psyche. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines of 'Psyche' as soul, mind, and "The specialized cognitive, conative, and affective aspects of a psychosomatic unity : mind; specifically : the totality of the id, ego, and superego including both conscious and unconscious components."
Death also is in Paradise
Therefore, the Ruach/Breath of life (vital breath) and the Psyche are essentially one and the same. In psychology, the psyche is the totality of the mind (conscious and unconscious) and states stemming from the six types of senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind; the breath of life; the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing; life, a living being: ψυχή ζῶσα, a living soul, the seat of the feelings, desires, affections, aversions. a moral being designed for everlasting life; an essence which differs from the body and is not dissolved by death.
ψυχή (Psyche) is Psyxḗ (from psyxō, "to breathe, blow" which is the root of the English words "psyche," "psychology") – soul (psyche); a person's distinct identity (unique personhood), i.e. individual personality. And that identity, that psyche comes to us through manifestation of our essence in our family tree.
Genealogy allows us to engrave our lines in history. As we journey up through our lines of descent we are always asking Who, Where, and When -- the questions that define the next of kin in our search pattern as we flesh out our family tree as its genealogical midwives.
Who from the family tree am I looking for at the moment?
- Where were they when a particular event occurred?
- When was it that the event likely took place?
The particular form the genealogical tree takes depends on who is identified as genealogical father and who is identified as genealogical mother to whom.
That identification is the basis upon which a conceptual system expressed in terms of symbols and relationships among symbols. When invaders become ancestors it reconfigures ethnicities, embodying systematic changes.
"The tree has a cosmic significance—it is the worldtree, the world-pillar, the world-axis.
Only think of Yggdrasill, the world-ash of Nordic mythology, a majestic, evergreen tree growing at the center of the world.
The tree, particularly its crown, is the abode of the gods. the world-tree.
But, as the alchemical symbolism clearly shows, it is also a transformation symbol, a symbol of the process of self-realization.
According to certain alchemical sources, the adept climbs the tree—a very ancient shamanistic motif.
The shaman, in an ecstasy, climbs the magical tree in order to reach the upper world where he will find his true self.
By climbing the magical tree, which is at the same time a tree of knowledge, he gains possession of his spiritual personality.
To the eye of the psychologist, the shamanistic and alchemical symbolism is a projected representation of the process of individuation.
(Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 353-358.)
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, according to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows. "
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life . This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy .
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus.
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge.
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology, that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe, the face of everything."
Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
The scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino made his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi syntonic with the Christian vision. He understood the sacred junction between the upper and the lower world. Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul, and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center, and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual.
For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension.
In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae, universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi."
Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe, understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies, but also as a node of all things, in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula, " i.e. union, the world itself with the divine. (La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ).
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan-enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten, and severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions. Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit . The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified.
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious.
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious. James Hillman (1926 - 2011) re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche Member of the mind , not as merely rational , but as Anima (original meaning of the word Psyche) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as they represented the Anima Mundi.
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and, above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance. We share the same Unus Mundus.
Things ' transparent '
who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth.
The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol. So every finite thing can become a symbol, ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it, as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its own image and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art means the art. The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art."
The soul of the world, life and death.
In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes. - Vincenzo Guzzo.
STAY WITH THE LIVING
We Are Alive; It's All We Know
Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries,
which themselves are one. --C.G. Jung
Over the course of the millennia, all these ancestors in your tree, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time--to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind? History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all. --Laurence Overmire
“The neurosis is as a rule a pathological, one-sided development of the personality, the imperceptible beginnings of which can be traced back almost indefinitely into the earliest years of childhood. Only a very arbitrary judgment can say where the neurosis actually begins. If we were to relegate the determining cause as far back as the patient’s prenatal life, thus involving the physical and psychic disposition of the parents at the time of conception and pregnancy—a view that seems not at all improbable in certain cases—such an attitude would be more justifiable than the arbitrary selection of a definite point of neurotic origin in the individual life of the patient” (Jung, CW 16, 257-258).
"It isn’t primarily a practice of thinking of one’s last hour, or of death as a physical phenomenon; it is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive."
—Brother David Steindl-Rast Parabola, 1977.
Assemblage theory
"Deleuze's theory (metaphor?) of assemblage as a way of thinking about the social world is an intriguing one. Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.
What is appealing to me about this way of talking about the social world is that it takes us away from the presuppositions we often bring about the social world as consisting of a range of discrete social objects or things. According to this static way of thinking, the state is a thing composed of other things; likewise Islam is an extended social thing; likewise Chicago; and so on. The assemblage approach suggests a different set of metaphors for the social world: mosaic, patchwork, heterogeneity, fluidity, transitory configuration. And this seems like a more realistic way of characterizing large extended social formation like states or regulatory agencies.
The downside of this way of talking and thinking about the social world is precisely the indefiniteness and indeterminacy it suggests for the composition relation. This poses a very hard problem for explanation. How are we to explain the properties and behavior of the composite entity if there is so much contingency in its parts and the ways in which they interact? The strategy of aggregative explanation seems to be a non-starter, since it is stipulated that composition is not a strongly rule-governed process. But so do the comparative and generalizing strategies. If the composites are indeed sui generis and unique configurations we can't generalize across instances and can't usefully compare them."
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.nl/…/assemblage-theory…
INVISIBLE LOYALTIES
Legacies of invisible loyalties and obligations from the past that are passed on through generations, including unconscious limitations. The invisible fibers of loyalty consist of consanguinity, maintenance of biological life and family lineage on the one hand and earned merit among members on the other. (1973, p. 52) Loyalty is a mark of belonging to a group and therefore manifests itself both as a group characteristic and as an individual attitude. Loyalty, as an individual attitude, goes beyond mere identification with the group.
To be a loyal member of the group implies internalizing the spirit of its expectations and complying with its internalized injunctions. Failure to live up to the demands of loyalty leads to feelings of existential guilt which constitute a system of secondary regulative forces which play a part in maintaining the homeostasis of the family system. The development of loyalty is determined by the history of the family group, the type of justice in force within it and its myths. The nature of each of the group members’ obligations depends on his/her emotional disposition and his/ her position in respect of the family ledger , which recapitulates what each member of the family owes.
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
When We Are No More
Mysteries are primal 'secrets' regarding all human evolution. We can mine our ancestral memories. But those secrets are in the experiential aspects of the process. It is not the conceptual part that is secret, but the lived reality unique to each individual -- the realization of self and spirit. They are the signposts along the primal path of alchemy leading to Gnosis. The first masters on Earth were all Dragons and Serpents. They bestowed wisdom and the means of experiencing Gnosis. Unbound consciousness is the basis of metaphysics.
Physics and metaphysics are not so separate as some philosophers and physicists indicate. In fact they are in a sense symbiotic. Physics cannot exist without metaphysical postulates upon which it can rest its own theories, while metaphysics can, in turn, be directly influenced by physical experiments. The meaning of this is that there is nothing unscientific about spirituality and its arts. Ultimately it is fully empirical. The only issue is perception. It is only in perception that materiality "appears" to separated from the divine or spiritual oncology. This also means that there is no mysterious "magic" about the higher realm of spirituality.
The search for truths in metaphysics should be supplemented by progress and advances that occur in physics, while physics should regard itself as being able to provide not final truths about reality, but truths that are dependent upon a more general metaphysical scheme. If metaphysics rejects physics as a valid partner in the search for truth, then its explanations can be valid to those who need final and ultimate answers, but the goal of metaphysics should not be to pose as any arbiter, but as the one that provides the best final and ultimate answers. Where do explanations cease?
Hermes says, “The upper open spirit is hidden in the earth. Work the open upper spirit with the lower secret one,
so will the living one awaken the dead,
and be to it a well of life and work great wonders.”
IN A SIMILAR VEIN
Because You're Mine, I "Walk the Lines"
But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
--Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556, Para 906.
"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished." -- Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die.” --Erich Fromm
Because You're Mine, I Walk the Lineage
Genealogy uses historical, phenomenological, and psychological methods. By "walking the lines" backward in each of the tangled branches of our Family Tree, we can engage layers of multidimensional imagery.
Our family tree emerges from each couple and their own respective networked lines of ancestors and their interpersonal relational interaction. Metaphorically, we walk in their footsteps in a 'magical' circumabulation of our ancestral field. The principle involves making a clear and conscious connection with the ancestors and the idea of oneness. 'Walking the Way' is a form of deep veneration.
Ensouled Body
Genealogy clears a walkway through the ancestral landscape. It is a comparative phenomenology of the imagination with an openness to Being. This is a hermeneutic phenomenology (description and interpretation of meaning), an empirical, transcendental, or psychological phenomenology of lived experiences and themes. Here, “transcendental” implies everything is perceived freshly, as if for the first time, without assumptions.
We immerse ourselves in the cosmic wisdom of matter, in the immanence of indeterminate, enigmatic, mysterious phenomena and its own language -- open, visionary, poetic, aesthetic, erotic, sensuous, spiritual, transformative, vocational. We can't decide if it's the right or only path until we travel along it but it informs our genealogical search at every point. One key to achieving that understand is establishing context.
Hermeneutics refers to the liminal nature of Hermes as an interpreter and soul guide (psychopomp) who connects heaven and earth, the realm of the living and the dead. He guides the soul into dreams and the dead to the underworld. The alchemists' defined the prima materia as the "land of the dead."
Jung describes Hermes as, "the arch-authority of Greek alchemy. He is "Hermes Trismegistos" (thrice-greatest Hermes), and is identical with the Egyptian Thoth, the god of learning. Hermes was a leader of souls, a god of revelation and understanding, connected with the human mind, and also the source of dreams.
He was actually the god of the unconscious, and the being who determined the human intellect." (ETH, Alchemy, Lecture XI 11th July, 1941, 224-231)
Jung said he wasn't well-versed in philosophy, but "had to make use of philosophical concepts to formulate my findings." Phenomenology brings to light what would otherwise remain hidden and helps us interpret what it means to exist in the world. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when its method is taken to be interpretive, rather than purely descriptive as in transcendental phenomenology.
Hermeneutic phenomenology enables access to subconscious phenomena and provides a means of interpreting our experiences of personal learning journeys. We acknowledge the complexity of a lived experience and subjective validation of it as an integration of our thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and experiences.
Meaning is encoded in cultural symbolism deposited and mediated through myth, religion, art, and language. In a prolonged engagement with a topic, such as genealogy, language itself is an appearance of being -- a means of being manifest and 'seeing' meaning.
With deep questioning of the phenomena, we become attentive to how things appear and speak for themselves, including the ancestors, connecting with the visceral world of attunement, resonance, and sensation. Sympathetic resonance includes physical, emotional, aesthetic, and intuitive responses, not just the verification of cognition.
The moment of vision embodies authentic temporality, illuminating the full meaning of the present in terms of our fate, our mortal future, with a simultaneous retrieval of our past heritage. Language and storytelling have a narrative function that ultimately return to the question of the meaning of being, the self and self-identity.
"...[T]here is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (Jung, CW 8, Pages 399-403.)
Evocations of remembrance embody the essential nature of the sensuous radiance of absence. The far greater and darker regions of the unknown give way to becoming, transforming emotional experience. The archetype is not “in” a person but “between” them, within the imaginal space that opens, for example, in evocative moments between ourselves and our ancestors with a sense of presence and place.
At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience. (Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 559-560.)
Condensing Meaning
A narrative reports the life of a single individual, while a phenomenology describes the collective meaning of lived experiences, of a concept, or a phenomenon. Life themes are divided into subthemes describing different dimensions of the process of understanding connected by the guiding theme “narrative.”
Our approach is phenomenal or qualitative rather than analytic. When phenomenology informs narrative analysis, the image is allowed to speak through form, stories and intuition. There is no predetermined framework of meaning. The comparative approach usefully challenges taken-for-granted understandings. Rooted in philosophy, it studies conscious awareness of the world as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.
Emotion As Epiphany
Phenomenology is an experiential approach to subjective experience. "Experience" (being or existence) is a complex concept -- an "in-relation-to" phenomenon. We can approach our ancestors with phenomenology, and also reflexively consider what we bring to the process from our own perspective and worldview.
As in the case of dreams we must stick as closely to the image as given as possible. Image is the primary phenomenon of psychic life, mytho-poetic imagination, and the prima materia of the phenomenology of the soul.
The phenomenal field focuses on perceptions, feelings, and "how one feels right now." The intergenerational field is a phenomenal field. Hillman referred to soul's self-expression as, “what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but ...the poetic imagination going on day and night.” (We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62)
He sees death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “loss of soul, not loss of life, should be [the analyst’s] main dread.” Hillman advocates the development of a conscious philosophy of death. He argues that death and life are not psychological opposites and that “...any act which holds off death prevents life” (Suicide and the Soul, p. 61).
"We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back." (Jung; The Red Book; Liber Primus; Page 244.)
With the phenomenal approach, Mircea Eliade identified “the sacred” as a kind of independent variable—unchanging and timeless even though manifest in completely different times and cultures. “Pure” phenomenology describes the intentional objects of consciousness.
Human experiences are phenomena -- what they experienced and how they experienced it, in holistic and embedded or qualitative perspectives. Hermeneutics renders the object accessible to interpretation, opening new possibilities. Naturally, we have to take account of our own bias, conceptions, and assumed truths into the interpretative activity involved.
We must distinguished interpretation from explanation and causes, focusing on a description of reasons. There is no firm boundary between the dimensions of description and interpretation. Deeper understanding demands more complexity-sensitive ways of thinking and a method that allows interpretation, exploration of dynamics and processes, and involvement of the context.
Presence & Absence
We synthesize the lived-experience from comparative transformations. General psychological structure is deduced from the psychological constituents of the experience. Constituents are context dependent and are necessarily part of the whole structure.
The purpose of this procedure is grounded in the phenomenological concept of parts and wholes. The meaning units are transformed using imaginative variation within the phenomenological attitude and psychological perspective to elucidate their essential psychological meanings.
The eidetic nature of the data or mental image, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory, is brought forth through the imaginative variation. We can create and explore eidetic images as a way of coming to terms with transgenerational and traumatic life events.
The phenomenological concept of presences and absences is an important one to use with imaginative variation. Explicit data can reveal implicit meanings [subtext] without them being concretely expressed. During the transformations, we can “see” the explicit meanings, and also uncover the implicit meanings.
Imaginative variation gives us a “sense of the whole.” In this way, the descriptive phenomenological approach is more comprehensive than mere empirical approaches in the natural attitude. This is justified through understanding that what is “present” often implies or indicates an “absent” quality.
In the phenomenological approach, each transformation describes what the meaning unit expresses psychologically without any interpretation or assumptions about its “truth.” The phenomenological approach represents different approaches, from focus on rich description to those more informed by interpretation.
We describe how it was experienced and understood from the subject's point of view without explanation of “why” it was experienced in the way it was. The phenomenological attitude of the researcher in the psychological analysis of the data is what makes the results both phenomenological and psychological.
We can reduce the information to significant statements or quotes and combine the statements into themes. Then we develop a textural description of the experiences of the persons (what participants experienced), a structural description of their experiences (how they experienced it in terms of the conditions, situations, or context), and a combination of the textural and structural descriptions to convey an overall essence of the experience.
We can describe what all participants have in common as they experience a phenomenon (e.g., grief is universally experienced). The basic purpose of phenomenology is to reduce individual experiences with a phenomenon to a description of the universal essence, to “grasp of the very nature of the thing.”
Contextualization
There is only one method: the comparative method. There are five core approaches to qualitative research: narrative study, a phenomenology, a grounded theory, an ethnography, and a case study. At the fundamental level, the five differ in what they are trying to accomplish with their foci or the primary objectives of the studies.
Exploring a life is different from generating a theory or describing the behavior of a cultural group. Narrative is both a method and phenomenon of study. Individuals are enabled and constrained by social resources, socially situated in interactive performances, and how narrators develop interpretations of the multileveled context of a life. A first-person psychological perspective is sought so that an empathetic position can be adopted.
In genealogy we are gathering data through the collection of their stories (biographical study), reporting individual experiences, and chronologically ordering (or using life course stages) the timeline and meaning of those experiences. Restoring them means re-storying them, reframing them with sensitive descriptions and imaginative variation.
We need to collect extensive information about each ancestor, and to have a clear understanding of the context of the individual’s life. It takes a keen eye to identify in the source material gathered the particular stories that capture the individual’s experiences. Narrative study tells the story of individuals unfolding in a chronology of their experiences, set within their personal, social, and historical context, and includes the important themes in those lived experiences.
Narrative inquiry concerns stories lived and told. A phenomenological perspective of the mind acknowledges consciousness as the most fundamental life-quality that coexists with the body. A person is regarded as an embodied consciousness. People know one another’s consciousness through their physical bodies. This means that we know our own consciousness by reflection but cannot know the consciousness of the other except through the body.
Three-dimensional narrative inquiry space includes the personal and social (the interaction); the past, present, and future (continuity); and the place (situation). This story line may include information about the setting or context of the participants’ experiences. Beyond the chronology, we might detail themes that arise from the story to provide a more detailed discussion of the meaning of the story.
Tracing the Path
'Walking the lines' is a ritual situated in the imaginal landscape suggested by our genealogical ascent which leads into our collective ancestral past. Along the path, or circuits of ancestral nodes, the secret meaning of life is discovered. Our ancient path of pilgrimage is rich with meaning and is a powerful tool for seeking soul and spirit in a movement toward transcendence. Perhaps facing our mortality inspires us to live more fully.
The main quest in the oldest myths is for immortality. We search for immortality. We cannot know anything final about that and all the possible means of 'living', but many strive for germline immortality, an ersatz-immortality in their offspring. The immortality of the soul is concerned with personal identity, not just in conscious and unconscious states, but in mutable conditions and alternating states of being.
Embodied & Disembodied Soul
In the Phaedo, Plato describes an immortal soul. Thus, while the natural body and the experiential mind are merely phenomenal clothing of the ontological soul, the latter is immortal as a living entity. Aristotle distinguishes between ontological and experiential soul.
As Danish physicist Niels Bohr quipped, "A Great Truth is a Truth the opposite of which is also a Great Truth." In the paradoxical nature of reality, immortality remains largely a concept and source of ontological argument. For example, Buddhism does not conceive of the soul as ultimately real.
Perhaps the latest version of the soul describes a field ontology and a functional dualism (mind/matter). Our form emerges from a primordial field of consciousness/energy (groundstate) in which we remain embedded, and to which we return.
Ancestral Field
This zero-point field has many names. That field is the energetic “void”, or “vacuum”, the space of the “ether”, the subtle but ultra-powerful energy potential. The Heart Sutra tells us that, "Form is not other than Void, Void is not other than Form." This implies that our human form is not other than void, and biophysics shows this to be true. This notion differs from survival of personal identity (self-movement) or soul, but is a conservation of primordial information.
Jung contends the archetype of rebirth and resurrection is a metaphorical experiences of [ego] death as a metaphorical precursor to five forms of rebirth:
1. Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls.
2. Reincarnation, human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory; re-birth in a human body.
3. Resurrection means a reestablishment of human existence in an incorruptible carnal or subtle body after death.
4. Rebirth within the span of individual life. Renovation, renewal or total rebirth of the essential nature (transmutation).
5. Indirect rebirth via participation in death-rebirth, the rite of transformation. (Jung, CW 9I, para 200- 205)
Experiential psychology is not pure ontology, and relies mostly on the rebirth experience and the truth and beauty of intuition for transformation. We have to be content with its psychic reality. Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams. There is a contrast between phenomenal and noumenal, experiential and eternal, relative and absolute, biological and ontological.
Psychologically, immortality is the attempt to grant distinct ontological status to the symbolic self, to deny the finality of organic death. In other words, it is a denial of death. Soul beliefs, discreetly or indiscreetly, transform the ontology of creativity into an immortality ideology.
James Hillman shifted Jung's conversation from individuation to "soul-making," a way of seeing and reflection that makes meaning possible. "By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself." He describes five things about the nature of soul as the imaginative possibilities of nature: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi; Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
Hillman's anima mundi is at home in the 'real' world -- the imaginal realm where real world spirit regains its zest and vision, addressing our sufferings after transformation. In the everyday, the best of the "unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative highly intentional and necessary" archetypal world of both the "noumenal" and the "phenomenal" manifests itself in the everyday tribal and familial context. Family history is transformed into myth.
Facts & Artifacts
In terms of ontological wholeness, immortality of one's being expressed in the continuance of one's proper name or even dynasty falls short of the unconscious belief in life after death. Immortality is an organic philosophical desire for life that should always be lived. It is a religious desire for another life, affirming an act of faith in a transcendent existence, or renewal without end of what is here in this world. This is the difference between cosmic pantheism and theistic (theosophic or transcendental) ontology.
Von Franz notes, "The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. …The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death." (von Franz (1987), ix.)
Like the shamans of old who ascended and descended the archetypal World Tree, genealogists can "walk the tree" -- "The Big Tree" or the "World Family Tree" -- from one end to the other, or "up" toward the past and then back "down" to the present on another line. Timelines help us arrange the numerous names and events that take place simultaneously and sequentially.
Some family trees will look like stumpy, dead sticks with a few twigs, while others will shared vast underground connections and vigorous thick growth, like as a yew tree. Within the Family Tree and World Tree, people are either connected by "bloodlines" or through marriage. Bloodlines can include adoptions and illegitimacy, either acknowledged or unacknowledged. Ancestors are only those from whom you directly descend, though cousin lines may share blood.
Spirit People
Family is the midwife of the soul. Jung reminds us that the source of unifying images which animated our ancestors and linked them to Mystery are generated by the symbol-making function we all possess. The same mysterious dream place gives birth to those mediating images which arise when we encounter the mysterious Other, the animated presence in our lives.
The family is the primordial psychophysical initiatory vessel or vehicle of our destiny -- the archetypal family and biological self. Family births us, develops us, procreates us, and buries us. Regardless of the pain and travail it may create for us, family is the grail within which the sacred nectar of our physical and psychic DNA is carried from the lips and organs of one generation to the next.
Long lines, about 13 generations back lead into medieval times. "Walking the path" means you MUST visit every profile in both paths, no shortcuts. We find ourselves walking the lines and paths around and up to legendary figures, and further back, purely mythic characters -- liminal entities.
Three modalities -- resonance, depth and numinosity -- describe the presence of that autonomous Other which we call soul and an experiential psychic connection to the Other, and a sense of self grounded in a transcendent order. Those images are conduits into the natural world, with its specific tribal mythos, and assist in later moving the community members into a world beyond mortality.
Genealogy is a sort of psychic archaeology where we dig up the dead with their own information and 'advice' -- hidden historical crumbs and clues, synchronicities, and intuitions. Genealogy reveals complex behaviors of distributed systems. Naturally they lead backwards to origins vastly different from the kinds of practices present in different time frames.
Genealogy is an archaeology of the individual and a therapeutic art -- optimally coordinated interpersonal synchronicity and optimized subsequent interactions. Similar personality traits align in rapport and return with greater simultaneous coordination. The interaction of pairs displays complementary simultaneous coordination. Coherent emotional charge states converge under effective conditions after an interval of time.
Archaeology of Knowledge
The archaeological level is what made an event or a situation possible. Archaeology and genealogy alternate and support each other. Archaeology is structuralist. It tries to take an objective neutral position and it avoids causal theories of change.
Foucault calls it, "the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today." (Genealogy and Social Criticism, p.42)
The genealogical side of analysis tries to grasp the power of constituting a domain of objects. Genealogy uncovers the creation of tangible objects. A society institutes the role of medicine man and gives him special privileges. Then we establish and institutionalize this practice, the psychosocial role of a "medicine man."
Treading the Path
Walking a path is symbolically a spiritual practice, a pilgrimage, like walking or tracing a labyrinth -- a contemplative spiritual exercise of circumnavigating a sacred path. We turn back to our center, to our origin, by a devotional path. A walk through the World Tree or a walk in the labyrinth is a cosmic journey through the heavens.
There is no right or wrong way; we have to enter and follow a path with presence. Our attitudes, focus, experience, consolation, and reflection may shift each time, or as we follow path. Traversing the labyrinth brings us into wholeness with all parts of our being. When we walk the labyrinth it recreates a very ancient expression of thanks and remembrance of the divine in all things. So does the family tree, expressing our completeness outwardly.
Like labyrinth, your genealogy has one way in and one way out -- you. Such an initiation, shifting perspectives, awakens the knowledge encoded within. Walking the labyrinth and walking our lines share a spirit. The circuits of the labyrinth pattern and genealogy share the same meaning -- a maze of ancestors, and a way to meander through them -- spiritual umbilical cords.
We walk a labyrinth by stepping into the entrance and putting one foot in front of the other. After traveling through all the paths and windings, the walker comes into the center - the six - petal rosette - the rose line, a symbol of the Holy Grail. Like walking the labyrinth, genealogy can be an exercise in self-healing. Both are journeys to the center and back out again to the ordinary world.
Seeking the Ancestors
Our genealogy is a sensorium of multisensory informational content. Relationship paths connect you to closest blood relationships via a given ancestor through several families, via either parent, male or female, or combinations thereof. There can be many relationship paths to the same ancestors.
Intergenerational Encounter
Collapsing the space between us, each ancestor, or avatar of our descent, touches us with an imaginal poem that is a product of their embedding in our ancestral history - layer after emerging layer of our augmented reality. They begin to talk to us in many ways: ambiance, serendipity, synchronicity, personal, contextual, instructively and artistically.
The image of the World Tree invites us to explore the vertical or depth dimension, while Family is the most prominent landmark on the horizontal plane of relational otherness. Family mediates this world and its essential, phenomenal reality and can enhance or dampen, devastatingly, our interaction with this dimension of psyche. The family seeds imagination.
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.
He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. --Carl Jung, MDR, Page 325
(c)2015-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.