SOUL GENEALOGY SITES
The Intelligence that Surrounds You
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
The Intelligence that Surrounds You
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
DEPTH GENEALOGY SITES
Shades of Our Past
by Iona Miller, 2016
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
JUNGIAN GENEALOGY
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/
HERE BE DRAGONS
http://herebedragons.weebly.com/
SangREALITY
http://sangreality.weebly.com/
Shades of Our Past
by Iona Miller, 2016
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
JUNGIAN GENEALOGY
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/
HERE BE DRAGONS
http://herebedragons.weebly.com/
SangREALITY
http://sangreality.weebly.com/
http://www.ecodition.net/en/our-books/
Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration
Traditional Wisdom and Contemporary Practices
By Thierry Gaillard, C. Michael Smith, Olivier Douville, Elisabeth Horowitz,
Iona Miller, Myron Eshowsky, Pierre Ramaut
(160 pages , Ecodition 2016 , ISBN 9782940540198)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
The Ancients already knew the therapeutic potential of the family links between generations that we rediscover in modern transgenerational analysis. Far from being a new fashion, the recognition of transgenerational processes dates back to the first shamanic type of communities. Their methods to cure "The Ancestor Syndrome" offer to contemporary therapies essential historical references and valuable teachings.
Transgenerational integration brings a welcome middle ground for exchanges between traditional, shamanic and actual therapeutic approaches. This new field nourishes the rooting of contemporary practices as well as the renewal of ancestral wisdom. With the contribution of specialists from different backgrounds, this collective book presents a wide spectrum of perspectives to bridge traditional and modern knowledges.
Ancestors and Transgenerational Integration
Traditional Wisdom and Contemporary Practices
By Thierry Gaillard, C. Michael Smith, Olivier Douville, Elisabeth Horowitz,
Iona Miller, Myron Eshowsky, Pierre Ramaut
(160 pages , Ecodition 2016 , ISBN 9782940540198)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
The Ancients already knew the therapeutic potential of the family links between generations that we rediscover in modern transgenerational analysis. Far from being a new fashion, the recognition of transgenerational processes dates back to the first shamanic type of communities. Their methods to cure "The Ancestor Syndrome" offer to contemporary therapies essential historical references and valuable teachings.
Transgenerational integration brings a welcome middle ground for exchanges between traditional, shamanic and actual therapeutic approaches. This new field nourishes the rooting of contemporary practices as well as the renewal of ancestral wisdom. With the contribution of specialists from different backgrounds, this collective book presents a wide spectrum of perspectives to bridge traditional and modern knowledges.
Original Awareness
Our antic biophysical background has been easier to ascertain than the physics of the soul, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic and psychological realities. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so.
Though you or I can "raise Cain" in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche, including Sumerian KIngs, Egyptian Pharaohs, Trojan Lords, Jewish Kings, Viking Warriors, Merovingian Kings, Russian Tsars, Scottish Royalty, British Royalty, Moors, Habsburgs, etc.
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker. When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. This is the gloss of imaginal vision that co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized' by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse.
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting of psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, and must be contextualized as imaginal.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future. So, sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
Our antic biophysical background has been easier to ascertain than the physics of the soul, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic and psychological realities. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so.
Though you or I can "raise Cain" in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche, including Sumerian KIngs, Egyptian Pharaohs, Trojan Lords, Jewish Kings, Viking Warriors, Merovingian Kings, Russian Tsars, Scottish Royalty, British Royalty, Moors, Habsburgs, etc.
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker. When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. This is the gloss of imaginal vision that co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized' by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse.
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting of psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, and must be contextualized as imaginal.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future. So, sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
AN ECOLOGY OF SOULS
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
“...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
"The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us."
(C. G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW, Vol. 15)
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
“...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
"The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us."
(C. G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW, Vol. 15)
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. Genealogy 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.
"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. Genealogy 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.
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.
LIFEWAYS
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Phenomenological intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically or falling into blind spots.
Through intuiting, we hope to experience a moment of insight in which we sees the phenomenon in a clearer light. Phenomenological disclosure is "the aha! experience," "revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through phenomenological disclosure, we hope to see the thing in its own terms and to feel confident that this seeing is reasonably correct.
Consciousness, Behavior & Experience
Our personal efforts, experiences, and insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon and arriving at moments of disclosure so the phenomenon reveals something about itself in a new or fuller way.
Generally, phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that slowly coalesce into a fuller apprehension of the phenomenon.
In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding comes in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through our wish, effort, and practice, we see the phenomenon in smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise that we never noticed before. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, with unpredictability and serendipity.
We must begin somewhere and intends to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. But, this movement isn’t a straight, sequential process. We see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion. We can’t say where this flow begins. The first idea of trying to makes sense of something may evolve over the course of our genealogical research activity.
Uncharted Territory
The phenomenon is an uncharted territory that we attempt to explore, flexibly adapting to the nature and circumstances of the phenomenon. We must assume that we do not know the phenomenon but wish to, so we approach it as a beginner. We may know what we do not know, but need to consider that we may not know what we don’t know. We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
We can use an existential and hermeneutic, as well as first-person approach, drawing on our realm of experience ‑- our own lived situation, setting aside preconceptions and biases. We examine specific characteristics and qualities and may become immersed in the process, its revelations and clarity. We become more perceptive, thus better able to articulate our experience. Emergent meaning arises from description and interpretation.
In genealogy the nature of ancestors is much more important for establishing the specific research procedure and descriptions, in a thoughtful, articulate way. Our specific methods and procedures fit the nature and needs of our own individual research style and the internal necessity that impels our impulses.
Our genealogy is a text imbued in some way with human meaning and therefore a subject for hermeneutic interpretation. We immerse ourselves in the process, get involved, and begin to discern configurations of meaning, of parts and wholes and their interrelationships.
We receive certain messages and glimpses of an unfolding development that beckons to be articulated and related to the total fabric of meaning. The hermeneutic allows the ancestors to be revealed to our eyes, ears, and intuition just by being what they are -- to speak their own story into our understanding in the universal language of imagery and symbolism. We are the lived fabric of inescapable fleshly connectedness. A whole lifetime is imprisoned in each ancestral image, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes, and joys.
Interpretive Relativity
The issue of trustworthiness raises the question, what criteria can be used to establish the reliability of phenomenological descriptions and interpretations? Reliability first of all involves interpretive appropriateness.
How is it that we can say what we experience and yet always live more than we can say, so that we could always say more than we in fact do? How can we evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy of our expression in terms of doing justice to the full lived quality of the experience described?
How are thought and life interrelated so that they can be characterized as interdependent, as in need of each other, as complementing and interpenetrating each other? Living informs expression (language and thinking) and, in turn, thinking-language-expression reciprocally informs and gives a recognizable shaped awareness to living.
Reliability can only be had through intersubjective corroboration. Do other interested parties find in their own life and experience, either directly or vicariously, what we find in our own work? In this sense, our interpretations are no more and no less than interpretive possibilities or potentials.
The aim is an openness and empathy whereby we begin to sense the other's situation and meaning. We can judge the trustworthiness of phenomenological interpretation from vividness, accuracy, richness, and elegance. Genealogical work is elegant because there is a clear interrelationship between real-world experiences and conceptual interpretation.
The Essence of Human Experience
In the end, this approach to genealogy is a highly personal, interpretive venture. In trying to see the phenomenon, it is very easy to see too much or too little. Looking and trying to see are very much an intuitive, spontaneous affair that involves feeling as much as thinking. In this sense, phenomenology might be described as a method to cultivate a mode of seeing with both intellectual and emotional sensibilities, for more whole and comprehensive understanding.
The genealogical work is born in a mysterious and secret way. It gains life and being. Its existence isn’t casual and inconsequential. It has a definite and purposeful strength, in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create a spiritual atmosphere suitable for ancestral devotion. We adapt the form to its inner meaning. When it comes to the ancestors we can investigate general essences and watch modes of appearing.
http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/seamon_revieweap.htm
When Lao-tzu says: "All are clear, I alone am clouded," he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.
Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning.
The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu.
This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.
In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself. ~Carl Jung;
Phenomenology indicates a way to research where we can be open to the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through our own direct involvement and understanding. Understanding arises directly from our personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure and immersion.
We meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced a way as possible so that it can present itself and be accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper clarity in which we see the phenomenon in a radically fresh and fuller way.
Phenomenological intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically or falling into blind spots.
Through intuiting, we hope to experience a moment of insight in which we sees the phenomenon in a clearer light. Phenomenological disclosure is "the aha! experience," "revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through phenomenological disclosure, we hope to see the thing in its own terms and to feel confident that this seeing is reasonably correct.
Consciousness, Behavior & Experience
Our personal efforts, experiences, and insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon and arriving at moments of disclosure so the phenomenon reveals something about itself in a new or fuller way.
Generally, phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that slowly coalesce into a fuller apprehension of the phenomenon.
In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding comes in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through our wish, effort, and practice, we see the phenomenon in smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise that we never noticed before. Phenomenological intuiting is a flow and spiral, with unpredictability and serendipity.
We must begin somewhere and intends to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. But, this movement isn’t a straight, sequential process. We see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion. We can’t say where this flow begins. The first idea of trying to makes sense of something may evolve over the course of our genealogical research activity.
Uncharted Territory
The phenomenon is an uncharted territory that we attempt to explore, flexibly adapting to the nature and circumstances of the phenomenon. We must assume that we do not know the phenomenon but wish to, so we approach it as a beginner. We may know what we do not know, but need to consider that we may not know what we don’t know. We have no clear sense of what we will find or how discoveries will arise fluidly and unfold in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional way. A certain uncertainty and spontaneity must be accepted and creatively transformed into possibility and pattern.
We can use an existential and hermeneutic, as well as first-person approach, drawing on our realm of experience ‑- our own lived situation, setting aside preconceptions and biases. We examine specific characteristics and qualities and may become immersed in the process, its revelations and clarity. We become more perceptive, thus better able to articulate our experience. Emergent meaning arises from description and interpretation.
In genealogy the nature of ancestors is much more important for establishing the specific research procedure and descriptions, in a thoughtful, articulate way. Our specific methods and procedures fit the nature and needs of our own individual research style and the internal necessity that impels our impulses.
Our genealogy is a text imbued in some way with human meaning and therefore a subject for hermeneutic interpretation. We immerse ourselves in the process, get involved, and begin to discern configurations of meaning, of parts and wholes and their interrelationships.
We receive certain messages and glimpses of an unfolding development that beckons to be articulated and related to the total fabric of meaning. The hermeneutic allows the ancestors to be revealed to our eyes, ears, and intuition just by being what they are -- to speak their own story into our understanding in the universal language of imagery and symbolism. We are the lived fabric of inescapable fleshly connectedness. A whole lifetime is imprisoned in each ancestral image, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes, and joys.
Interpretive Relativity
The issue of trustworthiness raises the question, what criteria can be used to establish the reliability of phenomenological descriptions and interpretations? Reliability first of all involves interpretive appropriateness.
How is it that we can say what we experience and yet always live more than we can say, so that we could always say more than we in fact do? How can we evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy of our expression in terms of doing justice to the full lived quality of the experience described?
How are thought and life interrelated so that they can be characterized as interdependent, as in need of each other, as complementing and interpenetrating each other? Living informs expression (language and thinking) and, in turn, thinking-language-expression reciprocally informs and gives a recognizable shaped awareness to living.
Reliability can only be had through intersubjective corroboration. Do other interested parties find in their own life and experience, either directly or vicariously, what we find in our own work? In this sense, our interpretations are no more and no less than interpretive possibilities or potentials.
The aim is an openness and empathy whereby we begin to sense the other's situation and meaning. We can judge the trustworthiness of phenomenological interpretation from vividness, accuracy, richness, and elegance. Genealogical work is elegant because there is a clear interrelationship between real-world experiences and conceptual interpretation.
The Essence of Human Experience
In the end, this approach to genealogy is a highly personal, interpretive venture. In trying to see the phenomenon, it is very easy to see too much or too little. Looking and trying to see are very much an intuitive, spontaneous affair that involves feeling as much as thinking. In this sense, phenomenology might be described as a method to cultivate a mode of seeing with both intellectual and emotional sensibilities, for more whole and comprehensive understanding.
The genealogical work is born in a mysterious and secret way. It gains life and being. Its existence isn’t casual and inconsequential. It has a definite and purposeful strength, in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create a spiritual atmosphere suitable for ancestral devotion. We adapt the form to its inner meaning. When it comes to the ancestors we can investigate general essences and watch modes of appearing.
http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/seamon_revieweap.htm
When Lao-tzu says: "All are clear, I alone am clouded," he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.
Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning.
The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a great philosopher like Lao-tzu.
This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.
In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself. ~Carl Jung;
ANCESTRAL DEVOTIONS
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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?
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
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
HOW DID YOU EVER GET HERE?
10,000 Paths to the Passed
Each of our ancestors is a gate to our Inner Sanctum, to our soul. Genealogy is the relational mode of understanding. The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge.
In the beginning everything is chaotic, fluid, co-mingled, and undifferentiated. Its alchemical symbol is a 3-headed serpent or dragon, of Sulpher, Mercury, and Salt. This represents the dance of Sun and Moon, King and Queen, the archetypal superpatterns of male and female, and their material offspring. We spring from the soul and remain the child of our ancestors.
In every adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286
First matter gives universe its properties. It organizes into the Elements, (fire, water, air, and earth), which are the building blocks of words, thought-ideas or archetypes. It is liminal, between manifest and unmanifest. It is the spiritualized essence or soul of substance: identity, form, and function oscillating between creation and destruction.
We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive something; the creation in its own essence is also destructive. You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people's organic health. It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing. Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560).
"The transformation of Mercurius, as prima materia, in the heated, sealed vessel is comparable to cooking the basic instinctive drives in their own affect until their essential fantasy content becomes conscious."
“Instead of arguing with the drives which carry us away, we prefer to cook them and . ask then what they want. . . . That can be discovered by active imagination, or through experimenting in reality, but always with the introverted attitude of observing objectively what the drive really wants.” (Marie von Franz, Alchemy, p. 129)
It is often suggested the prima materia is found in "feces" or lead which is alchemical code for matter or the physical body and what gets shoved down into the unconscious. The first matter is cyclic, contains all the elements, and is the source of the Philosopher's Stone -- the egg or light of Nature; Anima Mundi or Soul of the World.
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. Emotions are part of the reasoning process itself -- bodily intelligence.
This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for the treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation & Suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetics demonstrates that we inherit our parents' trauma and family secrets. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Traumas are events that induce intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state in PTSD. Trigger a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.
To be whole is to be full of contradictions. The unity never becomes apparent because the opposites within us operate and mingle in various ways and it is their interaction that makes the whole man. The complete human being, the hermaphrodite, is never visible. He is indescribable, always a mystical experience. (Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung - Ostrowski,)
So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
Serpent's Breath
The serpent in that Tree is its numinous voice, with its active dynamic kundalini -- the Serpent Power, the Secret Fire, the life force or basic animating principle -- the quintessence of matter. Never calling it evil, Genesis 3:1 says, "Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."
Our serpentine lines of ancestral descent recursively bite their own tails in the primordial archetype of the Orobouros. “"All human things are a circle” was inscribed on the temple at Athens.
The Hermetic "Holy Grail" was a circular crater or bowl of regeneration described in the fourth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was a font of immersion symbolizing the constant decay and renewal of all things, present in all Nature. The genealogical Holy Grail is found in royal lines that include the Arthurian legends then trace back to roots in various gods and goddesses.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
Grail symbolism encompasses the womb that always makes children, the horn and cup that serve drink, and the cauldron and bowl that give food. The quest for the Grail comes from these primal facts of life.
The holy bowl -- the cranium, where heaven meets earth -- is where individual souls mix with universal mind in a metaphor of immersive experience, The immersive baptism of wisdom or gnosis means 'living water' that springs up in creativity and illumination -- "the drink of the soul by the sweet stream of wisdom (Sophia)."
What Are They Remembering For Us?
Our history is our collective transgenerational memory. No people can successfully live outside of their memory. Jung tells us that, "Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force." (MDR, Page 277). The past plays one of the most critical roles in Western civilization. but it is so embedded, so obvious that it becomes invisible. The past remains with us as experiences change sperm and eggs.
Genes aren't the cause of most disease; the cause of most disease alters genetic expression. Epigenetics is revealing the biological transmission of molecular memory -- that we can pass down altered responses, emotional trauma, agitated nervous systems, under-regulated immune systems, chronic over-inflammation, and somatic disorders.
Biological Legacy
Ancestral behavior can also mutate single genes. Everybody has a different level of tolerance for alcohol, but some people act very strangely, exhibiting reckless, impulsive, violent, or even dangerous behavior on alcohol. Finnish researchers found that a fairly common mutation in serotonin 2B receptor gene can render some prone to impulsive behavior by nature, sober or under the influence of alcohol. They struggle with self-control or mood disorders.
“One of our main findings was that the HTR2B Q20* predicted alcohol-related risk-behaviors. The HTR2B Q20* carriers demonstrated aggressive out-bursts, got into fights and behaved in an impulsive manner under the influence of alcohol. They were also arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol more often than the controls."
“The HTR2B Q20* carriers were not alcoholics per se, as measured by average alcohol consumption, and were not diagnosed as alcoholics, but they had a tendency to lose behavioral control while under the influence of alcohol.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/common-genetic-mutation-linked-to-reckless-drunken-behaviour?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore
All cells have a genetic code with information to produce certain proteins to carry out vital processes. Chemical switches can turn genes on or off, or crank them up or down, so the cells know which proteins to produce and in what quantities. These switches or epigenetic tags are altered by environment, bad habits, and experience, passed on to their offspring, and their offspring's offspring.
Sperm and eggs carry genetic memories of parents' health well before conception. Even what grandparents ate and the father's behavior long before conception can influence the child's health in a range from mood disorders to mental illness. They inherit parents' psychic burdens, anxiety, low impulse control. Older people can unconsciously externalizes their traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. The physical transmission of the horrors of the past is “embodied history.”
Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors by complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Epigenetics changes the way instructions in the genetic code were translated and carried out by the body.
We are more than our transgenerational wounds. Our essence transcends our identification with history. In healing we are not alone, we trust a path to greater freedom, and feel our relationship to the suffering of our family lineage. We feel lighter when we release the burdens of our own trauma or family history. We can make wider choices and expand our sense of belonging in the world.
The Spent Breath of Millions
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique. As Jung says, "But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world." (Letters Vol. II, Page 567)
Perhaps the ancestors inform us in their own way. Intuition is information that is received by the mind. But for that information to be useful, it must be analyzed and purposefully acted upon. When integrated we act on those intuitive impulses with wise judgment and confidence. Creative ideas then take shape in manifest form.
Primordial Psyche
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession. But they also have complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns we can discern. This is the realm of the imaginal -- primordial images or instinctual energy which nevertheless have objective effects.
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited.
Archetypes & Instincts
That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. In Jungian thought, when we search for our "other half" and perhaps for our ancestors, too, we actually seek the integration of the elements of the unconscious psyche. “It is always important to have something to bring into a relationship, and solitude is often the means by which you acquire it” (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610, Letters Vol. II.)
As Jung notes, "Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of nature and is connected to his own roots." (Symbols of Transformation, Page 23).
If I speak of the collective unconscious I don't assume it as a principle, I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
The Platonic "Idea" is in this case no longer intellectual but a psychic, instinctual pattern. Instinctual patterns can be found in human beings too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
"Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." ("Transformation Symbolism in the Mass", CW 11, para. 401).
Inherent Nature of Man
Jung thought the "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species. They grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena.
Water is the cosmogonic element by which the self sinks into involuntary immersion in the dimensional abysses. Our pre-historical ancestors have sunk in the Atlantis of the waters of the unconscious. This may be more than symbolic as we now know humanity has gone through a few local and global catastrophic events.
Supervolcanoes, repeated glaciation, meteor, and comet falls, massive sea-rise, and climate change are only preserved in myth and legend, leading to speculation that we have a species-wide amnesia. We have only recently found that our genome contains contributions from at least three other species -- Neanderthal, Denisovan, and another as-yet-unknown hominid.
Life is a thread interwoven with hidden archetypes which remain entangled in our eternal present. We're already in our phenomenological graves. If we can embrace the ancient soul of our ancestors soulfully and creatively, we may engage and fall in love with the sacred again. Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life.
In our own genealogy, we begin to reveal a pattern in which we can locate a felt sense of understanding, a resonance that speaks to us within a myth or traces the path of a wounding through therapy. We can followed the thread of understanding using dreamwork, ritual, or other depth psychological methods, or experience the numinous on some unalterable level that changes us forever.
Genealogy can be our approach and return to the sacred. To understand the living we commune with the dead. We approach the phenomena of the psyche as we do the phenomena of nature. We've unwittingly buried with our ancestors any symbolic or revelatory meaning that would otherwise push its way through from the unconscious.
Modern life has short-circuited our connection with the primeval unconscious resulting in an intolerable rift -- psychic dissociation. This division separates us from the sacred, limiting our capacity to navigate divine corridors of the numinous, relegating us to lives of estrangement, isolation, and alienation.
Potentiality of Meaning
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth.
Genealogy becomes our altar to the sacred -- to the Great
Mystery that surrounds ideas of primordial mind, ancestral and shamanic wisdom, visionary transpersonal experiences, and other numinosum. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to our ancestry, wholeness, and deep history. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood.
Information Storage & Retrieval
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
Radical new proposals from physics are arising for vectors of information. Ervin Laszlo has linked it with psi phenomena and an integral theory recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. He bootstraps from the Sanskrit, calling non-local interaction the Akasha Paradigm -- an entangled self-actualizing cosmos not limited to the here and now. We can connect and feel into each other. Laszlo shows the cosmos of the Akasha to be a self-actualizing, self-organizing whole. Each part is in coherence with all others and all parts together create the conditions for the emergence of life and consciousness. (2007; 2014).
http://manifestdestinytriforce.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-akashic-records-what-are-they-do.html
Igor V. Limar (2012) proposes linking synchronicity, correlated mental processes, and quantum entanglement. Mental processes of two different persons correlate not just when the subjects are located at a distance from each other, but also when both persons are alternately (and sequentially, one after the other) located in the same point of space. In this case, there is a time gap between manifestation of mental process in one person and manifestation of mental process in the other person.
NeuroQuantology, Sept. 2012, Vol. 10, Issue 3, Page 489-491.
"A Version of Jung’s Synchronicity in the Event of Correlation of Mental Processes in the Past and the Future: Possible Role of Quantum Entanglement in Quantum Vacuum"
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/477/535
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets. Jung spoke of it poetically, "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." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Generational Archetypes
Everything we do starts with feeling and feeling starts in the family. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe created the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It identifies a recurring generational cycle in the last five centuries of Anglo-American history. It can be explained by four generational archetypes that repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern every 80-100 years. This is the unfixed length of a long human life the ancients called a “saeculum," which can be divided into four "seasons" of approximately 22 years each; these seasons represent youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.
Basically, this sociological generational theory describes how the era a person was born into affects the development of their view of the world. Our value systems are shaped in the first decade or so of our lives, by our families, our friends, our communities, significant events and the general era in which we are born.
All cultures are shared unconscious fantasies about how to live life. Traditional cultures viewed time as cyclical, much as the waxing and waning of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the birth and death of living creatures, the planting and harvesting of crops, and the seasons of the year. The idea of sacred time as an eternal round and the symbol of the ring or wheel are cross-cultural symbols. There is a repeating cycle in historical generational values. Each 20-year long generation faces similar issues and experiences.
http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
Beyond the modern pop nomenclature of Greatest Generation, Boomers, and Gens X, Y, Millennials, and Post-Millennials ("Homeland Generation"), their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, expands the theory focusing on a pulsating fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history. Graeme Codrington summarizes the repeating cycle.
Social Cycle Theory
[Each] 80 year period of human history, we start with a crisis period, when society has to stop and deal with an issue that actually changes institutions and structures. Children born during such a time grow up to be like the Silent generation of today. This is followed by an outer directed and driven period of rebuilding, with grand visions and big dreams, giving rise to a Boomer-like generation. This idealistic world cannot be sustained, however, and a period of disillusionment and breaking down follows, with society being reconfigured and adjusted. The children of this era grow up to be like Generation X is today. This era is followed by an inner-directed era, where leaders, institutions and society itself focuses on consolidating and building new foundations, rebuilding institutions and protecting the young. This era gives rise to the type of people who are from the GI generation and the Millennial generation today. Finally, this inner-directed focus cannot be maintained, and a crisis occurs, sparking a new cycle.
If this is correct, then generational theorists are expecting a major crisis to hit global society in the next few years. This is something that will cause society to stop, reconsider and reconstitute itself. http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
While they focus on the history of the United States, including the Colonial era and British antecedents, they also find similar generational trends around the globe from the late Medieval period. They have defined generational archetypes in cohort groups that express the zeitgeist of their times. While such attributions are arguable they can provide a touchstone for certain eras and their collective culture.
http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/generational-archetypes.html
They group four generations into a series of 80-year cyclic 'turnings' that include an initial 'high', followed by 'awakening,' unraveling,' and 'crisis.' Their archetypes include 'prophet,' 'nomad,' 'hero,' and 'artist' generations. We can think of such themes as collective dreams. Repeating cycles are a common theme for both individuals and whole generations.
As is the generation of leaves, so to of men:
At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth, and the season of spring comes
into existence;
So it is with the generations of men, which
alternately come forth and pass away.
– Homer, The Illiad, Book Six
We might benefit from the generational method in formulating our own Big Picture, as well as broad-stroke insights for our own generation within the pattern. The theory contends that each new generation entering a specific lifestage will redefine that lifestage and change it either subtly or dramatically. As generations clash there is a collision of values, expectations, ambitions, attitudes and behaviors -- the generation gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
Self-Generating Creativity
Prima materia is the "beginning of all," "the abyss," the primary chaotic earth, or principle of existence in general. In his 1941 ETH lecture, Jung describes how many philosophers have sought information about the prima materia from inhabitants of Hades, or in the "habitation of souls." This is the realm of psychic dark matter, what is hidden from view.
This "land of the dead" is also known as "the egg," "Adam's Earth," "Mercurial serpent," "winged dragon," and the "entrance to the West,” "the root of itself," the dark sky of night, the non-created, or eternity. Or, as Jung states, in Liber Novus, "Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of." (Page 244).
Prima materia is also called a neglected, rejected, and abandoned "orphan." The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Such self-organizing complexity is the beginning and end of transformation and renewal. This is the creative process Jung spoke about.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life (CW 15, P. 82)
Edinger (1978) compares the problem of discovering the prima materia to the problem of finding what to work on in psychotherapy. He gives some hints:
(1) It is ubiquitous, to be found everywhere, before the eyes of all. This means that psychotherapeutic material likewise is everywhere, in all the ordinary, everyday occurrences of life. Moods and petty personal reactions of all kinds are suitable matter to be worked on by the therapeutic process.
(2) Although of great inward value, the primal materia is vile in outer appearance and therefore despised, rejected or thrown on the dung heap. The prima materia is treated like the suffering servant in Isaiah. Psychologically, this means that the primal materia is found in the shadow, that part of the personality which is considered most despicable. Those aspects of ourselves most painful and most humiliating are the very ones to be brought forward and worked on.
(3) It appears as multiplicity, "has as many names as there are things," but at the same time is one. This feature corresponds to the fact that initially psychotherapy makes one aware of his/her fragmented, disjointed condition. Very gradually these warring fragments are discovered to be differing aspects of ones underlying unity. It is as though one sees the fingers of a hand touching a table at first only in two dimensions, as separate unconnected fingers. With three-dimensional vision, the fingers are seen as part of a larger unity, the hand.
(4) The prima materia is undifferentiated, without definite boundaries, limits or form. This corresponds to a certain experience of the unconscious which exposes the ego to the infinite. ...It may evoke the terror of dissolution or the awe of eternity. It provides a glimpse of the pleroma. ...the chaos prior to the operation of the World-creating Logos. It is the fear of the boundless that often leads one to be content with the ego-limits he has rather than risk falling into the infinite by attempting to enlarge them.
The different operations to transform the prima materia follow as the natural consequences of finding the material to work on. The imagery associated with these operations is profuse and draws from ancestors (genetic memory), myth, religion and folklore. The symbols for all these imagery-systems comes from the collective unconscious.
Dying to be Heard
Jung implies we cannot get rid of the unconscious and its intuitions, which are rooted in our instinctual, reflexive, and parasympathic systems. But we can go from being 'herd' to being heard. We can engage in intentional multisensory dialogue with our depths. It arises from the primordial ground of the subquantal level of every quantum particle of our being. Jung likened Hades to a black hole without an outlet.
When we enter our genealogy we enter the realm of the dead, so we must find a way to reconcile that metaphor and our surrender to the process. Jung cautions, "Under certain conditions living people can descend into Hades, but it does not agree with them. One must really be dead to go there, for it is the dark land where the dead are imprisoned; and this is a place from which this marvellous substance comes." (ETH, Pages 215-223.)
In Arcadia, the ancients sought out the Necromanteion or "Oracle of Death" where they communed with their dead ancestors in a psychoactive ritual. Though there were many oracles of the dead, the Necromanteion of Ephyra was the most important. Herodotus recounts that Periander, sent emissaries in the 6th century BC to ask questions of his dead wife, Melissa. In his nekyia, Odysseus enters Hades through the Necromanteion.
We can listen to the voice that has no words --the voice of the silence. We're all connected via the interactive sea of energy that connects us to everyone and everything in our world. It seems Hades presides over our descents and perhaps our descendancy. According to Jung, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven." (Liber Novus, Page 240.)
Caves always had their own gods. The underworld with its narrow jagged gaps is essential to many spiritual worldviews. We can imagine that a notion of hell arose early in mankind's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes of deep caverns that seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshipped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
Mankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths that tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
In some sense, hell was our ancient dwelling place to which we returned upon death -- a metaphorical regression to the primal epoch. With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. The dreamworld became a stone cold abyss and the primordial underworld was born.
The first proto-images appeared in cave art. Men and women impulsively desired to participate in the potential transforming powers of the "insides." Hades, the devouring one, could be contacted in the dark cavern of fathomless psychic force. The dismal labyrinthine complexity gave rise to the original trope. The soul is within, below, buried deep in self as within earth itself. This is the archetypal sleepworld of Hypnos and Thanatos.
If we accept that death is not the enemy but a doorway we can rest naturally in what is. The great invitation is to accept death. Lao Tzu invites us to give up the fight against death so existence is revealed as sublime relaxation. Each moment becomes a surrender, one of ‘touch and let go.’ We must not hide, but rather be open to all aspects of being. In sublime relaxation, shadow issues can emerge, some even hidden by our nondual language and cliches. All is grist for death’s mill.
In archetypal psychology, soul remains close to death -- disease, disorder, collapse. We die to the literal and concrete world of the senses for the sake of soul. Hillman imagined Hades right alongside daily life, the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning. It is the gaps between breaths. The dreamworld is also the underworld of Hades. From Hades perspective we are our images. By "letting be," we can allow dream images to speak for themselves, rather than forcing them toward interpretations for mundane life.
The underworld is the primal void -- the prima materia. Underworld is psyche. It is not a place but a hidden domain of liminal experience -- a dimension not available in itself. Our concern with Hades here regarding our ancestors is the spontaneous image-making of the soul. The 'ground' is a fathomless depth.
We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemy. We can understand the "death experience" metaphorically and psychologically, but we still must all confront it with naked awareness without the symbols and images born of nature's own workings.
Some families never forget who they are, while others struggle with a few fragments that don't seem to fit together. Either way it's a puzzle with some missing or damaged pieces. We must keep the big picture in mind to understand the smaller parts. We all have the ability to recognize and seize the deep sense of mystery that lives in our own lives.
Undoubtedly, there is a sacred dimension to the genealogical process, more so when we do the work ourselves. In our first attempts we cross the threshold of initiation. Jung suggests, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation." (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.)
"From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death ..." ~Carl Jung; Soul and death, CW 8, §800.
History, Memories, Stories
With genealogy we dig below the basement of our personal unconscious to find what lies below that still haunts or calls for us. What has been buried in the past yet is not gone nor dormant because it is part of the our psychophysical being. Our adaptive survival styles can distort identity in adult life.
To reclaim our ancestral soul we suffer through the anguish of the unknown as well as the burdens of what we do find from which we wished to protect ourselves. There is shock trauma and developmental trauma. We find things that are great and things that are tragic. Genealogy gives and it takes.
The Trail That Never Ends
Such discoveries have been popularized by media: “Finding Your Roots”‘, "Who Do You Think You Are", “Roots of Faith Ancestry”, "Genealogy Roadshow", and others. Genealogy is touted as the second biggest hobby in America. People want to reconnect with their ancestral homeland to know where and how they lived. http://b.treelines.com/in-defense-of-genealogy-as-a-hobby/
Finding Yourself
Many feel compelled to take on the project. Online genealogy sites are some of the most popular on the web. It's a thrill extending the family heritage back a few more generations or discovering that your family is related to royalty, or allegedly to the legends of history. The progenitor of the clan lies at the root of the male line.
Bi-Lateral Descent
Our own bi-lateral descent includes both of our parents. But each female in our direct descent has her own bi-lateral lines, as well. We honor not only our paternal surname (patrilineal descent), but all those grandmothers whose families keep our lines invigorated with new blood.
New surnames enter the tree with each wife. These are not easy lines to follow, retrieve, or draw without the aid of computers. Maiden names often present brick walls difficult to push beyond. Pedigrees show both family-as-child and their families-as-parent.
Algorithm Genealogy
Rather than mere family trees, massive genealogical sites with billions of records have been likened to Amazonian forests of family connections of blood ties and marriage bridges. Genealogists who explore the family tree information, weeding out false or duplicate information, call themselves "forest rangers." When genealogies were digitally archived it became possible for algorithms to find lines of descent that included both male and female progenitors.
Thus, genealogy reclaimed the realm of the Mothers -- a return of the Feminine to genealogy where female lines are equally valued. Algorithm genealogy finds paths of mixed fathers and mothers to particular ancestors that might not otherwise be discernible. This is particularly so for ancient and legendary ancestors. Usually, the term “Descents from Antiquity” refers to modern efforts to find plausible lines of descent. However, it can also include traditional descents that have varying degrees of reliability.
Matrilineal descent is called a "mother line". An individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as her or his mother. The matriline of historical nobility was also called her or his enatic or uterine ancestry (corresponding to the patrilineal "agnatic" ancestry).
Family Relationships
Algorithms can find all family relationships. Data structure represents a genealogy or genealogies as a stand-alone date structure. Genealogy is considered as a finite, connected graph that enables storage of the minimum of family relationships and recognition of them and others like 'ancestor-descendant', 'sibs', 'twins', 'cousins', 'uncle/aunt-nephew/niece' or 'spouses'. Algorithms for genealogy retrieval are classified as vertical, lateral and parallel. In certain combinations, vertical and lateral algorithms become capable of finding any relatives, no matter if they are in a direct 'ancestor-descendant' relationship or if they have only the same ancestor(s). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8366693
Like miners for meaning we tunnel through our history encountering riches and danger below. But genealogy also has its own myths. As we proceed, we dig deeper into our multigenerational study. Like ancient navigators, we have to course correct along the way for errors, forgeries, and fictitious ancestors. Genealogy is not a mash-up of metaphysical percepts, concepts, and pareidolia. We begin with percepts (i.e. the senses, from which we initially
know reality), not concepts (i.e. what we imagine the world to be or, commonly, wish it would become).
Re-Cording the Ties that Bind
Genealogy directly manifests the psyche as a transpersonal field that informs our personality and sustains us. Each ancestral couple embodies psychic polarities from exaltation to the conscious and unconscious suffering that brings positive developments such as enhanced empathy, wisdom, or spiritual development. Speaking of the opposites in his 1925 Seminar (p.85), Jung says, "Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death."
As we engage our ancestors we engage the numinous. We discover our mythic roots, the injured feminine, sacrifice, and other powerful archetypal forces of the cauldron of generativity -- the central theme of humanity. Sexuality, love, and spirituality play through the epic ancestral drama, uniting the opposites, again and again, shaping who we are and weaving patterns of conditioning and potential wholeness.
Genealogy can help us recapture that sense through creating a sacred space that allows us to reconnect in a direct way with our ancient past. Encounters with our ancestors, historical and imaginal, are encounters with soul. The imaginal becomes virtual and probabilistic vision. We don't need to split our subjective self from the the objective perception of the world. Perhaps "the view from death" enriches and enlarges the improbability of the gift of life. More than 10,000 ancestors are dreaming of you.
Feel It, Reveal It, Heal It
The emotional brain reacts the same way to objective or virtual information. In fact, the later may prompt a stronger brain response. Even when subliminal, the brain produces a global response to the unexpected, but it is more recognition than complex cognition. The neural correlates of conscious, global processing across the entire network are also generated during unconscious activity...even when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, leading to activity over the entire network. We can speculate that waves of virtual particles might indeed create real effects.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28444-leading-theory-of-consciousness-rocked-by-oddball-study/
Physics is finding that the arrow of time does not seem to follow the standard laws of physics. Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
The Crucible of Love
It is well-known to clergy and psychologists that on their deathbeds, people don't wish to discuss God or religion, but their own families. Many are not afraid to die but don't want to leave their living families. They speak and may even call out to their parents, their sons and daughters, or see lost spouses.
Or, we may call on our 'godparents,' those whom we've chosen as nurturing allies, known or unknown, for their inspiration and succor. Hillman noted as we become old we develop character which makes us fit ancestors and mentors. Soul's Code (1997)
We are born into and create our lives in families and families we create. This is where we find meaning, where our purpose becomes clear. There we experience love and first give it, and are hurt, betrayed, or rejected by caregivers and siblings. In this crucible of love we begin asking big spiritual questions to which we come back in the very end. Jung admonishes us, "My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart." (The Red Book, Page 232)
Those images in the conscious mirror reflect both the material and universal soul, our spiritual essence through a "sympathy," an intelligence of spirit that reflects the animation of the material world and the union of cosmic reality.
Some confess what it feels like to know that they neglected, criticized, abandoned, or engulfed and overwhelmed their children, or that drinking destroyed their family. They lament they were physically or psychologically abusive, or failed to care for those who most needed them. It isn't difficult to understand how such behavior leaves its mark on the future. All seem to know what is missing, and what was deserved by the innocent.
On their deathbeds, people often speak of the love they felt and gave away -- or didn't receive or give, or even known how to offer unconditionally. Love may be imperfect, emotionally unavailable, or entirely missing, or full of rage and trauma -- or uncertain and ambiguous. In the end the meaning of life is concerned only with love -- lost and found. Love is what matters -- perhaps the only thing that matters in the end.
We may hope we've had a gift to give. When the love is imperfect, or a family is destructive, forgiveness can be learned. Our spiritual work as human beings is learning how to love and how to forgive. Most have a simple wish that someone will remember them fondly and that they lived and loved fully, even if they know they have not.
But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart. The Egyptians had a ceremony for weighing the lightness of the heart against the weight of a feather of Ma'at for balance. Thought, memory, and emotion came from the heart. Today we speak of the neurological heart-brain and gut-brain. We might imagine weighing our own hearts for such psychic and emotional balance.
Exploring our family tree helps us explore the depths of love. We never say goodbye to those we hold in our hearts. If we listen with our heart, we make a mindful journey as we wend our way along. We won't know where it is leading. As in physics, the very act of our observation disturbs and alters the whole system through our participation.
Long buried issues come up, are unburied, challenge and lay claim to us somatically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. Many develop self-destructive biological processes or behaviors. We may need to reconnect with Death and our own death to reorient ourselves in life and find sanctuary. Doors are opened and closed by the mysterious spirit behind life and death.
Our dreams and the body will tell us. We may come to understand that fate itself rules and as we age we have to give up our own story, our merely personal history, to find peace. We find in some sense the end is in the beginning. Even death may need to feel our love. Death becomes our medicine.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the self-unfolding dynamics. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold generation after generation. It creates a wealth of energy that we find is a source of wisdom and containment. Inner guidance connects us with source. We awaken from our illusion of separateness by embracing our extended family.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children to the parents, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Spontaneous fantasies with all kinds of implications will naturally arise in the genealogical process. Jung notes that such play of ideas and impression can be purposeful and valuable. Hillman says we wrestle with our spirits at night.
"The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. (Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82).
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Such 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes a receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. In-between two physical systems, entrainment synchronizes one entity to vibrate in an identical way in metaphorical response to the Other.
"The Orphan" Soul
Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence -- the instinctual and the luminous. It may at first come as an emotional flooding or an inundation of fantasies before that massa confusa of primal material differentiates. We may experience loss and grief that things haven't worked out as we might have hoped. Powerful events can triggers such feelings.
It evokes an image of the archetypal "orphan soul" sought by alchemists to create the Philosopher's Stone. Secret fire is the "leaded" fuel that cooks under the surface from the "heat" of awareness -- that cooks it into conscious experience. This calcination is Stage 1 of our spiritual alchemy, which is followed by dissolution (solutio) and separation (coagulatio).
We begin in a state of disintegration, of insensibility, and gradually reach greater awareness. We all have a bit of the disillusioned orphan in us. Some have living parents who were never available or are now emotionally unavailable. We may be alienated but long to belong or connect in a meaningful way. Perhaps we resonate with other orphans in our lines.
The experience of "adult orphans" is often underplayed as we consider the death of our parents 'normal' in adulthood, but it is a condition worthy of attention, and genealogy is one way to address it, to deepen it, to deal with abandonment and loss. Jung says, "When one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guide."
This is no seance, spiritualism, hallucination, or lunacy, and should not be approached as such. It is not supernatural. This is an involuntary flood of charged emotions arising from the unconscious. Often double binds and hyperarousal lead to emotional flooding -- that ocean of emotion. Much of the trauma is held in the body in structure, soft tissue, and symptoms.
It's All Relative
For example, we may have internalized the traits of one parent, as well as the other parent's loathing of those qualities. If you are overloaded you may feel swamped. You may dream of tsunamis. Such feelings are linked to helplessness, frustration, anger, feeling trapped, remorse, guilt, and self-hate.
Orphans have to learn to not be loyal to their suffering, the abandonment, trauma, and betrayal. But we must be willing to accept our grief and loneliness and let go. It's not just your pain or hurt, but the hurt of humanity in this vastness. We can learn mercy and forgiveness, within our Tree and for ourselves. We may transform from hating and being incensed, to the sweet fragrance of an incense tree that perfumes our sacred space.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. We can view it as an acronym for "pay attention; integrate now." When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children of the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but if we don't have an urn, we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead. We may house skeletons in the basement of our subconscious.
Even grieving can be a sacred space -- a Grail space where magic can happen. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness, a depression.
We can learn self-compassion to carry our pain more graciously. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process and sea of people.
We are never experts in this task, as Confucious reminds us: "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." In 2009, China acknowledged a new Confucianism by publishing the genealogy of the 800-year-old Kong family on a computer database at China's National Library in Beijing.
China is trying to revive its traditional culture, including genealogy. "The Chinese have always been interested in their past -- worship of ancestors is worship of origins." (Heinz 1999:225). Kong Ming, a 33-year-old businessman from Shanghai, began researching his family in 1998. His elderly grandfather dug up the coffin in which he had hidden the family records to escape persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Heinz, Carolyn Brown, Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, Inc., 1999).
Tian, commonly translated as Heaven or Sky, but philologically meaning the Great One, the Great Whole, is a key concept in Confucianism. "Forming one body with the universe" is a neo-Confucian ideal. As we work, formlessness congeals into form. We arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world."
In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. Our personal family tree merges with the collective World Tree. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has no telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
Pleroma
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..." Jung's plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. Space isn't an empty vacuum but characterized as a fullness and creative flow.
Science tells us the ultimate state of rest is the virtual vacuum of absolute space, the Zero Point, zero-phase geometry. It is the groundstate of being and has been likened to the Akashic Field and universal memory by Ervin Lazlo (2007).
This subquantum coherent field is pure information. Rather than linear lines of ancestors, we might think of them metaphorically as superpositions of our deep ancestry -- a superwave "reaching over" with interference peaks, information states with entangled and partly coherent stimulated emissions.
Jung called it the Pleroma, after the Gnostics. The non-dual is beyond all distinctions, a field that is the only reality. "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness." In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. There is no one in it because they would be differentiated from the Pleroma, according to the Red Book. We must watch out for what we believe, but we can entertain many notions.
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there.
An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey.
Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into historical amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects up- and down-regulation of gene expression and disease development.
Upregulation and downregulation can also happen as a response to toxins or hormones. An example of upregulation in pregnancy is hormones that cause cells in the uterus to become more sensitive to oxytocin.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Because the brain accepts the imaginal as real, changes take place at a physical and mental level. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. We remember the past but not the future because of a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
10,000 Paths to the Passed
Each of our ancestors is a gate to our Inner Sanctum, to our soul. Genealogy is the relational mode of understanding. The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge.
In the beginning everything is chaotic, fluid, co-mingled, and undifferentiated. Its alchemical symbol is a 3-headed serpent or dragon, of Sulpher, Mercury, and Salt. This represents the dance of Sun and Moon, King and Queen, the archetypal superpatterns of male and female, and their material offspring. We spring from the soul and remain the child of our ancestors.
In every adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286
First matter gives universe its properties. It organizes into the Elements, (fire, water, air, and earth), which are the building blocks of words, thought-ideas or archetypes. It is liminal, between manifest and unmanifest. It is the spiritualized essence or soul of substance: identity, form, and function oscillating between creation and destruction.
We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive something; the creation in its own essence is also destructive. You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people's organic health. It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing. Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560).
"The transformation of Mercurius, as prima materia, in the heated, sealed vessel is comparable to cooking the basic instinctive drives in their own affect until their essential fantasy content becomes conscious."
“Instead of arguing with the drives which carry us away, we prefer to cook them and . ask then what they want. . . . That can be discovered by active imagination, or through experimenting in reality, but always with the introverted attitude of observing objectively what the drive really wants.” (Marie von Franz, Alchemy, p. 129)
It is often suggested the prima materia is found in "feces" or lead which is alchemical code for matter or the physical body and what gets shoved down into the unconscious. The first matter is cyclic, contains all the elements, and is the source of the Philosopher's Stone -- the egg or light of Nature; Anima Mundi or Soul of the World.
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. Emotions are part of the reasoning process itself -- bodily intelligence.
This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for the treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation & Suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetics demonstrates that we inherit our parents' trauma and family secrets. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Traumas are events that induce intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state in PTSD. Trigger a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.
To be whole is to be full of contradictions. The unity never becomes apparent because the opposites within us operate and mingle in various ways and it is their interaction that makes the whole man. The complete human being, the hermaphrodite, is never visible. He is indescribable, always a mystical experience. (Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung - Ostrowski,)
So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
Serpent's Breath
The serpent in that Tree is its numinous voice, with its active dynamic kundalini -- the Serpent Power, the Secret Fire, the life force or basic animating principle -- the quintessence of matter. Never calling it evil, Genesis 3:1 says, "Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."
Our serpentine lines of ancestral descent recursively bite their own tails in the primordial archetype of the Orobouros. “"All human things are a circle” was inscribed on the temple at Athens.
The Hermetic "Holy Grail" was a circular crater or bowl of regeneration described in the fourth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was a font of immersion symbolizing the constant decay and renewal of all things, present in all Nature. The genealogical Holy Grail is found in royal lines that include the Arthurian legends then trace back to roots in various gods and goddesses.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
Grail symbolism encompasses the womb that always makes children, the horn and cup that serve drink, and the cauldron and bowl that give food. The quest for the Grail comes from these primal facts of life.
The holy bowl -- the cranium, where heaven meets earth -- is where individual souls mix with universal mind in a metaphor of immersive experience, The immersive baptism of wisdom or gnosis means 'living water' that springs up in creativity and illumination -- "the drink of the soul by the sweet stream of wisdom (Sophia)."
What Are They Remembering For Us?
Our history is our collective transgenerational memory. No people can successfully live outside of their memory. Jung tells us that, "Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force." (MDR, Page 277). The past plays one of the most critical roles in Western civilization. but it is so embedded, so obvious that it becomes invisible. The past remains with us as experiences change sperm and eggs.
Genes aren't the cause of most disease; the cause of most disease alters genetic expression. Epigenetics is revealing the biological transmission of molecular memory -- that we can pass down altered responses, emotional trauma, agitated nervous systems, under-regulated immune systems, chronic over-inflammation, and somatic disorders.
Biological Legacy
Ancestral behavior can also mutate single genes. Everybody has a different level of tolerance for alcohol, but some people act very strangely, exhibiting reckless, impulsive, violent, or even dangerous behavior on alcohol. Finnish researchers found that a fairly common mutation in serotonin 2B receptor gene can render some prone to impulsive behavior by nature, sober or under the influence of alcohol. They struggle with self-control or mood disorders.
“One of our main findings was that the HTR2B Q20* predicted alcohol-related risk-behaviors. The HTR2B Q20* carriers demonstrated aggressive out-bursts, got into fights and behaved in an impulsive manner under the influence of alcohol. They were also arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol more often than the controls."
“The HTR2B Q20* carriers were not alcoholics per se, as measured by average alcohol consumption, and were not diagnosed as alcoholics, but they had a tendency to lose behavioral control while under the influence of alcohol.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/common-genetic-mutation-linked-to-reckless-drunken-behaviour?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore
All cells have a genetic code with information to produce certain proteins to carry out vital processes. Chemical switches can turn genes on or off, or crank them up or down, so the cells know which proteins to produce and in what quantities. These switches or epigenetic tags are altered by environment, bad habits, and experience, passed on to their offspring, and their offspring's offspring.
Sperm and eggs carry genetic memories of parents' health well before conception. Even what grandparents ate and the father's behavior long before conception can influence the child's health in a range from mood disorders to mental illness. They inherit parents' psychic burdens, anxiety, low impulse control. Older people can unconsciously externalizes their traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. The physical transmission of the horrors of the past is “embodied history.”
Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors by complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Epigenetics changes the way instructions in the genetic code were translated and carried out by the body.
We are more than our transgenerational wounds. Our essence transcends our identification with history. In healing we are not alone, we trust a path to greater freedom, and feel our relationship to the suffering of our family lineage. We feel lighter when we release the burdens of our own trauma or family history. We can make wider choices and expand our sense of belonging in the world.
The Spent Breath of Millions
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique. As Jung says, "But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world." (Letters Vol. II, Page 567)
Perhaps the ancestors inform us in their own way. Intuition is information that is received by the mind. But for that information to be useful, it must be analyzed and purposefully acted upon. When integrated we act on those intuitive impulses with wise judgment and confidence. Creative ideas then take shape in manifest form.
Primordial Psyche
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession. But they also have complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns we can discern. This is the realm of the imaginal -- primordial images or instinctual energy which nevertheless have objective effects.
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited.
Archetypes & Instincts
That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. In Jungian thought, when we search for our "other half" and perhaps for our ancestors, too, we actually seek the integration of the elements of the unconscious psyche. “It is always important to have something to bring into a relationship, and solitude is often the means by which you acquire it” (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610, Letters Vol. II.)
As Jung notes, "Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of nature and is connected to his own roots." (Symbols of Transformation, Page 23).
If I speak of the collective unconscious I don't assume it as a principle, I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
The Platonic "Idea" is in this case no longer intellectual but a psychic, instinctual pattern. Instinctual patterns can be found in human beings too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
"Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." ("Transformation Symbolism in the Mass", CW 11, para. 401).
Inherent Nature of Man
Jung thought the "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species. They grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena.
Water is the cosmogonic element by which the self sinks into involuntary immersion in the dimensional abysses. Our pre-historical ancestors have sunk in the Atlantis of the waters of the unconscious. This may be more than symbolic as we now know humanity has gone through a few local and global catastrophic events.
Supervolcanoes, repeated glaciation, meteor, and comet falls, massive sea-rise, and climate change are only preserved in myth and legend, leading to speculation that we have a species-wide amnesia. We have only recently found that our genome contains contributions from at least three other species -- Neanderthal, Denisovan, and another as-yet-unknown hominid.
Life is a thread interwoven with hidden archetypes which remain entangled in our eternal present. We're already in our phenomenological graves. If we can embrace the ancient soul of our ancestors soulfully and creatively, we may engage and fall in love with the sacred again. Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life.
In our own genealogy, we begin to reveal a pattern in which we can locate a felt sense of understanding, a resonance that speaks to us within a myth or traces the path of a wounding through therapy. We can followed the thread of understanding using dreamwork, ritual, or other depth psychological methods, or experience the numinous on some unalterable level that changes us forever.
Genealogy can be our approach and return to the sacred. To understand the living we commune with the dead. We approach the phenomena of the psyche as we do the phenomena of nature. We've unwittingly buried with our ancestors any symbolic or revelatory meaning that would otherwise push its way through from the unconscious.
Modern life has short-circuited our connection with the primeval unconscious resulting in an intolerable rift -- psychic dissociation. This division separates us from the sacred, limiting our capacity to navigate divine corridors of the numinous, relegating us to lives of estrangement, isolation, and alienation.
Potentiality of Meaning
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth.
Genealogy becomes our altar to the sacred -- to the Great
Mystery that surrounds ideas of primordial mind, ancestral and shamanic wisdom, visionary transpersonal experiences, and other numinosum. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to our ancestry, wholeness, and deep history. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood.
Information Storage & Retrieval
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
Radical new proposals from physics are arising for vectors of information. Ervin Laszlo has linked it with psi phenomena and an integral theory recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. He bootstraps from the Sanskrit, calling non-local interaction the Akasha Paradigm -- an entangled self-actualizing cosmos not limited to the here and now. We can connect and feel into each other. Laszlo shows the cosmos of the Akasha to be a self-actualizing, self-organizing whole. Each part is in coherence with all others and all parts together create the conditions for the emergence of life and consciousness. (2007; 2014).
http://manifestdestinytriforce.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-akashic-records-what-are-they-do.html
Igor V. Limar (2012) proposes linking synchronicity, correlated mental processes, and quantum entanglement. Mental processes of two different persons correlate not just when the subjects are located at a distance from each other, but also when both persons are alternately (and sequentially, one after the other) located in the same point of space. In this case, there is a time gap between manifestation of mental process in one person and manifestation of mental process in the other person.
NeuroQuantology, Sept. 2012, Vol. 10, Issue 3, Page 489-491.
"A Version of Jung’s Synchronicity in the Event of Correlation of Mental Processes in the Past and the Future: Possible Role of Quantum Entanglement in Quantum Vacuum"
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/477/535
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets. Jung spoke of it poetically, "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." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Generational Archetypes
Everything we do starts with feeling and feeling starts in the family. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe created the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It identifies a recurring generational cycle in the last five centuries of Anglo-American history. It can be explained by four generational archetypes that repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern every 80-100 years. This is the unfixed length of a long human life the ancients called a “saeculum," which can be divided into four "seasons" of approximately 22 years each; these seasons represent youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.
Basically, this sociological generational theory describes how the era a person was born into affects the development of their view of the world. Our value systems are shaped in the first decade or so of our lives, by our families, our friends, our communities, significant events and the general era in which we are born.
All cultures are shared unconscious fantasies about how to live life. Traditional cultures viewed time as cyclical, much as the waxing and waning of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the birth and death of living creatures, the planting and harvesting of crops, and the seasons of the year. The idea of sacred time as an eternal round and the symbol of the ring or wheel are cross-cultural symbols. There is a repeating cycle in historical generational values. Each 20-year long generation faces similar issues and experiences.
http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
Beyond the modern pop nomenclature of Greatest Generation, Boomers, and Gens X, Y, Millennials, and Post-Millennials ("Homeland Generation"), their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, expands the theory focusing on a pulsating fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history. Graeme Codrington summarizes the repeating cycle.
Social Cycle Theory
[Each] 80 year period of human history, we start with a crisis period, when society has to stop and deal with an issue that actually changes institutions and structures. Children born during such a time grow up to be like the Silent generation of today. This is followed by an outer directed and driven period of rebuilding, with grand visions and big dreams, giving rise to a Boomer-like generation. This idealistic world cannot be sustained, however, and a period of disillusionment and breaking down follows, with society being reconfigured and adjusted. The children of this era grow up to be like Generation X is today. This era is followed by an inner-directed era, where leaders, institutions and society itself focuses on consolidating and building new foundations, rebuilding institutions and protecting the young. This era gives rise to the type of people who are from the GI generation and the Millennial generation today. Finally, this inner-directed focus cannot be maintained, and a crisis occurs, sparking a new cycle.
If this is correct, then generational theorists are expecting a major crisis to hit global society in the next few years. This is something that will cause society to stop, reconsider and reconstitute itself. http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
While they focus on the history of the United States, including the Colonial era and British antecedents, they also find similar generational trends around the globe from the late Medieval period. They have defined generational archetypes in cohort groups that express the zeitgeist of their times. While such attributions are arguable they can provide a touchstone for certain eras and their collective culture.
http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/generational-archetypes.html
They group four generations into a series of 80-year cyclic 'turnings' that include an initial 'high', followed by 'awakening,' unraveling,' and 'crisis.' Their archetypes include 'prophet,' 'nomad,' 'hero,' and 'artist' generations. We can think of such themes as collective dreams. Repeating cycles are a common theme for both individuals and whole generations.
As is the generation of leaves, so to of men:
At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth, and the season of spring comes
into existence;
So it is with the generations of men, which
alternately come forth and pass away.
– Homer, The Illiad, Book Six
We might benefit from the generational method in formulating our own Big Picture, as well as broad-stroke insights for our own generation within the pattern. The theory contends that each new generation entering a specific lifestage will redefine that lifestage and change it either subtly or dramatically. As generations clash there is a collision of values, expectations, ambitions, attitudes and behaviors -- the generation gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
Self-Generating Creativity
Prima materia is the "beginning of all," "the abyss," the primary chaotic earth, or principle of existence in general. In his 1941 ETH lecture, Jung describes how many philosophers have sought information about the prima materia from inhabitants of Hades, or in the "habitation of souls." This is the realm of psychic dark matter, what is hidden from view.
This "land of the dead" is also known as "the egg," "Adam's Earth," "Mercurial serpent," "winged dragon," and the "entrance to the West,” "the root of itself," the dark sky of night, the non-created, or eternity. Or, as Jung states, in Liber Novus, "Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of." (Page 244).
Prima materia is also called a neglected, rejected, and abandoned "orphan." The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Such self-organizing complexity is the beginning and end of transformation and renewal. This is the creative process Jung spoke about.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life (CW 15, P. 82)
Edinger (1978) compares the problem of discovering the prima materia to the problem of finding what to work on in psychotherapy. He gives some hints:
(1) It is ubiquitous, to be found everywhere, before the eyes of all. This means that psychotherapeutic material likewise is everywhere, in all the ordinary, everyday occurrences of life. Moods and petty personal reactions of all kinds are suitable matter to be worked on by the therapeutic process.
(2) Although of great inward value, the primal materia is vile in outer appearance and therefore despised, rejected or thrown on the dung heap. The prima materia is treated like the suffering servant in Isaiah. Psychologically, this means that the primal materia is found in the shadow, that part of the personality which is considered most despicable. Those aspects of ourselves most painful and most humiliating are the very ones to be brought forward and worked on.
(3) It appears as multiplicity, "has as many names as there are things," but at the same time is one. This feature corresponds to the fact that initially psychotherapy makes one aware of his/her fragmented, disjointed condition. Very gradually these warring fragments are discovered to be differing aspects of ones underlying unity. It is as though one sees the fingers of a hand touching a table at first only in two dimensions, as separate unconnected fingers. With three-dimensional vision, the fingers are seen as part of a larger unity, the hand.
(4) The prima materia is undifferentiated, without definite boundaries, limits or form. This corresponds to a certain experience of the unconscious which exposes the ego to the infinite. ...It may evoke the terror of dissolution or the awe of eternity. It provides a glimpse of the pleroma. ...the chaos prior to the operation of the World-creating Logos. It is the fear of the boundless that often leads one to be content with the ego-limits he has rather than risk falling into the infinite by attempting to enlarge them.
The different operations to transform the prima materia follow as the natural consequences of finding the material to work on. The imagery associated with these operations is profuse and draws from ancestors (genetic memory), myth, religion and folklore. The symbols for all these imagery-systems comes from the collective unconscious.
Dying to be Heard
Jung implies we cannot get rid of the unconscious and its intuitions, which are rooted in our instinctual, reflexive, and parasympathic systems. But we can go from being 'herd' to being heard. We can engage in intentional multisensory dialogue with our depths. It arises from the primordial ground of the subquantal level of every quantum particle of our being. Jung likened Hades to a black hole without an outlet.
When we enter our genealogy we enter the realm of the dead, so we must find a way to reconcile that metaphor and our surrender to the process. Jung cautions, "Under certain conditions living people can descend into Hades, but it does not agree with them. One must really be dead to go there, for it is the dark land where the dead are imprisoned; and this is a place from which this marvellous substance comes." (ETH, Pages 215-223.)
In Arcadia, the ancients sought out the Necromanteion or "Oracle of Death" where they communed with their dead ancestors in a psychoactive ritual. Though there were many oracles of the dead, the Necromanteion of Ephyra was the most important. Herodotus recounts that Periander, sent emissaries in the 6th century BC to ask questions of his dead wife, Melissa. In his nekyia, Odysseus enters Hades through the Necromanteion.
We can listen to the voice that has no words --the voice of the silence. We're all connected via the interactive sea of energy that connects us to everyone and everything in our world. It seems Hades presides over our descents and perhaps our descendancy. According to Jung, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven." (Liber Novus, Page 240.)
Caves always had their own gods. The underworld with its narrow jagged gaps is essential to many spiritual worldviews. We can imagine that a notion of hell arose early in mankind's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes of deep caverns that seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshipped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
Mankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths that tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
In some sense, hell was our ancient dwelling place to which we returned upon death -- a metaphorical regression to the primal epoch. With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. The dreamworld became a stone cold abyss and the primordial underworld was born.
The first proto-images appeared in cave art. Men and women impulsively desired to participate in the potential transforming powers of the "insides." Hades, the devouring one, could be contacted in the dark cavern of fathomless psychic force. The dismal labyrinthine complexity gave rise to the original trope. The soul is within, below, buried deep in self as within earth itself. This is the archetypal sleepworld of Hypnos and Thanatos.
If we accept that death is not the enemy but a doorway we can rest naturally in what is. The great invitation is to accept death. Lao Tzu invites us to give up the fight against death so existence is revealed as sublime relaxation. Each moment becomes a surrender, one of ‘touch and let go.’ We must not hide, but rather be open to all aspects of being. In sublime relaxation, shadow issues can emerge, some even hidden by our nondual language and cliches. All is grist for death’s mill.
In archetypal psychology, soul remains close to death -- disease, disorder, collapse. We die to the literal and concrete world of the senses for the sake of soul. Hillman imagined Hades right alongside daily life, the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning. It is the gaps between breaths. The dreamworld is also the underworld of Hades. From Hades perspective we are our images. By "letting be," we can allow dream images to speak for themselves, rather than forcing them toward interpretations for mundane life.
The underworld is the primal void -- the prima materia. Underworld is psyche. It is not a place but a hidden domain of liminal experience -- a dimension not available in itself. Our concern with Hades here regarding our ancestors is the spontaneous image-making of the soul. The 'ground' is a fathomless depth.
We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemy. We can understand the "death experience" metaphorically and psychologically, but we still must all confront it with naked awareness without the symbols and images born of nature's own workings.
Some families never forget who they are, while others struggle with a few fragments that don't seem to fit together. Either way it's a puzzle with some missing or damaged pieces. We must keep the big picture in mind to understand the smaller parts. We all have the ability to recognize and seize the deep sense of mystery that lives in our own lives.
Undoubtedly, there is a sacred dimension to the genealogical process, more so when we do the work ourselves. In our first attempts we cross the threshold of initiation. Jung suggests, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation." (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.)
"From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death ..." ~Carl Jung; Soul and death, CW 8, §800.
History, Memories, Stories
With genealogy we dig below the basement of our personal unconscious to find what lies below that still haunts or calls for us. What has been buried in the past yet is not gone nor dormant because it is part of the our psychophysical being. Our adaptive survival styles can distort identity in adult life.
To reclaim our ancestral soul we suffer through the anguish of the unknown as well as the burdens of what we do find from which we wished to protect ourselves. There is shock trauma and developmental trauma. We find things that are great and things that are tragic. Genealogy gives and it takes.
The Trail That Never Ends
Such discoveries have been popularized by media: “Finding Your Roots”‘, "Who Do You Think You Are", “Roots of Faith Ancestry”, "Genealogy Roadshow", and others. Genealogy is touted as the second biggest hobby in America. People want to reconnect with their ancestral homeland to know where and how they lived. http://b.treelines.com/in-defense-of-genealogy-as-a-hobby/
Finding Yourself
Many feel compelled to take on the project. Online genealogy sites are some of the most popular on the web. It's a thrill extending the family heritage back a few more generations or discovering that your family is related to royalty, or allegedly to the legends of history. The progenitor of the clan lies at the root of the male line.
Bi-Lateral Descent
Our own bi-lateral descent includes both of our parents. But each female in our direct descent has her own bi-lateral lines, as well. We honor not only our paternal surname (patrilineal descent), but all those grandmothers whose families keep our lines invigorated with new blood.
New surnames enter the tree with each wife. These are not easy lines to follow, retrieve, or draw without the aid of computers. Maiden names often present brick walls difficult to push beyond. Pedigrees show both family-as-child and their families-as-parent.
Algorithm Genealogy
Rather than mere family trees, massive genealogical sites with billions of records have been likened to Amazonian forests of family connections of blood ties and marriage bridges. Genealogists who explore the family tree information, weeding out false or duplicate information, call themselves "forest rangers." When genealogies were digitally archived it became possible for algorithms to find lines of descent that included both male and female progenitors.
Thus, genealogy reclaimed the realm of the Mothers -- a return of the Feminine to genealogy where female lines are equally valued. Algorithm genealogy finds paths of mixed fathers and mothers to particular ancestors that might not otherwise be discernible. This is particularly so for ancient and legendary ancestors. Usually, the term “Descents from Antiquity” refers to modern efforts to find plausible lines of descent. However, it can also include traditional descents that have varying degrees of reliability.
Matrilineal descent is called a "mother line". An individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as her or his mother. The matriline of historical nobility was also called her or his enatic or uterine ancestry (corresponding to the patrilineal "agnatic" ancestry).
Family Relationships
Algorithms can find all family relationships. Data structure represents a genealogy or genealogies as a stand-alone date structure. Genealogy is considered as a finite, connected graph that enables storage of the minimum of family relationships and recognition of them and others like 'ancestor-descendant', 'sibs', 'twins', 'cousins', 'uncle/aunt-nephew/niece' or 'spouses'. Algorithms for genealogy retrieval are classified as vertical, lateral and parallel. In certain combinations, vertical and lateral algorithms become capable of finding any relatives, no matter if they are in a direct 'ancestor-descendant' relationship or if they have only the same ancestor(s). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8366693
Like miners for meaning we tunnel through our history encountering riches and danger below. But genealogy also has its own myths. As we proceed, we dig deeper into our multigenerational study. Like ancient navigators, we have to course correct along the way for errors, forgeries, and fictitious ancestors. Genealogy is not a mash-up of metaphysical percepts, concepts, and pareidolia. We begin with percepts (i.e. the senses, from which we initially
know reality), not concepts (i.e. what we imagine the world to be or, commonly, wish it would become).
Re-Cording the Ties that Bind
Genealogy directly manifests the psyche as a transpersonal field that informs our personality and sustains us. Each ancestral couple embodies psychic polarities from exaltation to the conscious and unconscious suffering that brings positive developments such as enhanced empathy, wisdom, or spiritual development. Speaking of the opposites in his 1925 Seminar (p.85), Jung says, "Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death."
As we engage our ancestors we engage the numinous. We discover our mythic roots, the injured feminine, sacrifice, and other powerful archetypal forces of the cauldron of generativity -- the central theme of humanity. Sexuality, love, and spirituality play through the epic ancestral drama, uniting the opposites, again and again, shaping who we are and weaving patterns of conditioning and potential wholeness.
Genealogy can help us recapture that sense through creating a sacred space that allows us to reconnect in a direct way with our ancient past. Encounters with our ancestors, historical and imaginal, are encounters with soul. The imaginal becomes virtual and probabilistic vision. We don't need to split our subjective self from the the objective perception of the world. Perhaps "the view from death" enriches and enlarges the improbability of the gift of life. More than 10,000 ancestors are dreaming of you.
Feel It, Reveal It, Heal It
The emotional brain reacts the same way to objective or virtual information. In fact, the later may prompt a stronger brain response. Even when subliminal, the brain produces a global response to the unexpected, but it is more recognition than complex cognition. The neural correlates of conscious, global processing across the entire network are also generated during unconscious activity...even when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, leading to activity over the entire network. We can speculate that waves of virtual particles might indeed create real effects.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28444-leading-theory-of-consciousness-rocked-by-oddball-study/
Physics is finding that the arrow of time does not seem to follow the standard laws of physics. Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
The Crucible of Love
It is well-known to clergy and psychologists that on their deathbeds, people don't wish to discuss God or religion, but their own families. Many are not afraid to die but don't want to leave their living families. They speak and may even call out to their parents, their sons and daughters, or see lost spouses.
Or, we may call on our 'godparents,' those whom we've chosen as nurturing allies, known or unknown, for their inspiration and succor. Hillman noted as we become old we develop character which makes us fit ancestors and mentors. Soul's Code (1997)
We are born into and create our lives in families and families we create. This is where we find meaning, where our purpose becomes clear. There we experience love and first give it, and are hurt, betrayed, or rejected by caregivers and siblings. In this crucible of love we begin asking big spiritual questions to which we come back in the very end. Jung admonishes us, "My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart." (The Red Book, Page 232)
Those images in the conscious mirror reflect both the material and universal soul, our spiritual essence through a "sympathy," an intelligence of spirit that reflects the animation of the material world and the union of cosmic reality.
Some confess what it feels like to know that they neglected, criticized, abandoned, or engulfed and overwhelmed their children, or that drinking destroyed their family. They lament they were physically or psychologically abusive, or failed to care for those who most needed them. It isn't difficult to understand how such behavior leaves its mark on the future. All seem to know what is missing, and what was deserved by the innocent.
On their deathbeds, people often speak of the love they felt and gave away -- or didn't receive or give, or even known how to offer unconditionally. Love may be imperfect, emotionally unavailable, or entirely missing, or full of rage and trauma -- or uncertain and ambiguous. In the end the meaning of life is concerned only with love -- lost and found. Love is what matters -- perhaps the only thing that matters in the end.
We may hope we've had a gift to give. When the love is imperfect, or a family is destructive, forgiveness can be learned. Our spiritual work as human beings is learning how to love and how to forgive. Most have a simple wish that someone will remember them fondly and that they lived and loved fully, even if they know they have not.
But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart. The Egyptians had a ceremony for weighing the lightness of the heart against the weight of a feather of Ma'at for balance. Thought, memory, and emotion came from the heart. Today we speak of the neurological heart-brain and gut-brain. We might imagine weighing our own hearts for such psychic and emotional balance.
Exploring our family tree helps us explore the depths of love. We never say goodbye to those we hold in our hearts. If we listen with our heart, we make a mindful journey as we wend our way along. We won't know where it is leading. As in physics, the very act of our observation disturbs and alters the whole system through our participation.
Long buried issues come up, are unburied, challenge and lay claim to us somatically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. Many develop self-destructive biological processes or behaviors. We may need to reconnect with Death and our own death to reorient ourselves in life and find sanctuary. Doors are opened and closed by the mysterious spirit behind life and death.
Our dreams and the body will tell us. We may come to understand that fate itself rules and as we age we have to give up our own story, our merely personal history, to find peace. We find in some sense the end is in the beginning. Even death may need to feel our love. Death becomes our medicine.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the self-unfolding dynamics. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold generation after generation. It creates a wealth of energy that we find is a source of wisdom and containment. Inner guidance connects us with source. We awaken from our illusion of separateness by embracing our extended family.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children to the parents, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Spontaneous fantasies with all kinds of implications will naturally arise in the genealogical process. Jung notes that such play of ideas and impression can be purposeful and valuable. Hillman says we wrestle with our spirits at night.
"The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. (Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82).
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Such 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes a receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. In-between two physical systems, entrainment synchronizes one entity to vibrate in an identical way in metaphorical response to the Other.
"The Orphan" Soul
Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence -- the instinctual and the luminous. It may at first come as an emotional flooding or an inundation of fantasies before that massa confusa of primal material differentiates. We may experience loss and grief that things haven't worked out as we might have hoped. Powerful events can triggers such feelings.
It evokes an image of the archetypal "orphan soul" sought by alchemists to create the Philosopher's Stone. Secret fire is the "leaded" fuel that cooks under the surface from the "heat" of awareness -- that cooks it into conscious experience. This calcination is Stage 1 of our spiritual alchemy, which is followed by dissolution (solutio) and separation (coagulatio).
We begin in a state of disintegration, of insensibility, and gradually reach greater awareness. We all have a bit of the disillusioned orphan in us. Some have living parents who were never available or are now emotionally unavailable. We may be alienated but long to belong or connect in a meaningful way. Perhaps we resonate with other orphans in our lines.
The experience of "adult orphans" is often underplayed as we consider the death of our parents 'normal' in adulthood, but it is a condition worthy of attention, and genealogy is one way to address it, to deepen it, to deal with abandonment and loss. Jung says, "When one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guide."
This is no seance, spiritualism, hallucination, or lunacy, and should not be approached as such. It is not supernatural. This is an involuntary flood of charged emotions arising from the unconscious. Often double binds and hyperarousal lead to emotional flooding -- that ocean of emotion. Much of the trauma is held in the body in structure, soft tissue, and symptoms.
It's All Relative
For example, we may have internalized the traits of one parent, as well as the other parent's loathing of those qualities. If you are overloaded you may feel swamped. You may dream of tsunamis. Such feelings are linked to helplessness, frustration, anger, feeling trapped, remorse, guilt, and self-hate.
Orphans have to learn to not be loyal to their suffering, the abandonment, trauma, and betrayal. But we must be willing to accept our grief and loneliness and let go. It's not just your pain or hurt, but the hurt of humanity in this vastness. We can learn mercy and forgiveness, within our Tree and for ourselves. We may transform from hating and being incensed, to the sweet fragrance of an incense tree that perfumes our sacred space.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. We can view it as an acronym for "pay attention; integrate now." When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children of the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but if we don't have an urn, we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead. We may house skeletons in the basement of our subconscious.
Even grieving can be a sacred space -- a Grail space where magic can happen. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness, a depression.
We can learn self-compassion to carry our pain more graciously. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process and sea of people.
We are never experts in this task, as Confucious reminds us: "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." In 2009, China acknowledged a new Confucianism by publishing the genealogy of the 800-year-old Kong family on a computer database at China's National Library in Beijing.
China is trying to revive its traditional culture, including genealogy. "The Chinese have always been interested in their past -- worship of ancestors is worship of origins." (Heinz 1999:225). Kong Ming, a 33-year-old businessman from Shanghai, began researching his family in 1998. His elderly grandfather dug up the coffin in which he had hidden the family records to escape persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Heinz, Carolyn Brown, Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, Inc., 1999).
Tian, commonly translated as Heaven or Sky, but philologically meaning the Great One, the Great Whole, is a key concept in Confucianism. "Forming one body with the universe" is a neo-Confucian ideal. As we work, formlessness congeals into form. We arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world."
In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. Our personal family tree merges with the collective World Tree. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has no telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
Pleroma
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..." Jung's plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. Space isn't an empty vacuum but characterized as a fullness and creative flow.
Science tells us the ultimate state of rest is the virtual vacuum of absolute space, the Zero Point, zero-phase geometry. It is the groundstate of being and has been likened to the Akashic Field and universal memory by Ervin Lazlo (2007).
This subquantum coherent field is pure information. Rather than linear lines of ancestors, we might think of them metaphorically as superpositions of our deep ancestry -- a superwave "reaching over" with interference peaks, information states with entangled and partly coherent stimulated emissions.
Jung called it the Pleroma, after the Gnostics. The non-dual is beyond all distinctions, a field that is the only reality. "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness." In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. There is no one in it because they would be differentiated from the Pleroma, according to the Red Book. We must watch out for what we believe, but we can entertain many notions.
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there.
An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey.
Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into historical amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects up- and down-regulation of gene expression and disease development.
Upregulation and downregulation can also happen as a response to toxins or hormones. An example of upregulation in pregnancy is hormones that cause cells in the uterus to become more sensitive to oxytocin.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Because the brain accepts the imaginal as real, changes take place at a physical and mental level. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. We remember the past but not the future because of a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
Archai (Greek, noun, plural)
Universal principles, original forms; the fundamental essences and primordial forces that animate the cosmos. Archai derives from the Greek word, arkhe, meaning beginning. In archetypal psychology, the root metaphors of psychological function.
GENEALOGY FACTS & FICTIONS
Most people are nothing special, except perhaps to those close to them. Descent is one of the Mysteries of everyday life. What 'matters' about our past is more than only the biology of our descent, though this is the premis of genealogy. We are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but are related to all nature.
Among genealogists the battle still rages, whether to cut off once and for all disputed, fictitious, and legendary lineage, or to allow its traditional use to remain, even though some may be misled in their own minds by mythological material. Their issue, on shared trees, is having to repeat the same corrections over and again, especially in the medieval era. Fake lines to royalty that arise in the 1800's are also common, so they get re-added as often as they are removed. The same mistakes are copied over and over.
Who's Genealogy Is It?
In the medieval and ancient lines the whole research landscape changes. Monks in early Christian eras invented genealogies taking the lines of kings back to Adam. If the kings were no longer descended from the indigenous gods, then they must be somehow descendants of figures from the Bible, from Troy, and from Rome.
Then, starting in the 1200s and reaching a peak in the 1600s, royal propagandists were competing to collect every old tradition and invent new ones if necessary to enhance the prestige of royal and noble families.
The French kings, for example, produced the Grandes Chroniques de France that claimed to show they were the heirs of a small band of Trojan refugees who established the Frankish people. Not to be outdone, Habsburgs followed a conscious policy for centuries of creating propaganda to show they were the heirs of the Trojan hero Aeneas through Julius Caesar. The idea that Julius Caesar was descended from Aeneas is just a much earlier, Roman example of the same kind of propaganda.
Still, radical amputation is a non-issue in Jungian work, which approaches mythic material with an "as if" on a regular basis. No one is confused there about the imaginal nature or depictions of mythic material and narrative. In many genealogy sites, such lines questioned by 'realists' are clearly marked as such. There will also, as well, always be fantasy-prone individuals who will believe what they wish to believe about such subjects.
Genealogy is a systems concept of emergence -- our emergence. It is a creative process within a formal system -- an ecology of ancestors we foster and conserve, not merely a causal chain of linear descent. We create most of what we think of as reality through the stories we tell, even in science. Lately, scandals in science and medicine suggest as much as half of the published studies are erroneous, and yet are disseminated and allowed to influence public opinion and behavior.
Even profiles that contain only names and dates are still story telling. They say, "I come from people who lived here and went there." They connect into history. And history can be scholarly history, which depends on evaluation of sources and the creation of logical arguments, or it can be family history, which depends on the stories being passed down through the generations, or it can be even older oral history, which existed before writing, and eventually made it into manuscripts and then into print.
Though the lines often blur, a generic distinction is the source of such stories. Biases in story telling needs arise in relation to genealogy and the World Tree:
we need to see how we might be connected to history, or we need to know that we are special somehow, or we need to be able to see a path that connects us to our gods. All such stories are "real," since they are valued and retold, giving people a picture of who they think or imagine they are.
"Imagined" Family
But, none of them are "real," in that even with as much good evidence as we can muster, good solid scholarly sources have their own biases, and will have included some things and left others out. The self-narrative of individuals is notoriously unreliable, and second- or third-hand evaluations probably moreso, despite well-meaning research. In genealogy as in life we mostly relate to our illusions of family, rather than a fixed reality, at best based on skimpy information.
With any sort of balance or psychological perspective it is easy enough to recognize when we step from the ordinary world into that imaginal world, which is more than illusion or fiction, if less than or merely different from hard fact. Some of our heritage comes from specific places and people while the deeper parts come from the Far Country. By "traveling" in such foreign territory we learn other kinds of things about ourselves and our origins.
"Foreign Countries"
For example, in Masonry “Foreign Countries” do not mean the various geographical and political divisions of the Old World, nor a realm of external feats. “Foreign Countries” is used as a symbol. Like all symbols, it has more than one interpretation; but, unlike many, none of these is very difficult to trace or understand.
Through such travels we gain a new perspective on our origins, life, love, and ourselves. When we visit such 'foreign lands' we must use the laws of that land as well as customs and traditions - deciding what is right and what is wrong. In this regard a Jungian approach offers the most leeway without succumbing to literalisms or fantasy-based illusions.
Like genealogy, Freemasonry itself is a “foreign country” in which the initiate will travel; a world as different from the familiar workaday world as France is different from England, or Belgium from Greece. The standards are different. Surely such a land is a “foreign country” to the stranger within its borders; and the visitor must study it, learn its language and its customs, in order to enjoy and explore it.
Professional genealogists trying to revision traditional practice need not shepherd the public like over-protective parents. The fantasy of professional genealogy as some sort of factual reality is erroneous in itself. It remains an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experiment and trial-and-error methods.
Reconciling Pedigrees
Sure, we can rely on the data, but only to a certain limited extent. A quick review of more recent census data shows it is riddled with multiple incorrect spellings and data recording, just for starters. If you can get a line back to the early-1800s you have a good chance of connecting to extant research, especially American colonial lines.
Further back, most family lines disappear by 1500 or so, and there are no proven lines from before around 700. Statistically, our descent from Charlemagne is (virtually) certain, but the details of who, how, where, etc. could be laughably wrong or contain gaps.
All family trees go back as far as anyone else's whether you know it or not. You are real and so are your ancestors, even if they are hiding. Hidden ancestors are as real as you are in this process of "Hide and Seek." Our job is to effectively release the hidden information and forms, even where 'inaccurate' information proliferates as much as reliable data. Cliches, such as "Like father, like son" are necessarily abbreviated 'truths' that stand up to scrutiny in some instances and utterly fail in others.
Genealogy's Shadow
Genealogists and Curators need to realize they are always and only dealing with a symbolic landscape, even though some factual hook is available. To imagine otherwise is psychological naivete. They need to realize that no matter how they approach it or annotate the lines, or discuss the medieval flaws in the system people come to genealogy for their own reasons -- no longer the legal issues of legitimacy, inheritance, or succession. We all risk inaccuracy together.
People are inclined to believe what they want to believe in terms of literalisms and metaphors for their own psychic needs. Whatever impressions we form, including those about our parents, remain mostly that. Psychological pay offs feed into self-narrative, the stories we tell ourselves, a social construct much like Jung's persona archetype.
Most of us understand the notion that history is written by 'the winners' and is riddled with propaganda and deliberate falsehood or retrofitted 'spin'. Historical accuracy outside the story is likely unattainable, much less something genealogy is capable of re/producing. Can we not logically discern, for example, that we all descend from archetypal evil, whether we find the Mark of Cain in our pedigree or not?
Archetypal Assumptions
We approach the family tree in full comprehension this is an archetypal phenomenon. The only certainty in genealogy is the archetypal imagination. Pedigree is way to help us imagine our origins. Genealogy is a template; in the beginning a tabula rasa upon which we construct a family "history." Often even the timeline is weak or ignored.
Like a Big Dream genealogy requires heuristics, any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Heuristics is a discovery process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula -- "trial-and-error" learning or using "a rule-of-thumb." In other words, we interpret all the data.
In certain situations it is not enough to simply cross that threshold; we must wait for the image to penetrate, work in the depths, gestate, and emerge from its own path. Such phenomena can be treated the same as all psychic phenomena.
People's capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality varies to the degree to which they use accurate 'reality testing' or are being sucked into the stories they are telling themselves about their family.
These include religious beliefs, 'royal' pay offs, romanticizing, feeling superior, self-delusion, and identity issues and needs. Rather than redacting the traditional lines, such issues are better dealt with individually in Transgenerational Integration.
After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83
Universal principles, original forms; the fundamental essences and primordial forces that animate the cosmos. Archai derives from the Greek word, arkhe, meaning beginning. In archetypal psychology, the root metaphors of psychological function.
GENEALOGY FACTS & FICTIONS
Most people are nothing special, except perhaps to those close to them. Descent is one of the Mysteries of everyday life. What 'matters' about our past is more than only the biology of our descent, though this is the premis of genealogy. We are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but are related to all nature.
Among genealogists the battle still rages, whether to cut off once and for all disputed, fictitious, and legendary lineage, or to allow its traditional use to remain, even though some may be misled in their own minds by mythological material. Their issue, on shared trees, is having to repeat the same corrections over and again, especially in the medieval era. Fake lines to royalty that arise in the 1800's are also common, so they get re-added as often as they are removed. The same mistakes are copied over and over.
Who's Genealogy Is It?
In the medieval and ancient lines the whole research landscape changes. Monks in early Christian eras invented genealogies taking the lines of kings back to Adam. If the kings were no longer descended from the indigenous gods, then they must be somehow descendants of figures from the Bible, from Troy, and from Rome.
Then, starting in the 1200s and reaching a peak in the 1600s, royal propagandists were competing to collect every old tradition and invent new ones if necessary to enhance the prestige of royal and noble families.
The French kings, for example, produced the Grandes Chroniques de France that claimed to show they were the heirs of a small band of Trojan refugees who established the Frankish people. Not to be outdone, Habsburgs followed a conscious policy for centuries of creating propaganda to show they were the heirs of the Trojan hero Aeneas through Julius Caesar. The idea that Julius Caesar was descended from Aeneas is just a much earlier, Roman example of the same kind of propaganda.
Still, radical amputation is a non-issue in Jungian work, which approaches mythic material with an "as if" on a regular basis. No one is confused there about the imaginal nature or depictions of mythic material and narrative. In many genealogy sites, such lines questioned by 'realists' are clearly marked as such. There will also, as well, always be fantasy-prone individuals who will believe what they wish to believe about such subjects.
Genealogy is a systems concept of emergence -- our emergence. It is a creative process within a formal system -- an ecology of ancestors we foster and conserve, not merely a causal chain of linear descent. We create most of what we think of as reality through the stories we tell, even in science. Lately, scandals in science and medicine suggest as much as half of the published studies are erroneous, and yet are disseminated and allowed to influence public opinion and behavior.
Even profiles that contain only names and dates are still story telling. They say, "I come from people who lived here and went there." They connect into history. And history can be scholarly history, which depends on evaluation of sources and the creation of logical arguments, or it can be family history, which depends on the stories being passed down through the generations, or it can be even older oral history, which existed before writing, and eventually made it into manuscripts and then into print.
Though the lines often blur, a generic distinction is the source of such stories. Biases in story telling needs arise in relation to genealogy and the World Tree:
we need to see how we might be connected to history, or we need to know that we are special somehow, or we need to be able to see a path that connects us to our gods. All such stories are "real," since they are valued and retold, giving people a picture of who they think or imagine they are.
"Imagined" Family
But, none of them are "real," in that even with as much good evidence as we can muster, good solid scholarly sources have their own biases, and will have included some things and left others out. The self-narrative of individuals is notoriously unreliable, and second- or third-hand evaluations probably moreso, despite well-meaning research. In genealogy as in life we mostly relate to our illusions of family, rather than a fixed reality, at best based on skimpy information.
With any sort of balance or psychological perspective it is easy enough to recognize when we step from the ordinary world into that imaginal world, which is more than illusion or fiction, if less than or merely different from hard fact. Some of our heritage comes from specific places and people while the deeper parts come from the Far Country. By "traveling" in such foreign territory we learn other kinds of things about ourselves and our origins.
"Foreign Countries"
For example, in Masonry “Foreign Countries” do not mean the various geographical and political divisions of the Old World, nor a realm of external feats. “Foreign Countries” is used as a symbol. Like all symbols, it has more than one interpretation; but, unlike many, none of these is very difficult to trace or understand.
Through such travels we gain a new perspective on our origins, life, love, and ourselves. When we visit such 'foreign lands' we must use the laws of that land as well as customs and traditions - deciding what is right and what is wrong. In this regard a Jungian approach offers the most leeway without succumbing to literalisms or fantasy-based illusions.
Like genealogy, Freemasonry itself is a “foreign country” in which the initiate will travel; a world as different from the familiar workaday world as France is different from England, or Belgium from Greece. The standards are different. Surely such a land is a “foreign country” to the stranger within its borders; and the visitor must study it, learn its language and its customs, in order to enjoy and explore it.
Professional genealogists trying to revision traditional practice need not shepherd the public like over-protective parents. The fantasy of professional genealogy as some sort of factual reality is erroneous in itself. It remains an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experiment and trial-and-error methods.
Reconciling Pedigrees
Sure, we can rely on the data, but only to a certain limited extent. A quick review of more recent census data shows it is riddled with multiple incorrect spellings and data recording, just for starters. If you can get a line back to the early-1800s you have a good chance of connecting to extant research, especially American colonial lines.
Further back, most family lines disappear by 1500 or so, and there are no proven lines from before around 700. Statistically, our descent from Charlemagne is (virtually) certain, but the details of who, how, where, etc. could be laughably wrong or contain gaps.
All family trees go back as far as anyone else's whether you know it or not. You are real and so are your ancestors, even if they are hiding. Hidden ancestors are as real as you are in this process of "Hide and Seek." Our job is to effectively release the hidden information and forms, even where 'inaccurate' information proliferates as much as reliable data. Cliches, such as "Like father, like son" are necessarily abbreviated 'truths' that stand up to scrutiny in some instances and utterly fail in others.
Genealogy's Shadow
Genealogists and Curators need to realize they are always and only dealing with a symbolic landscape, even though some factual hook is available. To imagine otherwise is psychological naivete. They need to realize that no matter how they approach it or annotate the lines, or discuss the medieval flaws in the system people come to genealogy for their own reasons -- no longer the legal issues of legitimacy, inheritance, or succession. We all risk inaccuracy together.
People are inclined to believe what they want to believe in terms of literalisms and metaphors for their own psychic needs. Whatever impressions we form, including those about our parents, remain mostly that. Psychological pay offs feed into self-narrative, the stories we tell ourselves, a social construct much like Jung's persona archetype.
Most of us understand the notion that history is written by 'the winners' and is riddled with propaganda and deliberate falsehood or retrofitted 'spin'. Historical accuracy outside the story is likely unattainable, much less something genealogy is capable of re/producing. Can we not logically discern, for example, that we all descend from archetypal evil, whether we find the Mark of Cain in our pedigree or not?
Archetypal Assumptions
We approach the family tree in full comprehension this is an archetypal phenomenon. The only certainty in genealogy is the archetypal imagination. Pedigree is way to help us imagine our origins. Genealogy is a template; in the beginning a tabula rasa upon which we construct a family "history." Often even the timeline is weak or ignored.
Like a Big Dream genealogy requires heuristics, any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Heuristics is a discovery process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula -- "trial-and-error" learning or using "a rule-of-thumb." In other words, we interpret all the data.
In certain situations it is not enough to simply cross that threshold; we must wait for the image to penetrate, work in the depths, gestate, and emerge from its own path. Such phenomena can be treated the same as all psychic phenomena.
People's capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality varies to the degree to which they use accurate 'reality testing' or are being sucked into the stories they are telling themselves about their family.
These include religious beliefs, 'royal' pay offs, romanticizing, feeling superior, self-delusion, and identity issues and needs. Rather than redacting the traditional lines, such issues are better dealt with individually in Transgenerational Integration.
After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83
IDENTIFY YOURSELF
Your Search for Your Identity
Order and meaning are things that have become and
are no longer becoming. --Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235
And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hillman said we have an extreme need to expand our psychological space. The soul is restricted or forced because of his own imagination is withered or blocked. Genealogy expands our psychological space exponentially.
Many people have no dream, no clear image of the future. Some have a dream, even a clear image of the future but they are not in love with it—they may feel that it is not really them.
How might we search for our identity and discover a dream and fall in love with it? This search for identity is one of the most important things that a person ever does. Sometimes a story—even a fantasy—can capture the essence of a problem such as this and distill the powerful truth. A story can be transformative.
The hero goes forth to come to grips with a merciless opponent, the truth about him- or herself, and to reshape that life from inherent inner resources. The dreadful importance of finding one’s identity is reflected in the following speech:
"It is my heart to learn the truth about myself. I will not stop short of it. Were I to do so, who I am would forever be unknown and through all my life I would feel a part of me lacking."
Exactly the same idea is expressed in the Epistles of St. Paul where he says that all living beings, the whole of creation, is waiting for the revelation of the children of God; they are waiting to celebrate their apokatastasis, their reinstallation with the redemption of the children of God.
In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been.
Primitives express that quite plainly; they say that when the hero steps out of the belly of the monster, not only he comes out but his dead parents who have also been swallowed by the time dragon, and not only his parents but all the people of the tribe who have disappeared in time, and even rivers and mountains and woods, whole countries come out of the whale-dragon.
All the vanished memories of former situations will be restored,
everything will be brought back to its original condition.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280
From the Core of Stillness to The Unboundedness of Life
"I warn you, whoever you are, Oh! You who want to probe the arcana of nature, that if you do not find within yourself that which you are looking for, you shall not find it outside either! If you ignore the excellences of your own house, how do you pretend to find other excellencies? Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures! Know thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods."
-- Inscription on the frontispiece of the Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus, Greece, 2500 B.C.
To ‘Know Thyself” is to be ‘Thyself” – without compromise. What an incredibly daunting task. Not because it is hard, but because it is so simple, and simplicity may be the most difficult experience to truly live. Difficult - because it is ‘world saving’, without external recognition. In fact, those who do set out on such a path are likely to go unnoticed and, in some instances shunned. Thus, the inner life is typically pursed separately from our presence in public life, social life, work life, and often even in intimate relationships.
Self-division is no longer tenable. Bridging the inner life and outer life, we can see how we need to find ourselves. As we shed our adopted and adapted programming, we sweep away externalized notions of ourselves and open an inner light to the true beauty of the living spirit we are.
In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled 'Know Thyself', on the theme of 'God in thee.' Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journals (1833)
Each day we have the potential of opening to ‘revelatory moments’ of seeing through. Utterly simple and cumulative practices open us to the core of our spirit.
Stillness, the sensory truth of being ourselves, means living with death and immortality.
In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
The principal pair of opposites is the conscious world and the unconscious world, and when the two come together, it is as if man and woman were coming together, the union of the male and the female, of the light and the darkness. Then a birth will take place. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 574
If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. --Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235
Know Thyself” is one of the most important things we can do. Without self-knowledge, we are absent from ourselves, easily controlled by others, and lose all direction in our lives.
Most people take the admonition to “KNOW THYSELF” as a primarily intellectual endeavor, neglecting the deeply felt presence of our embodied experience. We’ve polarized our intelligence to our heads, often ignoring the “gut instinct” and deeper awareness of the body. To truly “Know Thyself” requires a deeper gnosis, experiencing the full presence of our psychosomatic body-mind, fully sensitive, present, and receptive to life with every sensation we experience as a form of thought and direct perception.
" The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature , the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for that which is irrationally given - including the objective psyche , which is all that consciousness is not. " --Jung, The Undiscovered Self
Underneath all the top-down authoritarian games we play from our cultural indoctrination, we know that intellect alone will not suffice for the deepest sense of ‘Knowing Thyself.” It's not just cognitive understanding but the fully embodied presence of Being in every moment.
Getting into the body means regularly allowing ourselves to slow down. Breathe slowly and deeply in to your stomach and even deeper in to your pelvic bowl, releasing the clenched pelvic muscles, vocalizing and moving as needed, stretching and feeling your energy body expand as you breathe. Feel the breath enter in to you from all over your body, including its negentropic potential.
Be still and silent until you can hear your own heartbeat. Feel the tightness melt away as your armor dissolves and your dormant senses begin to rejuvenate. Be present with your breath, letting thoughts come and go, without attaching to them. You can embody this process in your daily relationship to sacred self and ancestors. We begin to awaken the inherent embodied wisdom of full presence and deeper gnosis. Deeper layers of awareness are already in you, awaiting your conscious care to nurture them back to the foreground of your awareness.
The most intimate, real, and authentic parts of you are ecstatically invigorating and deeply ever-present. We willingly surrender control of our intellectualized notions of “what should be” and allow the vulnerable, spontaneous “messiness” of pure Being to emerge.
When “Doing” comes from our “Being”, effort becomes effortless. We act not from the conditioned constructs of our identity, but from ourselves in the present moment in harmony with our environment and greater awareness of the world. This fully experienced embodied connection -- with all its ineffable joy, sadness, silliness, passion, fear, presence, wonder, and love -- is the essence of what it means to truly “Know Thyself”.
"If you do not know yourself, your unconscious as well as your conscious states, all your inquiry will be twisted, given a bias. You will have no foundation for thinking which is rational, clear, logical, sane. Your thinking will be according to a certain pattern, formula, or set of ideas - but that is not really thinking. To think clearly, logically, without becoming neurotic, without being caught in any form of illusion, you have to know this whole process of your own consciousness." --J. Krishnamurti
"You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence. It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body.
"Each part is always something in itself. The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality.
What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks.
The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind.
"Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irreprehensible, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them."
~ Carl Jung, "On the Nature of the Psyche"
"That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible. Different things are represented, and these are always supposed to be in a field of consciousness, in a sort of extension, that is. Yet you feel that the whole, that plurality, is drawn together and referred to something you call "I"; it is referred to a center which you cannot say has extension, as little as you can say of a thought that it has extension.
"Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities. So "I" is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say "I" you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the "I."
--Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
"If a story is seed, then we are its soil. Just hearing the story allows us to experience it as though we ourselves were the heroine who either falters or wins out in the end. If we hear a story about a wolf, then afterward we rove about and know like a wolf for a time. If we hear a story about a dove finding her young at last, then for a time after, something moves behind our own feathered breasts. If it be a story of wresting the sacred pearl from beneath the claw of the ninth dragon, we feel exhausted afterward, and satisfied. In a very real way, we are imprinted with knowing just by listening to the tale."
--Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Your Search for Your Identity
Order and meaning are things that have become and
are no longer becoming. --Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235
And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hillman said we have an extreme need to expand our psychological space. The soul is restricted or forced because of his own imagination is withered or blocked. Genealogy expands our psychological space exponentially.
Many people have no dream, no clear image of the future. Some have a dream, even a clear image of the future but they are not in love with it—they may feel that it is not really them.
How might we search for our identity and discover a dream and fall in love with it? This search for identity is one of the most important things that a person ever does. Sometimes a story—even a fantasy—can capture the essence of a problem such as this and distill the powerful truth. A story can be transformative.
The hero goes forth to come to grips with a merciless opponent, the truth about him- or herself, and to reshape that life from inherent inner resources. The dreadful importance of finding one’s identity is reflected in the following speech:
"It is my heart to learn the truth about myself. I will not stop short of it. Were I to do so, who I am would forever be unknown and through all my life I would feel a part of me lacking."
Exactly the same idea is expressed in the Epistles of St. Paul where he says that all living beings, the whole of creation, is waiting for the revelation of the children of God; they are waiting to celebrate their apokatastasis, their reinstallation with the redemption of the children of God.
In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been.
Primitives express that quite plainly; they say that when the hero steps out of the belly of the monster, not only he comes out but his dead parents who have also been swallowed by the time dragon, and not only his parents but all the people of the tribe who have disappeared in time, and even rivers and mountains and woods, whole countries come out of the whale-dragon.
All the vanished memories of former situations will be restored,
everything will be brought back to its original condition.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280
From the Core of Stillness to The Unboundedness of Life
"I warn you, whoever you are, Oh! You who want to probe the arcana of nature, that if you do not find within yourself that which you are looking for, you shall not find it outside either! If you ignore the excellences of your own house, how do you pretend to find other excellencies? Within you is hidden the treasure of treasures! Know thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods."
-- Inscription on the frontispiece of the Temple of Apollo on Mount Parnassus, Greece, 2500 B.C.
To ‘Know Thyself” is to be ‘Thyself” – without compromise. What an incredibly daunting task. Not because it is hard, but because it is so simple, and simplicity may be the most difficult experience to truly live. Difficult - because it is ‘world saving’, without external recognition. In fact, those who do set out on such a path are likely to go unnoticed and, in some instances shunned. Thus, the inner life is typically pursed separately from our presence in public life, social life, work life, and often even in intimate relationships.
Self-division is no longer tenable. Bridging the inner life and outer life, we can see how we need to find ourselves. As we shed our adopted and adapted programming, we sweep away externalized notions of ourselves and open an inner light to the true beauty of the living spirit we are.
In 1831, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled 'Know Thyself', on the theme of 'God in thee.' Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journals (1833)
Each day we have the potential of opening to ‘revelatory moments’ of seeing through. Utterly simple and cumulative practices open us to the core of our spirit.
Stillness, the sensory truth of being ourselves, means living with death and immortality.
In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
The principal pair of opposites is the conscious world and the unconscious world, and when the two come together, it is as if man and woman were coming together, the union of the male and the female, of the light and the darkness. Then a birth will take place. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 574
If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. --Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235
Know Thyself” is one of the most important things we can do. Without self-knowledge, we are absent from ourselves, easily controlled by others, and lose all direction in our lives.
Most people take the admonition to “KNOW THYSELF” as a primarily intellectual endeavor, neglecting the deeply felt presence of our embodied experience. We’ve polarized our intelligence to our heads, often ignoring the “gut instinct” and deeper awareness of the body. To truly “Know Thyself” requires a deeper gnosis, experiencing the full presence of our psychosomatic body-mind, fully sensitive, present, and receptive to life with every sensation we experience as a form of thought and direct perception.
" The forlornness of consciousness in our world is due primarily to the loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature , the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for that which is irrationally given - including the objective psyche , which is all that consciousness is not. " --Jung, The Undiscovered Self
Underneath all the top-down authoritarian games we play from our cultural indoctrination, we know that intellect alone will not suffice for the deepest sense of ‘Knowing Thyself.” It's not just cognitive understanding but the fully embodied presence of Being in every moment.
Getting into the body means regularly allowing ourselves to slow down. Breathe slowly and deeply in to your stomach and even deeper in to your pelvic bowl, releasing the clenched pelvic muscles, vocalizing and moving as needed, stretching and feeling your energy body expand as you breathe. Feel the breath enter in to you from all over your body, including its negentropic potential.
Be still and silent until you can hear your own heartbeat. Feel the tightness melt away as your armor dissolves and your dormant senses begin to rejuvenate. Be present with your breath, letting thoughts come and go, without attaching to them. You can embody this process in your daily relationship to sacred self and ancestors. We begin to awaken the inherent embodied wisdom of full presence and deeper gnosis. Deeper layers of awareness are already in you, awaiting your conscious care to nurture them back to the foreground of your awareness.
The most intimate, real, and authentic parts of you are ecstatically invigorating and deeply ever-present. We willingly surrender control of our intellectualized notions of “what should be” and allow the vulnerable, spontaneous “messiness” of pure Being to emerge.
When “Doing” comes from our “Being”, effort becomes effortless. We act not from the conditioned constructs of our identity, but from ourselves in the present moment in harmony with our environment and greater awareness of the world. This fully experienced embodied connection -- with all its ineffable joy, sadness, silliness, passion, fear, presence, wonder, and love -- is the essence of what it means to truly “Know Thyself”.
"If you do not know yourself, your unconscious as well as your conscious states, all your inquiry will be twisted, given a bias. You will have no foundation for thinking which is rational, clear, logical, sane. Your thinking will be according to a certain pattern, formula, or set of ideas - but that is not really thinking. To think clearly, logically, without becoming neurotic, without being caught in any form of illusion, you have to know this whole process of your own consciousness." --J. Krishnamurti
"You see, inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence. It is also a plurality which is gathered up in one mind, for the body is extended in space, and the here and the there are two things; what is in your toes is not in your fingers, and what is in your fingers is not in your ears or your stomach or your knees or anywhere else in your body.
"Each part is always something in itself. The different forms and localizations are all represented in your mind as more or less different facts, so there is a plurality.
What you think with your head doesn’t necessarily coincide with what you feel in your heart, and what your belly thinks is not what your mind thinks.
The extension in space, therefore, creates a pluralistic quality in the mind.
"Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irreprehensible, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them."
~ Carl Jung, "On the Nature of the Psyche"
"That is probably the reason why consciousness is possible. Different things are represented, and these are always supposed to be in a field of consciousness, in a sort of extension, that is. Yet you feel that the whole, that plurality, is drawn together and referred to something you call "I"; it is referred to a center which you cannot say has extension, as little as you can say of a thought that it has extension.
"Thought is a disembodied something because it has no spatial qualities. So "I" is as if it were something abstract, yet in a vague way it coincides with your body; when you say "I" you beat your chest for instance, to emphasize the "I."
--Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
"If a story is seed, then we are its soil. Just hearing the story allows us to experience it as though we ourselves were the heroine who either falters or wins out in the end. If we hear a story about a wolf, then afterward we rove about and know like a wolf for a time. If we hear a story about a dove finding her young at last, then for a time after, something moves behind our own feathered breasts. If it be a story of wresting the sacred pearl from beneath the claw of the ninth dragon, we feel exhausted afterward, and satisfied. In a very real way, we are imprinted with knowing just by listening to the tale."
--Clarissa Pinkola Estes
LONG AGO & FAR AWAY
Uncanny Intelligence
“Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone,
I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One.
I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.”
--Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell.
~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.
Life inevitably leads down into reality.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
Inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
If you fulfill the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
And if you lose yourself in the crowd, in the whole of humanity, you also never arrive at yourself; just as you can get lost in your isolation, you can also get lost in utter abandonment to the crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020
The spirit consists of possibilities-one could say the world of possibilities was the world of the spirit. The spirit can be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. Don't run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 66-67
Wisdom begins only when one takes things as they are; otherwise we get nowhere, we simply become inflated balloons with no feet on the earth.
So it is a healing attitude when one can agree with the facts as they are; only then can we live in our body on this earth, only then can we thrive.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 545
"Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. .."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 483.
Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos.
The task is now to bring about order, the alchemistic process must begin, namely, the production of the valuable substance, the transformation into the light.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
Psyche (or soul) is the “third, mediating standpoint” or terrain upon which the fundamentally opposite worlds of inner and outer, idea and thing, can be “joined together in living union.” ~Jeffrey C. Miller, The Transcendent Function, Page 36.
“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity;
if life, death.” ―Pythagoras
“I love him who justifieth the future ones, and redeemeth the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.” [Nietzsche]
That complete surrender to the present necessities means of course a fulfilment,
a redemption of the past generations, and of the unfulfilled lives that are
waiting to be fulfilled.
If we live completely, we surrender to their lives and redeem them.
Also, we prepare for a future generation, because we have lived out our own lives; we have fulfilled them, and we leave no curse for the
following generations—the curse of economized life.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 89.
UP A TREE - YOUR ANCESTRY
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened. If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
It is utterly important that one should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the germ of life which one is. ~Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
But the spirit of the depths said: "No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230.
When the flame of your greed consumes you, and nothing remains of you but ash, so nothing of you was steadfast. Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many. But if you flee from your fire full of fear, you scorch your fellow men, and the burning torment of your greed cannot die out, so long as you do not desire yourself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture. You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 273.
Remember that you can know yourself and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit.
~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 306.
You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.
This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.
What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473.
Therefore my formula: for the love of mankind and for the love of yourself-of mankind in yourself-create a devil. That is an act of devotion, I should say; you have to put something where there is nothing, for the sake of mankind.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1322.
You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. . . . Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also? ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
You are light and life, like God the Father of whom Man was born. If therefore you learn to know yourself... you will return to life. ~Corpus Hermeticum I, Poimandres, 21.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of the unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 458-459.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books… ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 479.
There is no point in delivering yourself over to the last drop. . . . In my view it is absolutely essential always to have our consciousness well enough in hand to pay sufficient attention to our reality, to the Here and Now. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 239.
The experience of wholeness is, quite to the contrary, an extremely simple matter of feeling yourself in harmony with the world within and without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
But if you hate and despise yourself—if you have not accepted your pattern— then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbours like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, P. 66
The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.
You can only know yourself if you get into yourself, and you can only do that when you accept the lead of the animal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 458.
By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 905
YOUR TREE IS YOUR SANCTUARY
Tree of Spirits, Initiation, & Fate
For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
The World Tree is the great archetype. The World Tree is a common image in shamanic experiences from both traditional societies and in modern shamanic groups. In this tree spirits pass from one world to another. It is the holy center. http://www.shamaniccircles.org/2002oraclefolder/worldtree.html
The World Tree is the center of the world, but in shamanic paradox, the center of the world is also everywhere. In shamanic ritual or performance, the shaman operates in an altered state of consciousness with one foot in both realities. In this state, the the shaman 'becomes' the World Tree, and the place of that ritual becomes the center of the world.
The World Tree forms an integral part of the shamanic cosmos, linking the world of humanity with the world of the spirits. It is depicted in numerous tales of shamanic ritual and in power objects.
Genealogy is an ancient shamanic tool, like journeying and dialoguing. Working with the energies of dreams, death, and initiation helps us change our story and reveal our true nature which we can celebrate in ritual, including ancestral work. Our oldest ancestors can still be found at the edge of oblivion -- each generation another wave upon waves of possibility.
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.”
- C.G. Jung The Earth Has a Soul.
Climbing trees is part of the natural growth process which helps us become more fully human. You may remember when you were a child, climbing up into a tree in your yard, or that of your grandparents -- a place to hide and lick your childhood wounds and let the imagination soar, or maybe watch an approaching storm. That tree was your first archaic temple.
From that lofty perch you felt the wind in your hair, experienced the dappled sunlight, and gained a new perspective, from which you could observe a bigger picture of the landscape and the unfolding story of your life. You may also have been aware of the elegance and beauty of the tree itself as your sanctuary and haven.
You might even have had a treehouse, a sanctuary in the green leaves and a lively space far above ordinary life where your 'observer self' and imagination could roam or 'fly', and you felt you could see forever. Then, perhaps you climbed even higher. Did you keep your power objects there? As an adult, you may have created a treehouse for your own children.
Traditionally, such a treehouse reminds us that climbing up and down trees was the work of ancient shaman, who entered that sacred space to speak with the ancestors, find healing, enter altered states, and commune with the cosmos.
Your family treehouse of the imagination is the House of your family surname -- your dynastic inheritance and legacy. It is the repository of your family history, including all the maternal lines of the realm of the mothers. Such a treehouse is where we can go for family reunions, relational intimacy, and to commune with ourselves.
That tree embodies our family. "We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 251.) The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one.
So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is,because it is and it is not.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.
Your family tree is a synthesis of the ascent to higher consciousness and descent into more soulful living. All your beloved relatives still have a place there, or in your collateral lines -- a place where we can visit and honor them, or even work toward healing. It helps us live a sacred life of wisdom, heart and service, honoring all the parts of our being and all the dimensions of our life.
This work is at the heart of an embodied and inspiring expression of higher consciousness in day-to-day life, in which we come to honor our unique quirks, challenges and personality traits, as well as our depths, and the lives and legacies of our ancestors. You are a specific configuration of traits and opinions.
"The unconscious can make a fool of you in no time."
(Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 747).
"No matter what your conscious attitude may be, the unconscious has an absolutely free hand and can do what it pleases." (Jung, Visions Seminar, P. 27)
"But your attitude to it [death] matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.)
We learn to perceive the blessing in our wounds, and the liberation that beckons to us from our shadows. Buddhists suggest that the initial consciousness emerges as a vision of the clear light manifesting as a sight for the eye of wisdom. We simultaneously open to the vastness of Spirit and the beauty and depth of soul.
Worldviews Collide
It is a great privilege to live in a culture where we can recognize our birthright as free spiritual beings to a greater or lesser extent. But that may not have been so for our 2 parents, 4 grandparents, our 8 great grandparents, or our 16 great-great grandparents, much less our medieval and ancient ancestral lines. Many were born into systems their lives depended upon, whether or not they truly believed.
Where there is great passion, there is also great resentment. Heresy was punishable by death. Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, Johannite, or other religious ancestors, from the Gnostics, to the Inquisition, sought their version of spiritual freedom, at whatever cost to themselves or those who they fought or to lands they appropriated from it.
Spiritual Identity
Protestants persecuted Puritans who persecuted Quakers, like Roman Catholics persecuted Jews, Moors, and Cathars. Protestant vs. Catholic, Crusaders vs. Muslims, Christians vs. Pagans, etc. they all wished to 'purify' their ideas of religion. Certainly, there are many sides to the slings and arrows of holy wars, migration and beliefs when cultures clash. Each ethnicity has its traumas and issues and transitions. Often we have ancestors on both sides of conflicts, even in the same family.
Even if we look back only a generation or two we encounter ancestors whose spiritual self-identity and worldview we would now consider blindingly ignorant -- spiritual bondage rather than spiritual liberation. Yet the depth of commitment to the spiritual impulse remains the same. They searched within and this is what makes us interested in people who lived hundreds or thousands or years ago, to reconnect with the earth and be part of it as a culture, even if we are not sure how to do it.
Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true. --Jung, Visions Seminar, P. 1314
https://books.google.com/books?id=XLqEWwa7fT8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists who Came to America Before 1700
...By Frederick Lewis Weis
Uncanny Intelligence
“Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone,
I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One.
I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.”
--Diana Gabaldon, Outlander
Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell.
~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 198.
Life inevitably leads down into reality.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
Inasmuch as the living body contains the secret of life, it is an intelligence.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 360.
If you fulfill the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
And if you lose yourself in the crowd, in the whole of humanity, you also never arrive at yourself; just as you can get lost in your isolation, you can also get lost in utter abandonment to the crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1020
The spirit consists of possibilities-one could say the world of possibilities was the world of the spirit. The spirit can be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. Don't run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 66-67
Wisdom begins only when one takes things as they are; otherwise we get nowhere, we simply become inflated balloons with no feet on the earth.
So it is a healing attitude when one can agree with the facts as they are; only then can we live in our body on this earth, only then can we thrive.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 545
"Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one. I cannot mourn the dead. They endure, but we pass over. .."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 483.
Life is of the nature of water: it always seeks the deepest place, which is always below in the darkness and heaviness of the earth.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos.
The task is now to bring about order, the alchemistic process must begin, namely, the production of the valuable substance, the transformation into the light.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263
Psyche (or soul) is the “third, mediating standpoint” or terrain upon which the fundamentally opposite worlds of inner and outer, idea and thing, can be “joined together in living union.” ~Jeffrey C. Miller, The Transcendent Function, Page 36.
“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity;
if life, death.” ―Pythagoras
“I love him who justifieth the future ones, and redeemeth the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.” [Nietzsche]
That complete surrender to the present necessities means of course a fulfilment,
a redemption of the past generations, and of the unfulfilled lives that are
waiting to be fulfilled.
If we live completely, we surrender to their lives and redeem them.
Also, we prepare for a future generation, because we have lived out our own lives; we have fulfilled them, and we leave no curse for the
following generations—the curse of economized life.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 89.
UP A TREE - YOUR ANCESTRY
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened. If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. ~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
It is utterly important that one should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the germ of life which one is. ~Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 28
Selfish desire ultimately desires itself. You find yourself in your desire, so do not say that desire is vain. If you desire yourself you produce the divine son in your embrace with yourself. Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
But the spirit of the depths said: "No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction; sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come. Have you not had monasteries? Have not countless thousands gone into the desert? You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 230.
When the flame of your greed consumes you, and nothing remains of you but ash, so nothing of you was steadfast. Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many. But if you flee from your fire full of fear, you scorch your fellow men, and the burning torment of your greed cannot die out, so long as you do not desire yourself. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture. You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 273.
Remember that you can know yourself and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit.
~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 306.
You should always ask yourself what you desire, since all too many do not know what they want. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 249, Footnote 190.
This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
You announced yourself to me in advance in dreams. They burned in my heart and drove me to all the boldest acts of daring, and forced me to rise above myself. You let me see truths of which I had no previous inkling. You let me undertake journeys, whose endless length would have scared me, if the knowledge of them had not been secure in you. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 233.
What is meant is, that you should be with yourself, not alone but with yourself, and you can be with yourself even in a crowd. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1484.
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473.
Therefore my formula: for the love of mankind and for the love of yourself-of mankind in yourself-create a devil. That is an act of devotion, I should say; you have to put something where there is nothing, for the sake of mankind.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1322.
You see, in the actual functioning of the psyche, it does not matter whether you do a thing or whether it happens to you; whether it reaches you from without or happens within, fate moves through yourself and outside circumstances equally. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 896.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. . . . Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ’s teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also? ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis
You are light and life, like God the Father of whom Man was born. If therefore you learn to know yourself... you will return to life. ~Corpus Hermeticum I, Poimandres, 21.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of the unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 458-459.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books… ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 479.
There is no point in delivering yourself over to the last drop. . . . In my view it is absolutely essential always to have our consciousness well enough in hand to pay sufficient attention to our reality, to the Here and Now. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 239.
The experience of wholeness is, quite to the contrary, an extremely simple matter of feeling yourself in harmony with the world within and without. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 456.
It is legitimate to ask yourself what it is that carries the qualities of the archetypal and synchronistic, and to pose the question, for instance, of the intrinsic nature of the psyche or of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
But if you hate and despise yourself—if you have not accepted your pattern— then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbours like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, P. 66
The great lure of the archetypal situation is that you yourself suddenly cease to be. You cease to think and are acted upon as though carried by a great river with no end. You are suddenly eternal. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 240.
You can only know yourself if you get into yourself, and you can only do that when you accept the lead of the animal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 458.
By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 905
YOUR TREE IS YOUR SANCTUARY
Tree of Spirits, Initiation, & Fate
For the archetype is nothing human; no archetype is properly human.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1343.
The World Tree is the great archetype. The World Tree is a common image in shamanic experiences from both traditional societies and in modern shamanic groups. In this tree spirits pass from one world to another. It is the holy center. http://www.shamaniccircles.org/2002oraclefolder/worldtree.html
The World Tree is the center of the world, but in shamanic paradox, the center of the world is also everywhere. In shamanic ritual or performance, the shaman operates in an altered state of consciousness with one foot in both realities. In this state, the the shaman 'becomes' the World Tree, and the place of that ritual becomes the center of the world.
The World Tree forms an integral part of the shamanic cosmos, linking the world of humanity with the world of the spirits. It is depicted in numerous tales of shamanic ritual and in power objects.
Genealogy is an ancient shamanic tool, like journeying and dialoguing. Working with the energies of dreams, death, and initiation helps us change our story and reveal our true nature which we can celebrate in ritual, including ancestral work. Our oldest ancestors can still be found at the edge of oblivion -- each generation another wave upon waves of possibility.
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.”
- C.G. Jung The Earth Has a Soul.
Climbing trees is part of the natural growth process which helps us become more fully human. You may remember when you were a child, climbing up into a tree in your yard, or that of your grandparents -- a place to hide and lick your childhood wounds and let the imagination soar, or maybe watch an approaching storm. That tree was your first archaic temple.
From that lofty perch you felt the wind in your hair, experienced the dappled sunlight, and gained a new perspective, from which you could observe a bigger picture of the landscape and the unfolding story of your life. You may also have been aware of the elegance and beauty of the tree itself as your sanctuary and haven.
You might even have had a treehouse, a sanctuary in the green leaves and a lively space far above ordinary life where your 'observer self' and imagination could roam or 'fly', and you felt you could see forever. Then, perhaps you climbed even higher. Did you keep your power objects there? As an adult, you may have created a treehouse for your own children.
Traditionally, such a treehouse reminds us that climbing up and down trees was the work of ancient shaman, who entered that sacred space to speak with the ancestors, find healing, enter altered states, and commune with the cosmos.
Your family treehouse of the imagination is the House of your family surname -- your dynastic inheritance and legacy. It is the repository of your family history, including all the maternal lines of the realm of the mothers. Such a treehouse is where we can go for family reunions, relational intimacy, and to commune with ourselves.
That tree embodies our family. "We suffer very much from the fact that we consist of mind and have lost the body." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 251.) The self is a fact of nature and always appears as such in immediate experiences, in dreams and visions, and so on; it is the spirit in the stone, the great secret which has to be worked out, to be extracted from nature, because it is buried in nature herself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 977.
The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one.
So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is,because it is and it is not.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.
Your family tree is a synthesis of the ascent to higher consciousness and descent into more soulful living. All your beloved relatives still have a place there, or in your collateral lines -- a place where we can visit and honor them, or even work toward healing. It helps us live a sacred life of wisdom, heart and service, honoring all the parts of our being and all the dimensions of our life.
This work is at the heart of an embodied and inspiring expression of higher consciousness in day-to-day life, in which we come to honor our unique quirks, challenges and personality traits, as well as our depths, and the lives and legacies of our ancestors. You are a specific configuration of traits and opinions.
"The unconscious can make a fool of you in no time."
(Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 747).
"No matter what your conscious attitude may be, the unconscious has an absolutely free hand and can do what it pleases." (Jung, Visions Seminar, P. 27)
"But your attitude to it [death] matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.)
We learn to perceive the blessing in our wounds, and the liberation that beckons to us from our shadows. Buddhists suggest that the initial consciousness emerges as a vision of the clear light manifesting as a sight for the eye of wisdom. We simultaneously open to the vastness of Spirit and the beauty and depth of soul.
Worldviews Collide
It is a great privilege to live in a culture where we can recognize our birthright as free spiritual beings to a greater or lesser extent. But that may not have been so for our 2 parents, 4 grandparents, our 8 great grandparents, or our 16 great-great grandparents, much less our medieval and ancient ancestral lines. Many were born into systems their lives depended upon, whether or not they truly believed.
Where there is great passion, there is also great resentment. Heresy was punishable by death. Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, Johannite, or other religious ancestors, from the Gnostics, to the Inquisition, sought their version of spiritual freedom, at whatever cost to themselves or those who they fought or to lands they appropriated from it.
Spiritual Identity
Protestants persecuted Puritans who persecuted Quakers, like Roman Catholics persecuted Jews, Moors, and Cathars. Protestant vs. Catholic, Crusaders vs. Muslims, Christians vs. Pagans, etc. they all wished to 'purify' their ideas of religion. Certainly, there are many sides to the slings and arrows of holy wars, migration and beliefs when cultures clash. Each ethnicity has its traumas and issues and transitions. Often we have ancestors on both sides of conflicts, even in the same family.
Even if we look back only a generation or two we encounter ancestors whose spiritual self-identity and worldview we would now consider blindingly ignorant -- spiritual bondage rather than spiritual liberation. Yet the depth of commitment to the spiritual impulse remains the same. They searched within and this is what makes us interested in people who lived hundreds or thousands or years ago, to reconnect with the earth and be part of it as a culture, even if we are not sure how to do it.
Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true. --Jung, Visions Seminar, P. 1314
https://books.google.com/books?id=XLqEWwa7fT8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists who Came to America Before 1700
...By Frederick Lewis Weis
Daimon, Serpent & Bird
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
The image of the serpent has been corrupted by the will of man, yet beyond the scope of his vision, it readies itself at his root, preparing to return him to the Godhead upon his death. --C.G. Jung
For it ascends from earth to Heaven, and descends again new born to earth, having acquired the powers of the Above and the Below. . .The power of the Telesma* is not complete if it is not converted into earth. --Emerald Tablet
Serpents symbolized the underworld, water, regeneration, fertility, awe, and fear to the Celts. The Uroboros snake eating its own tail is a perfect illustration of how chthonic can represent both the creative and destructive aspects of nature.
The Uroboros is the unity of life and death in which all things that arise into existence must descend back into the void. In that silence we find our alert Presence, self-arising primordial awareness -- the unconscious ground that dissolves thousands of years of human conditioning and root of the Tree of Life...unborn awareness that is awareness itself.
In Jung's view, "the snake, as a chthonic and at the same time spiritual being, symbolizes the unconscious." (17) In particular, it seems to refer to "the latter's sudden and unexpected manifestations, its painful and dangerous intervention in our affairs, and its frightening effects." The Gnostic serpent of Paradise is wise, holy, and well-intentioned -- a manifestation of mother Sophia.
The snake corresponds to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious. As instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other.
Birds have an ambiguous symbolic significance across cultures throughout human history, universally relating to both life and death. Birds portend impending calamity and death. They bear or steal spirits of the dead, sometimes even embodying those very spirits themselves, and are also commonly associated with life, fertility, and longevity. They symbolize our deep-seated ambivalence to mortality -- the denial of death as finality through a desire for renewal, transformation, and rebirth.
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience. The daimon conducts our "life review," and may show us past lives.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
"In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single 'greatest man. . . .'" ("The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man", CW 10: § 175)
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; a hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man. (Jung, "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925), CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 338)
"In the unconscious it is not so terribly important whether a man is alive or dead, that seems to make very little impression upon the unconscious. But your attitude to it matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious."
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.
“Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. (Cf. the maternal significance of the fons signatus, as an attribute of the Virgin Mary, etc.)” --Jung, Psychology & Alchemy
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
The image of the serpent has been corrupted by the will of man, yet beyond the scope of his vision, it readies itself at his root, preparing to return him to the Godhead upon his death. --C.G. Jung
For it ascends from earth to Heaven, and descends again new born to earth, having acquired the powers of the Above and the Below. . .The power of the Telesma* is not complete if it is not converted into earth. --Emerald Tablet
Serpents symbolized the underworld, water, regeneration, fertility, awe, and fear to the Celts. The Uroboros snake eating its own tail is a perfect illustration of how chthonic can represent both the creative and destructive aspects of nature.
The Uroboros is the unity of life and death in which all things that arise into existence must descend back into the void. In that silence we find our alert Presence, self-arising primordial awareness -- the unconscious ground that dissolves thousands of years of human conditioning and root of the Tree of Life...unborn awareness that is awareness itself.
In Jung's view, "the snake, as a chthonic and at the same time spiritual being, symbolizes the unconscious." (17) In particular, it seems to refer to "the latter's sudden and unexpected manifestations, its painful and dangerous intervention in our affairs, and its frightening effects." The Gnostic serpent of Paradise is wise, holy, and well-intentioned -- a manifestation of mother Sophia.
The snake corresponds to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious. As instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other.
Birds have an ambiguous symbolic significance across cultures throughout human history, universally relating to both life and death. Birds portend impending calamity and death. They bear or steal spirits of the dead, sometimes even embodying those very spirits themselves, and are also commonly associated with life, fertility, and longevity. They symbolize our deep-seated ambivalence to mortality -- the denial of death as finality through a desire for renewal, transformation, and rebirth.
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience. The daimon conducts our "life review," and may show us past lives.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
"In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single 'greatest man. . . .'" ("The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man", CW 10: § 175)
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; a hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man. (Jung, "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925), CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 338)
"In the unconscious it is not so terribly important whether a man is alive or dead, that seems to make very little impression upon the unconscious. But your attitude to it matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious."
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.
“Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. (Cf. the maternal significance of the fons signatus, as an attribute of the Virgin Mary, etc.)” --Jung, Psychology & Alchemy
"Acorn", Io Miller, 2016
James Hillman's 'acorn theory' of soul says we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life's work when fully actualized.
TAKING IT TO THE GRAVE
DREAM GENEALOGY
Inner Ways of Knowing
"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination? In the ordinary course of things, fantasy does not go astray; it is too deep for that, and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal instinct. . . . The creative activity of the imagination frees man from his bondage to the 'nothing but' and liberates him in the spirit of play. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing."
--C.G. Jung, CW 16, §98
Young children have a consciousness which is remarkable.
I find the psychology of little children exceedingly difficult; their dreams, for instance, are amazingly difficult. One would assume that they would be quite simple but they are far from that.
Of course some are obvious, but they have an unusual number of great dreams, and great visions too, and to deal with them requires an hypothesis which makes one quite dizzy.
One has to assume that they have a consciousness of the collective unconscious, an amazing thing. It makes little children seem quite old, like people who have lived a full life and who have a very profound idea of what consciousness really is. Hence the saying: fools and children speak the truth. It is because they know it.
Children have the vision still hanging over them of things which they have never seen, and could not possibly have seen, and which are in accordance with the theory of reincarnation. It is just as if reminiscences of a former life were carried over into this life, or from the ancestral life perhaps, we don’t know.
I could tell you children’s dreams which are simply uncanny, and if you want to interpret them at all, you have to use uncanny means.
They cannot be explained even by the psychology of the parents.
They must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they
were born, and that is really vision.
I know a case where a vision affected a whole life. Individuals can be stunted all through their lives by a vision in childhood. Such children are not quite born—their birth takes place much later, when they can detach.
But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.
Psychic and Personal Rootedness
"We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots.
We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live.
That idea, that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left, is an inflation. I am sorry, that is impossible; it makes no sense."
~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
It may seem strange at first to think that collective dreams could have any relevance to ourselves. We have cut ourselves off from the past to such an extent that it is difficult to realize that the experiences of remote people can still have meaning for us. Yet it is so.
Unconsciously we still think like our distant ancestors, and to understand this is to deepen our experience, and open up new possibilities. We remain connected through the language of dreams and imagination. To visit “the imaginal realm,” suspended between the empirical world and the totally visionary, is not a supernatural power of some, but a phenomenon recognized from the dawn of mankind. Turning the inside out, we bring it through the senses.
While some dreams may be compensatory (balancing our conscious viewpoint), ancestral dream content often appears as not substantially different from conscious functioning. There is no need for defense or surrender to the dream material. We might dream of cemeteries, family records, ancestors themselves, or any other variety that informs our genealogical quest.
As Jung suggests, "There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self." (MDR, Pgs. 196-197)
When the Spirits Came Back
Even more than blood, we are bonded by respect and joy in each other's lives as true family. We may wonder about our ancestors who lived closely attuned to the land, and what were their lives like Who were the indigenous Celts and Anglo Saxons, or our other more archaic progenitors?
Although we may never truly know our indigenous ancestors’ ceremonies and rituals, we may be able to remember aspects of them and their world through dreaming. Even dreams about genealogy sometimes lead to real discoveries. Recurring dreams are even more compelling. Significant, impactful or highly-memorable dreams can be bizarre or beautiful. Some dreams have a life-long effect on us.
Integral Dreaming
Dreaming with the ancestors is perhaps more accurate than dreaming about them. 'Dreaming with' we may explore the power of dreams to recover deep ancestral, cultural, planetary, and cosmic memory. Hillman argued dreams tell us where are are not what to do. The dream is a descent into the underworld. Dreams saturate our consciousness with the mysterious customs of the dark and impenetrable underworld.
Somewhere within the total personality, there appears to be a continuing integrative force, a homeostasis or self-regulating function. Even when we feel overwhelmed by experience, some part of our mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life.
This may disappear for brief periods, but most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this is. It appears different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. It can appear symbolically as distinctly 'Other.'
Jung's concept of wholeness, linked with the Self. Such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collected dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn.
The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation -- the gaps in our experience. Following our dreams means following our uncertainty. Root metaphor dreams may arise in times of crisis and help us adapt and help one another.
Dreams teach by revelation, but there is no reason to objectify that. There is no work to it, no interpretation, no theorizing. We are each simply unrepeatable and utterly inexhaustible entities, whose mystery cannot be objectified or reduced to any single interpretation.
The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity that can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or savior. The power we find is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self, our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams.
Dreams are the underworld. Imagination and the psyche are two key components of the underworld, a dreamland of souls where the human mind retreats and interacts with other psyches present.
In the Hero's Journey, Campbell notes, "Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered."
The 'nekyia' is a night sea journey, a descent into the underworld or into the belly of a sea monster, and a meeting with the dead. It is a myth which occurs in many cultures in different forms and symbolizes the struggle towards spiritual or psychological revelation and transformation.
In a Fortune article, Lawrence Lessing describes recent sleep research: ‘...recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’
“But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness? This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead… I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man." (CW 9i, §177)
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
Last Rites: Embodying Ancestor Wisdom
By Iona Miller, (c) 2016
"I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be
rooted in the earth."
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 204
"There is an alchemical saying: Man is the heaven of woman and woman
is the earth of man. The woman’s task is to bring things down to earth."
--Marie Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives by E. Rossi
"You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people’s organic health."
--Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.
Solidly Grounded
"The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite.
So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body." --Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66
Arguably, the best way to hone our theory is to refine our arguments against vigorous counterarguments. We don't have to go as far as 'magical thinking' to have a bit of magic in our lives, nor do we have to remain content with wishful thinking, idiosyncratic views, or 'spiritual' fantasies about our healing potential. If we use our genealogy in a compensatory fashion, it functions somewhat like dreams, and can be approached with the same conditions.
There is an enormous amount of variation in metaphysical and moral views, often characterized by an unusual degree of intractability. Without any rational basis, people believe all sorts of things because they "feel right," as if that were some touchstone, when it is the basis of pseudo-science, false suppositions, or erroneous conclusions and lack of critical thinking.
Jung said, "All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 64.)
We don't need to make exaggerated claims for CAM healing or "secrets," based on spurious theories or misapplied science and buzzword branding. Sometimes it works temporarily, but not for the reasons or in the way it purports. Much of it mobilizes the placebo effect, which is fine, but perhaps not the best approach. Our own hidden family secrets contain the key to our well-being, but we don't need to turn our genealogy work into a rootless transcendental escape.
We don't need to approach our ancestors with far-fetched superstitious ideas or wildly irrational models to consciously develop a living relationship with them. There are four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication).
Everything begins with a foundation. It is said there are things hidden since the Foundation of the World. Archaic genealogy is one of them. Rituals revolve around whether imitation is forbidden or mandatory. Imperative rituals are religious or spiritual; forbidden rites are transgressive.
Genealogy is desirable. Descent is the first and primordial fact about the body-mind -- its origin and source of 'in-form-ation.' We don't need special gifts to track their weird properties. In genealogy, meaning and purpose meet a genuine emotional connection. Genealogy is the skeleton upon which we can flesh out our family history into a sacred living lineage. It is not a way of burying ourselves in the past to avoid the present, but to be more fully Present.
Our attitude is one of openness and inclusiveness, which is essential for working with dying, death, grieving, and caring. We desire to experience everything without withdrawing from the intensity and vividness of any experience. Our guide is the continuum of spontaneity, a realm of not-knowing -- undefended and transparent to the full embrace of life.
The past is fully present in our psychophysical being. Presence is that state where the past doesn’t exist, and the future hasn’t been written. It is what is in the now. It is clarity. Like heals like.
"Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, P.66)
"...when people approach their inferior function; they have attacks of vertigo or nausea for instance, because the unconscious brings a peculiar sort of motion, as if the earth were moving under their feet, or as if they were on the deck of a ship rolling in a heavy swell. They get a kind of seasickness; they develop such symptoms actually.
It simply means that their former basis, or their imagined basis, has gone certain values which they thought to be basic are no longer there-so they become doubtful and suspended in a sort of indefinite atmosphere with no ground under their feet, always afraid of falling down.
And of course the thing that is waiting for them underneath is the jaws of hell, or the depth of the water, or a profound darkness, or a monster-or they may call it madness. And mind you, it is madness to fall out of one's conscious world into an unconscious condition.
Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
It is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition.
Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
Consciousness is swept over by unconscious contents in which all orientation is lost.
The ego then becomes a sort of fish swimming in a sea among other fishes, and of course fishes don’t know who they are, don’t even know the name of their own species. (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1088-1089)
Divinatory Traditions
Besides dreams, divination is one of the major ways ancestors communicate. Shaman 'throw the bones' acknowledging that they have the capacity for revelations. Divination with natural objects uses organic living tools of divination. In bone divination, bones of various sorts are ritually tossed onto a mat, an animal hide, or into a circle drawn in the dirt, and the resulting patterns interpreted.
Throwing the bones is an ancient practice traditional to many regions of the world, including Africa, Asia, and North America. The number and type of bones used, as well as the inclusion of other small objects, such as pebbles, shells, and hard nuts, varies from culture to culture.
Marked bones are often used in groups of two or four to obtain yes or no answers, as well as more detailed information. Gaming dice, often called "the bones," may have their origin in marked bone divination. There are still forms of divination using patterns of spots and dots on dice or dominoes. Marking or painting the bones makes their identification quick and certain. Runes were often inscribed on bones.
Before throwing the bones, the healer invokes the ancestors by giving snuff, kneeling and clapping, and rattling or chanting a song. A general reading is given and then specific questions are asked and answered. Each question is answered by a separate throw of all the bones. It is the ancestor, and not the healer or messenger, who provides the information.
Old style Conjure, Mama Starr says, "I was taught that we are able to read the bones through our ancestors and the spirits that walk with us. You have to have a strong connection with your ancestors in order to receive the information through the bones. Your bones are very personal, and they should be taken care of after all this is a link between you and your ancestors. ... I was taught my bones are protected by my ancestors and if someone stole them they would have to deal with my ancestors..."
Others say, "In both my bone sets I have a piece that represents an ancient ancestor. It is an ancestor so far back that we can no longer know if it was male or female, or whether it is a relative from the mother’s side, or the father’s side. The only thing we know about it is that it is ancient and powerful."
"When it is near a person I look to see if there is a message. But even if there is no message, the presence of this piece nearby tells me that the client has an ancestor like this nearby watching over them. To me this is a special blessing."
"At the point this ancestor appears in your family tree they may have hundreds, if not thousands of blood descendants. That they are taking a particular interest in you out of all those others implies a gift. It could be that you share a similar gift or calling in life. I generally think of these gifts as gifts of the spirit – healing, or divination, or a creative talent. I think it has to be something that is universal throughout time. Every generation in every culture had healers, diviners, and artisans."
"The ancestors that are far back in our bloodlines appear the weakest to our intellect, but they have the most powerful energy. With little to go on, ancestors like this are hard to imagine or get a mental image of. But they themselves have the wisdom of ages. If in your self readings this ancestor keeps making its presence known you might want to consider deeper connection with just this ancestor."
Scottish speal bones are a divination used in Scotland, called Sleina-nachd, or reading the Speal Bone, or the Blade Bone ...A speal bone or blade bone of a shoulder of mutton was used, but complete details of the divinatory practice is unknown.
Cooked bones (most often the shoulder blade or scapular of a large animal) may be scraped clean of flesh and the marks upon it interpreted. In other cultures, certain specially selected bones, sometimes called oracle bones (usually scapulars or turtle bones) may be burned in a fire or heated until they crack and the resulting chars and cracks examined for specific answers to questions.
Firm Foundation
A firm foundation in our close family is a good anchor for more distance ancestors. The depth of your foundation determines how high you can fly, or in this case, trace your far-flung family tree -- an exceptional foundation as only royal, legendary, and mythical lineages pre-date the Middle Ages.
The durability of any structure is predetermined by the strength of its foundation. Impactful destinies have sure foundations. The stories we tell about the deceased depend largely on the foundation that person laid down in their life.
You must invest in your foundation. Your root should be enduring, deep, and strong. A deep foundation holds up the edifice of your destiny, eternally. The strength of your foundation supports your unique development or individuation.
When the ancestors call and you answer, you are infused with their organic wisdom. Outstanding dedication shines. Your worldview widens to encompass deep time. Life is about the bonds of family, the essence of what it is to be human. We become oblivious to the names and experiences of even our recent ancestors; we get ancestral amnesia. We forget their burdens and their blessings.
But we can raise them into the light of consciousness with a bit of joyful effort. Then we are rewarded with new meaning and self-knowledge. Like all initiatory journeys, it is about engaging with the ancestors, the death of the old self, and rebirth of the new, within generations of generativity.
This is family you can keep with you for the rest of your life. Groundwork takes some digging. With research and reading, combined with some information gathering to lay the groundwork, you can begin to construct your family tree and fill in the blanks that may have eluded you on your first rough sketches. You may think you are looking for 'who' and 'when', but you also need to think about 'where,' as in the precise location of your ancestors who may share a common surname with many families.
Genealogy looks at several generations of a family while kinship maps merge several family histories or genealogies to understand, not just descent, but extended family relationships. All meaningful communication is a form of storytelling or giving a report of events (narrative). In bonding, we realize that the ancestors mirror us and we reflect them.
Narrative Coherence
Because of this, human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, each with its own conflicts, characters, beginning, middle, and end -- best viewed as stories shaped by history, culture, and character. Narrative is the basis of communication, how we explain and/or justify their behavior, whether past or future.
The world is a set of stories from among which we must choose in order to live in a process of continual re-creation. We choose the ones that match our values and beliefs. Beliefs are how we make sense of life and death. The test of narrative rationality is based on the probability, coherence, and fidelity of the stories that underpin each story.
Narration is cross-cultural and is one of the first language skills all children develop. Is the story consistent, with sufficient detail, reliable characters, and free of any major surprises? Do the characters to act in a reliable manner. Otherwise, we become suspicious when characters behave uncharacteristically.
Narrative fidelity states that if a story matches our own beliefs and experiences, it will be accepted. Fidelity determines how the story fits into the background of the world as we have known it. Fisher also believes that a story has fidelity when it can be seen as a guide for our own actions, ultimately influence our beliefs and values.
It is more than a metaphor that nature is alive and speaks to us in millions of fragments of light -- the final form of life. "If you will bring to light what is inside of you, what you will bring to light will save you." (Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 30) “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” (Sir Francis Bacon)
"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." (Jung, CW 8, Para 800).
Jung called dreams "pure nature."..."they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” (CW 10 317)
Shake Hands With Your Family Tree
“Trees depict the living structure of our inner self. Its roots show our connection with our physical body and the earth; its trunk the way we would direct the energies of our being–varied and yet all connected in the common life process of our being. The tree can also symbolize new growth, stages of life and death, with its springs leaves and blossoms, then the falling leaves. The top of the tree, by the end of the branches, are our aspirations, the growing bendable tip of our personal growth and spiritual realization. The leaves may represent our personal life which may fall off the tree of life (die) but what gave it life continues to exist. The tree is our whole life, the evolutionary urge which pushes us into being. Its growth depicts the forces or processes behind all other life forms, expressing interpersonal existence.”
“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, P. 227)
James Hillman's 'acorn theory' of soul says we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life's work when fully actualized.
TAKING IT TO THE GRAVE
DREAM GENEALOGY
Inner Ways of Knowing
"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination? In the ordinary course of things, fantasy does not go astray; it is too deep for that, and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal instinct. . . . The creative activity of the imagination frees man from his bondage to the 'nothing but' and liberates him in the spirit of play. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing."
--C.G. Jung, CW 16, §98
Young children have a consciousness which is remarkable.
I find the psychology of little children exceedingly difficult; their dreams, for instance, are amazingly difficult. One would assume that they would be quite simple but they are far from that.
Of course some are obvious, but they have an unusual number of great dreams, and great visions too, and to deal with them requires an hypothesis which makes one quite dizzy.
One has to assume that they have a consciousness of the collective unconscious, an amazing thing. It makes little children seem quite old, like people who have lived a full life and who have a very profound idea of what consciousness really is. Hence the saying: fools and children speak the truth. It is because they know it.
Children have the vision still hanging over them of things which they have never seen, and could not possibly have seen, and which are in accordance with the theory of reincarnation. It is just as if reminiscences of a former life were carried over into this life, or from the ancestral life perhaps, we don’t know.
I could tell you children’s dreams which are simply uncanny, and if you want to interpret them at all, you have to use uncanny means.
They cannot be explained even by the psychology of the parents.
They must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they
were born, and that is really vision.
I know a case where a vision affected a whole life. Individuals can be stunted all through their lives by a vision in childhood. Such children are not quite born—their birth takes place much later, when they can detach.
But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.
Psychic and Personal Rootedness
"We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots.
We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live.
That idea, that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left, is an inflation. I am sorry, that is impossible; it makes no sense."
~Carl Jung, Kundalini Seminar, Page 29
It may seem strange at first to think that collective dreams could have any relevance to ourselves. We have cut ourselves off from the past to such an extent that it is difficult to realize that the experiences of remote people can still have meaning for us. Yet it is so.
Unconsciously we still think like our distant ancestors, and to understand this is to deepen our experience, and open up new possibilities. We remain connected through the language of dreams and imagination. To visit “the imaginal realm,” suspended between the empirical world and the totally visionary, is not a supernatural power of some, but a phenomenon recognized from the dawn of mankind. Turning the inside out, we bring it through the senses.
While some dreams may be compensatory (balancing our conscious viewpoint), ancestral dream content often appears as not substantially different from conscious functioning. There is no need for defense or surrender to the dream material. We might dream of cemeteries, family records, ancestors themselves, or any other variety that informs our genealogical quest.
As Jung suggests, "There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self." (MDR, Pgs. 196-197)
When the Spirits Came Back
Even more than blood, we are bonded by respect and joy in each other's lives as true family. We may wonder about our ancestors who lived closely attuned to the land, and what were their lives like Who were the indigenous Celts and Anglo Saxons, or our other more archaic progenitors?
Although we may never truly know our indigenous ancestors’ ceremonies and rituals, we may be able to remember aspects of them and their world through dreaming. Even dreams about genealogy sometimes lead to real discoveries. Recurring dreams are even more compelling. Significant, impactful or highly-memorable dreams can be bizarre or beautiful. Some dreams have a life-long effect on us.
Integral Dreaming
Dreaming with the ancestors is perhaps more accurate than dreaming about them. 'Dreaming with' we may explore the power of dreams to recover deep ancestral, cultural, planetary, and cosmic memory. Hillman argued dreams tell us where are are not what to do. The dream is a descent into the underworld. Dreams saturate our consciousness with the mysterious customs of the dark and impenetrable underworld.
Somewhere within the total personality, there appears to be a continuing integrative force, a homeostasis or self-regulating function. Even when we feel overwhelmed by experience, some part of our mind still seems to observe, evaluate, comment, and even attempt to integrate this otherwise hidden material with the knowledge of conscious life.
This may disappear for brief periods, but most of the time it is clearly at work. No one knows what type of ‘thinking’ this is. It appears different both from ‘reality thinking’ and ‘autistic thinking,’ from the patterns of conscious thought and the imagery of fantasy a kind of bridge between two types of mental process. It can appear symbolically as distinctly 'Other.'
Jung's concept of wholeness, linked with the Self. Such compensatory dreams connect with is best seen in the collected dreams by an individual undertaking their own personal journey to self acceptance and integration. Through an overview of dreams gained in this way, the two aspects of compensation become much more clearly drawn.
The dream work, aimed at meeting the neglected or hurt parts of oneself, opens the way to more pronounced compensation -- the gaps in our experience. Following our dreams means following our uncertainty. Root metaphor dreams may arise in times of crisis and help us adapt and help one another.
Dreams teach by revelation, but there is no reason to objectify that. There is no work to it, no interpretation, no theorizing. We are each simply unrepeatable and utterly inexhaustible entities, whose mystery cannot be objectified or reduced to any single interpretation.
The process of compensation also links with patterns of love and strength actually lived by others. They are then patterns remaining in the collective experience of humanity that can be accessed. When we touch these powerful racial memories we may clothe them in the image of our cultural hero or savior. The power we find is a release of our own potential emerging from our core self, our own innate potential. This emerges from our unconscious clothed in whatever imagery or ideas we can accept or allow, as do dreams.
Dreams are the underworld. Imagination and the psyche are two key components of the underworld, a dreamland of souls where the human mind retreats and interacts with other psyches present.
In the Hero's Journey, Campbell notes, "Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered."
The 'nekyia' is a night sea journey, a descent into the underworld or into the belly of a sea monster, and a meeting with the dead. It is a myth which occurs in many cultures in different forms and symbolizes the struggle towards spiritual or psychological revelation and transformation.
In a Fortune article, Lawrence Lessing describes recent sleep research: ‘...recent evidence shows that there may well be a second, lower level of dreaming extending down even into deep sleep, consisting largely of abstract thoughts or isolated symbols, much harder to recall than the generally vivid, active imagery of rapid-eye-movement dreaming.’
“But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness? This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead… I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of the primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man." (CW 9i, §177)
ANCESTORS & ARCHETYPES
Last Rites: Embodying Ancestor Wisdom
By Iona Miller, (c) 2016
"I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be
rooted in the earth."
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 204
"There is an alchemical saying: Man is the heaven of woman and woman
is the earth of man. The woman’s task is to bring things down to earth."
--Marie Louise von Franz, Psychological Perspectives by E. Rossi
"You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people’s organic health."
--Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654.
Solidly Grounded
"The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite.
So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body." --Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66
Arguably, the best way to hone our theory is to refine our arguments against vigorous counterarguments. We don't have to go as far as 'magical thinking' to have a bit of magic in our lives, nor do we have to remain content with wishful thinking, idiosyncratic views, or 'spiritual' fantasies about our healing potential. If we use our genealogy in a compensatory fashion, it functions somewhat like dreams, and can be approached with the same conditions.
There is an enormous amount of variation in metaphysical and moral views, often characterized by an unusual degree of intractability. Without any rational basis, people believe all sorts of things because they "feel right," as if that were some touchstone, when it is the basis of pseudo-science, false suppositions, or erroneous conclusions and lack of critical thinking.
Jung said, "All people who claim to be spiritual try to get away from the fact of the body; they want to destroy it in order to be something imaginary, but they never will be that, because the body denies them; the body says otherwise." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 64.)
We don't need to make exaggerated claims for CAM healing or "secrets," based on spurious theories or misapplied science and buzzword branding. Sometimes it works temporarily, but not for the reasons or in the way it purports. Much of it mobilizes the placebo effect, which is fine, but perhaps not the best approach. Our own hidden family secrets contain the key to our well-being, but we don't need to turn our genealogy work into a rootless transcendental escape.
We don't need to approach our ancestors with far-fetched superstitious ideas or wildly irrational models to consciously develop a living relationship with them. There are four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication).
Everything begins with a foundation. It is said there are things hidden since the Foundation of the World. Archaic genealogy is one of them. Rituals revolve around whether imitation is forbidden or mandatory. Imperative rituals are religious or spiritual; forbidden rites are transgressive.
Genealogy is desirable. Descent is the first and primordial fact about the body-mind -- its origin and source of 'in-form-ation.' We don't need special gifts to track their weird properties. In genealogy, meaning and purpose meet a genuine emotional connection. Genealogy is the skeleton upon which we can flesh out our family history into a sacred living lineage. It is not a way of burying ourselves in the past to avoid the present, but to be more fully Present.
Our attitude is one of openness and inclusiveness, which is essential for working with dying, death, grieving, and caring. We desire to experience everything without withdrawing from the intensity and vividness of any experience. Our guide is the continuum of spontaneity, a realm of not-knowing -- undefended and transparent to the full embrace of life.
The past is fully present in our psychophysical being. Presence is that state where the past doesn’t exist, and the future hasn’t been written. It is what is in the now. It is clarity. Like heals like.
"Don’t run away and make yourself unconscious of bodily facts, for they keep you in real life and help you not to lose your real way in the world of mere possibilities where you are simply blindfolded." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, P.66)
"...when people approach their inferior function; they have attacks of vertigo or nausea for instance, because the unconscious brings a peculiar sort of motion, as if the earth were moving under their feet, or as if they were on the deck of a ship rolling in a heavy swell. They get a kind of seasickness; they develop such symptoms actually.
It simply means that their former basis, or their imagined basis, has gone certain values which they thought to be basic are no longer there-so they become doubtful and suspended in a sort of indefinite atmosphere with no ground under their feet, always afraid of falling down.
And of course the thing that is waiting for them underneath is the jaws of hell, or the depth of the water, or a profound darkness, or a monster-or they may call it madness. And mind you, it is madness to fall out of one's conscious world into an unconscious condition.
Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
It is madness to fall out of one’s conscious world into an unconscious condition.
Insanity means just that, being overcome by an invasion of the unconscious.
Consciousness is swept over by unconscious contents in which all orientation is lost.
The ego then becomes a sort of fish swimming in a sea among other fishes, and of course fishes don’t know who they are, don’t even know the name of their own species. (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1088-1089)
Divinatory Traditions
Besides dreams, divination is one of the major ways ancestors communicate. Shaman 'throw the bones' acknowledging that they have the capacity for revelations. Divination with natural objects uses organic living tools of divination. In bone divination, bones of various sorts are ritually tossed onto a mat, an animal hide, or into a circle drawn in the dirt, and the resulting patterns interpreted.
Throwing the bones is an ancient practice traditional to many regions of the world, including Africa, Asia, and North America. The number and type of bones used, as well as the inclusion of other small objects, such as pebbles, shells, and hard nuts, varies from culture to culture.
Marked bones are often used in groups of two or four to obtain yes or no answers, as well as more detailed information. Gaming dice, often called "the bones," may have their origin in marked bone divination. There are still forms of divination using patterns of spots and dots on dice or dominoes. Marking or painting the bones makes their identification quick and certain. Runes were often inscribed on bones.
Before throwing the bones, the healer invokes the ancestors by giving snuff, kneeling and clapping, and rattling or chanting a song. A general reading is given and then specific questions are asked and answered. Each question is answered by a separate throw of all the bones. It is the ancestor, and not the healer or messenger, who provides the information.
Old style Conjure, Mama Starr says, "I was taught that we are able to read the bones through our ancestors and the spirits that walk with us. You have to have a strong connection with your ancestors in order to receive the information through the bones. Your bones are very personal, and they should be taken care of after all this is a link between you and your ancestors. ... I was taught my bones are protected by my ancestors and if someone stole them they would have to deal with my ancestors..."
Others say, "In both my bone sets I have a piece that represents an ancient ancestor. It is an ancestor so far back that we can no longer know if it was male or female, or whether it is a relative from the mother’s side, or the father’s side. The only thing we know about it is that it is ancient and powerful."
"When it is near a person I look to see if there is a message. But even if there is no message, the presence of this piece nearby tells me that the client has an ancestor like this nearby watching over them. To me this is a special blessing."
"At the point this ancestor appears in your family tree they may have hundreds, if not thousands of blood descendants. That they are taking a particular interest in you out of all those others implies a gift. It could be that you share a similar gift or calling in life. I generally think of these gifts as gifts of the spirit – healing, or divination, or a creative talent. I think it has to be something that is universal throughout time. Every generation in every culture had healers, diviners, and artisans."
"The ancestors that are far back in our bloodlines appear the weakest to our intellect, but they have the most powerful energy. With little to go on, ancestors like this are hard to imagine or get a mental image of. But they themselves have the wisdom of ages. If in your self readings this ancestor keeps making its presence known you might want to consider deeper connection with just this ancestor."
Scottish speal bones are a divination used in Scotland, called Sleina-nachd, or reading the Speal Bone, or the Blade Bone ...A speal bone or blade bone of a shoulder of mutton was used, but complete details of the divinatory practice is unknown.
Cooked bones (most often the shoulder blade or scapular of a large animal) may be scraped clean of flesh and the marks upon it interpreted. In other cultures, certain specially selected bones, sometimes called oracle bones (usually scapulars or turtle bones) may be burned in a fire or heated until they crack and the resulting chars and cracks examined for specific answers to questions.
Firm Foundation
A firm foundation in our close family is a good anchor for more distance ancestors. The depth of your foundation determines how high you can fly, or in this case, trace your far-flung family tree -- an exceptional foundation as only royal, legendary, and mythical lineages pre-date the Middle Ages.
The durability of any structure is predetermined by the strength of its foundation. Impactful destinies have sure foundations. The stories we tell about the deceased depend largely on the foundation that person laid down in their life.
You must invest in your foundation. Your root should be enduring, deep, and strong. A deep foundation holds up the edifice of your destiny, eternally. The strength of your foundation supports your unique development or individuation.
When the ancestors call and you answer, you are infused with their organic wisdom. Outstanding dedication shines. Your worldview widens to encompass deep time. Life is about the bonds of family, the essence of what it is to be human. We become oblivious to the names and experiences of even our recent ancestors; we get ancestral amnesia. We forget their burdens and their blessings.
But we can raise them into the light of consciousness with a bit of joyful effort. Then we are rewarded with new meaning and self-knowledge. Like all initiatory journeys, it is about engaging with the ancestors, the death of the old self, and rebirth of the new, within generations of generativity.
This is family you can keep with you for the rest of your life. Groundwork takes some digging. With research and reading, combined with some information gathering to lay the groundwork, you can begin to construct your family tree and fill in the blanks that may have eluded you on your first rough sketches. You may think you are looking for 'who' and 'when', but you also need to think about 'where,' as in the precise location of your ancestors who may share a common surname with many families.
Genealogy looks at several generations of a family while kinship maps merge several family histories or genealogies to understand, not just descent, but extended family relationships. All meaningful communication is a form of storytelling or giving a report of events (narrative). In bonding, we realize that the ancestors mirror us and we reflect them.
Narrative Coherence
Because of this, human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives, each with its own conflicts, characters, beginning, middle, and end -- best viewed as stories shaped by history, culture, and character. Narrative is the basis of communication, how we explain and/or justify their behavior, whether past or future.
The world is a set of stories from among which we must choose in order to live in a process of continual re-creation. We choose the ones that match our values and beliefs. Beliefs are how we make sense of life and death. The test of narrative rationality is based on the probability, coherence, and fidelity of the stories that underpin each story.
Narration is cross-cultural and is one of the first language skills all children develop. Is the story consistent, with sufficient detail, reliable characters, and free of any major surprises? Do the characters to act in a reliable manner. Otherwise, we become suspicious when characters behave uncharacteristically.
Narrative fidelity states that if a story matches our own beliefs and experiences, it will be accepted. Fidelity determines how the story fits into the background of the world as we have known it. Fisher also believes that a story has fidelity when it can be seen as a guide for our own actions, ultimately influence our beliefs and values.
It is more than a metaphor that nature is alive and speaks to us in millions of fragments of light -- the final form of life. "If you will bring to light what is inside of you, what you will bring to light will save you." (Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, 30) “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” (Sir Francis Bacon)
"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." (Jung, CW 8, Para 800).
Jung called dreams "pure nature."..."they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” (CW 10 317)
Shake Hands With Your Family Tree
“Trees depict the living structure of our inner self. Its roots show our connection with our physical body and the earth; its trunk the way we would direct the energies of our being–varied and yet all connected in the common life process of our being. The tree can also symbolize new growth, stages of life and death, with its springs leaves and blossoms, then the falling leaves. The top of the tree, by the end of the branches, are our aspirations, the growing bendable tip of our personal growth and spiritual realization. The leaves may represent our personal life which may fall off the tree of life (die) but what gave it life continues to exist. The tree is our whole life, the evolutionary urge which pushes us into being. Its growth depicts the forces or processes behind all other life forms, expressing interpersonal existence.”
“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, P. 227)
DEPTH GENEALOGY
GROUNDWORK: AN ECOLOGY OF SOULS
Collaborating with the Dead
"I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth." ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 204
"Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1277
Jung contended we can make no progress with ourselves until we become "very much more acquainted" with nature and our own nature. Genealogy is one opportunity to do so.
Depth Genealogy is an approach to genealogy with its own roots in Jungian and archetypal psychology, Transgenerational Integration, phenomenology, genetic genealogy, the arts, and other relevant areas. It is a soulful approach, attuned to the Earth and Feminine with an eye for the imaginal, the ecological, the embodied, and mythological. We cannot describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. Our way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized phenomenology—the phenomena of being aware of one’s own consciousness of the moment. Heidegger wrote about Dasein, or “being there” in the moment with oneself and with how one perceives the world.
Beliefs organize our experience and condition our experience and interpretation of sensed presence. You can't unperceive a perception once perceived, but you can erroneously project, interpret. or concretize it. However we attribute 'sensed presence' or 'liminal entities' we know that they are evoked potentials, rather than literal beings, but they exhibit phenomenological qualities that carry meaning.
Similar exotic experiences can be induced in the laboratory with electromagnetic fields on the temporal lobes, as reported by Persinger and Murphy (2016). The amygdala also plays a role in such manifestations, which appear 'good' or 'evil', depending on which side of the amygdala is dominant during the 'visitor experience,' which includes the 'ancestors'.
"On one extreme, there is the 'demonic' or evil visitor, and on the other extreme, there are more angelic visitors. It depends on which emotional center (amygdala), left or right, is more active. If the negative one (meaning the one that supports fear) is more active, the visitor experience will become a visitation by a demon, Satan, or a terrifying ghost. On the other extreme, it could be an angel, a spirit protector, or even God." (Todd Murphy)
In private mail Murphy hypothesized about the benign nature of 'ancestors'. We can conjecture that the rule of thumb of 10% experiencing negative effects may hold.
"Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival [or elicitation of an altered state], an individual may spontaneously sense the presence of non-physical beings becoming, for a time, a divided entity, with a portion of their consciousness more able to access non-verbal (intuitive, psychic, empathetic) information via the right temporal lobes and limbic region."
Enhancements in intuitive skills increase the chances for surviving the sharp crisis. The person's own non-linear cognitive skills are attributed to the 'spirit' being, who will seem to have guided them in a moment of crisis. In fact, the being was a projection of their own right-hemispheric self, the insight was from their own experiences, and the being enabled to whole process - whether it was 'real' (in the mechanistic sense) or not."
"The profound experiences attributed to the “sensed presence” and their cultural anthropomorphisms such as deities and gods are persistent reports in human populations that are frequently associated with permanent changes in behavior, reduced depression and alleviation of pain. The majority of traditional clinical observations and modern imaging techniques have emphasized the central role of right temporal lobe structures and their directly related networks. The experimental simulation of sensed presences ... can result in attributions to spiritual, deity-based or mystical sources within the clinical laboratory by the application of physiologically -patterned magnetic fields across the temporal lobes." (Persinger, Murphy,)
http://www.nrgarchive.gdk.mx/2016-reply-to-neuroscience-for-the-soul.pdf
In the genealogical journey our lineage descent becomes an initiatory experience of the depths of the human psyche and collective unconscious. In-depth research, therapy, and self-help for exploring of your Family Tree. Genealogy is a firm foundation for self-knowledge and any spiritual practice. Our ancestors become living presences informing our lives and being -- our relationship with the past, present, and future and the great cycle of life -- birth, death, and rebirth.
GROUNDWORK: AN ECOLOGY OF SOULS
Collaborating with the Dead
"I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth." ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 204
"Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1277
Jung contended we can make no progress with ourselves until we become "very much more acquainted" with nature and our own nature. Genealogy is one opportunity to do so.
Depth Genealogy is an approach to genealogy with its own roots in Jungian and archetypal psychology, Transgenerational Integration, phenomenology, genetic genealogy, the arts, and other relevant areas. It is a soulful approach, attuned to the Earth and Feminine with an eye for the imaginal, the ecological, the embodied, and mythological. We cannot describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. Our way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized phenomenology—the phenomena of being aware of one’s own consciousness of the moment. Heidegger wrote about Dasein, or “being there” in the moment with oneself and with how one perceives the world.
Beliefs organize our experience and condition our experience and interpretation of sensed presence. You can't unperceive a perception once perceived, but you can erroneously project, interpret. or concretize it. However we attribute 'sensed presence' or 'liminal entities' we know that they are evoked potentials, rather than literal beings, but they exhibit phenomenological qualities that carry meaning.
Similar exotic experiences can be induced in the laboratory with electromagnetic fields on the temporal lobes, as reported by Persinger and Murphy (2016). The amygdala also plays a role in such manifestations, which appear 'good' or 'evil', depending on which side of the amygdala is dominant during the 'visitor experience,' which includes the 'ancestors'.
"On one extreme, there is the 'demonic' or evil visitor, and on the other extreme, there are more angelic visitors. It depends on which emotional center (amygdala), left or right, is more active. If the negative one (meaning the one that supports fear) is more active, the visitor experience will become a visitation by a demon, Satan, or a terrifying ghost. On the other extreme, it could be an angel, a spirit protector, or even God." (Todd Murphy)
In private mail Murphy hypothesized about the benign nature of 'ancestors'. We can conjecture that the rule of thumb of 10% experiencing negative effects may hold.
"Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival [or elicitation of an altered state], an individual may spontaneously sense the presence of non-physical beings becoming, for a time, a divided entity, with a portion of their consciousness more able to access non-verbal (intuitive, psychic, empathetic) information via the right temporal lobes and limbic region."
Enhancements in intuitive skills increase the chances for surviving the sharp crisis. The person's own non-linear cognitive skills are attributed to the 'spirit' being, who will seem to have guided them in a moment of crisis. In fact, the being was a projection of their own right-hemispheric self, the insight was from their own experiences, and the being enabled to whole process - whether it was 'real' (in the mechanistic sense) or not."
"The profound experiences attributed to the “sensed presence” and their cultural anthropomorphisms such as deities and gods are persistent reports in human populations that are frequently associated with permanent changes in behavior, reduced depression and alleviation of pain. The majority of traditional clinical observations and modern imaging techniques have emphasized the central role of right temporal lobe structures and their directly related networks. The experimental simulation of sensed presences ... can result in attributions to spiritual, deity-based or mystical sources within the clinical laboratory by the application of physiologically -patterned magnetic fields across the temporal lobes." (Persinger, Murphy,)
http://www.nrgarchive.gdk.mx/2016-reply-to-neuroscience-for-the-soul.pdf
In the genealogical journey our lineage descent becomes an initiatory experience of the depths of the human psyche and collective unconscious. In-depth research, therapy, and self-help for exploring of your Family Tree. Genealogy is a firm foundation for self-knowledge and any spiritual practice. Our ancestors become living presences informing our lives and being -- our relationship with the past, present, and future and the great cycle of life -- birth, death, and rebirth.
YOU ARE A BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Depth Genealogy: Retrieving Your Ancestors
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
Retrieval does *not* mean "going back in time" but, rather,
remembering what we've forgotten. Yes, that is a re-naissance.
In the archetypal realm, the beginning and end of days is always with us in each and every moment as the mythic dimension. Myth describes breakthroughs of the sacred into the profane or historical time.
As humans, we still live in a Tree -- the ancient World Tree of our ancestors. We can use archeomythology to retrieve the ancestors, our lost soul, and the Feminine. Deeply buried in the layers of our cellular memory are the myths and stories of the Great Goddess; therein lies a connection to the very source of healing that we so desperately seek to reground ourselves in the present.
If we are lucky, and not too dissociated, we can feel our pain. Pain becomes a portal into deep awakening, and when we are truly blessed we can hear the faint and distant echo of the voice of the Mother calling to us through our pain, as she calls to us now. Her blessing of love fills our hearts and souls with the moisture of life, as we soak it up like parched drought land, welcoming a long awaited rain.
Mystical Marriage & Groundwork
The Mystical Marriage, the union of self and the divine, soul and spirit, is a process of being reborn on multiple levels of Ascent and Descent. Genealogy is the raw material of the symbolic life. Genealogy is the groundwork of our reclamation project, which leads downward toward the dark center of our individual selves and into the fruitful mysteries of the-more-than-human world of nature and ancestral lines already etched somewhere within us.
When we encounter the soul we are more likely to say we has uncovered our unique gifts, destiny, life purpose, or personal meaning. Through soul encounter, we learns why spirit and nature gave birth to our exceptional individuality and particular way of belonging to the world. Jung said, "But your darkness should grasp the light." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 270)
The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow. We may have been taught that the downward direction is a turn away from the sacred, toward evil and wickedness, toward “hell.” Then, entering the underworld is sinful, suicidal, or a one-way trip reserved for those who have been particularly bad.
Likewise, nature has been rendered as evil. Pan, the Greek’s horned god of the forest, was transformed into the devil of Christian mythology. Most Western cultures have feared wild nature and have thought of it as unruly, a realm whose laws clash with society’s. We have, in short, been led to believe that nature and soul are not merely wild but inherently dangerous, forbidden, tainted, or evil.
We 'descendants' are the embodiment of descent itself. The initial goal of the descent is to cultivate the ego/soul relationship, which is underworld business, that might, at first, make our surface lives more difficult or lonely, or less comfortable, secure, or happy. Soul practices prepare the old self-ego to abandon its social stability and psychological composure and to be reassigned through initiation as an active, adult agent for soul, as opposed to its former role as an adolescent agent for itself.
This journey of descent prepares us to live in the world with its harsh need to change us, and shows us where and how to make our stand on solid groundwork, firmly and uniquely. On this half of the spiritual journey, we do not rise toward heaven but fall toward the center of our longing. Although equally sacred and perhaps even more ancient than the journey of ascent, this second spiritual realm may be unfamiliar.
The concept of soul embraces the essence of our particular individuality while spirit is universal. Spirit and soul are both sacred; they imbue life with meaning, beauty, and mystery. Spirit and soul are both spiritual or transpersonal—they exist beyond the personal, beyond the conventional mind or personality. They might each be referred to as the “sacred Other.”
Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul says whereas in spirit, "we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values," soul "has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance."
Spirit wants to go toward beyond every unseen horizon; soul wants to remain in the world and its complexity, to stay within. Spirit wants transcendence; soul wants immanence. Spirit would leave all worldliness behind to escape to heaven, while soul wants to find heaven on earth and in all the earth's messiness.
The inseparable roots systems of the genealogical discipline are mystical practices and healing traditions, providing direct experience of present centered awareness, the numinous, heartful healing, and an embodied awakening, summoning the soul toward a return, a reunion with the origin and the eternal.
The descent into our genealogical roots in the 'land of the dead' has its own rewards both independent of the ascent and in conjunction with it. As Rilke wrote:
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees."
The rooting (of trees, of our selves) is as important and as necessary as the rising. We have the opportunity to sink roots into soul and rise up with branches in heaven.
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could root down ascendant, like trees." Our spiritual growth is meant to go toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upper world—through the trunks of our middle world lives.
Rilke saw the intrinsic value of darkness: "You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore."
Hierosgamos
Heirosgamos is a mystic marriage or union. Symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio, it stands for conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Mysterium Coniunctionis ("mysterious conjunction") is the final alchemical synthesis (for Jung, of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female) that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self). Its highest aspect, as for alchemist Gerard Dorn, was the unus mundus, a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit.
Moore says neither spirit nor soul can work without the other.
In fact, they need to be married to each other:
"Spirit tends to shoot off on its own in ambition, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and perfectionism. Soul gets stuck in its soupy moods, impossible relationships, and obsessive preoccupations. For the marriage to take place, each has to learn to appreciate the other and to be affected by the other--spirit's loftiness tempered by the soul's lowly limitations, soul's unconsciousness stirred by ideas and imagination."
Transcendence must remember its immanent context, and immanence must remember its transcendent implications. However, this marriage isn't just a metaphor. According to Jungian psychology, spirit and soul have definite masculine and feminine correspondences, respectively. The archetype of spirit is what Jungians call the animus, defined as the archetype of masculine being, whereas soul corresponds to the anima as the archetype of primordial femininity. This association deeper than any superficial definition of gender.
In his book Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, James Hillman talks about the way the animus or spirit always appears alongside the anima or soul, and vice versa, whether we like it or not:
"At the very moment of a new psychological move, we hear animus voices, driving us from it by spiritualizing the experience into abstractions, extracting its meaning, carrying it into actions, dogmatizing it into general principles, or using it to prove something. Where anima is vivid, animus enters. Similarly, when at work intellectually, or in spiritual meditation, or where courage is screwed to the sticking place, then anima invades with images and fears, with distractions of attachments and connections, telephoning, natural urges, suicidal despairs, or disturbing with ever deeper questions and puzzling unknowns. Moved by a new idea or spiritual impetus, anima is right there, wanting to make it personal, asking 'How does it relate?' and 'What about me?'
The anima--as soul, relatedness, immanence, the "thick of things"--always appears together with the transcendent animus. You can't separate them even if you tried.
We all share the same connection, as is revealed by the presence of our umbilicus. We cannot split from this source and expect to maintain a quality of life and love in the world. The Sacred Feminine has many names: Kali, Tara, Isis, Asherah, Yemaya, Guanyin, Coatlique, White Buffalo Woman, Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and countless more. She inspired the names of lands, such as Asia, Africa, Europe and Russia, and is calling to us to re-member Her and to re-member ourselves, and re-member our Family Tree.
The thresholds of creativity we behold when we retrieve the Sacred Feminine for ourselves exist in the internal landscapes of our deep inner being. There we uncover the sacred well of the Goddess, where we can drink freely of Her nurturing waters and feel cleansed of our suffering, shedding like the snake, the ancient symbol of the Goddess, our outworn skins of despair. She is the elixir of life, the fountain of youth. Her youth lies not in an eternally youthful appearance, but in Her powers of regeneration, well-known by our ancestors.
In soul retrieval power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma, often linked to family of origin trauma. Lack of conscious connection to this source cuts us off from that which births and sustains us. We become detached and dissociated, losing our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine.
We must do the re-membering in order for the ancestors to inform our lives and to drink from the deep well within. Our approach includes many disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, history, mythology,
comparative religions, psychology, poetry, and the visual arts.
Ancestor retrieval is information retrieval. Like alchemists of old, we become miners of data, trying to turn raw information and literature narratives into meaningful 'gold'. Extraction of characteristics from text is one of the main tasks in text mining. Family relationships help link people across different genealogical documents and sources.
Depth Genealogy: Retrieving Your Ancestors
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
Retrieval does *not* mean "going back in time" but, rather,
remembering what we've forgotten. Yes, that is a re-naissance.
In the archetypal realm, the beginning and end of days is always with us in each and every moment as the mythic dimension. Myth describes breakthroughs of the sacred into the profane or historical time.
As humans, we still live in a Tree -- the ancient World Tree of our ancestors. We can use archeomythology to retrieve the ancestors, our lost soul, and the Feminine. Deeply buried in the layers of our cellular memory are the myths and stories of the Great Goddess; therein lies a connection to the very source of healing that we so desperately seek to reground ourselves in the present.
If we are lucky, and not too dissociated, we can feel our pain. Pain becomes a portal into deep awakening, and when we are truly blessed we can hear the faint and distant echo of the voice of the Mother calling to us through our pain, as she calls to us now. Her blessing of love fills our hearts and souls with the moisture of life, as we soak it up like parched drought land, welcoming a long awaited rain.
Mystical Marriage & Groundwork
The Mystical Marriage, the union of self and the divine, soul and spirit, is a process of being reborn on multiple levels of Ascent and Descent. Genealogy is the raw material of the symbolic life. Genealogy is the groundwork of our reclamation project, which leads downward toward the dark center of our individual selves and into the fruitful mysteries of the-more-than-human world of nature and ancestral lines already etched somewhere within us.
When we encounter the soul we are more likely to say we has uncovered our unique gifts, destiny, life purpose, or personal meaning. Through soul encounter, we learns why spirit and nature gave birth to our exceptional individuality and particular way of belonging to the world. Jung said, "But your darkness should grasp the light." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 270)
The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow. We may have been taught that the downward direction is a turn away from the sacred, toward evil and wickedness, toward “hell.” Then, entering the underworld is sinful, suicidal, or a one-way trip reserved for those who have been particularly bad.
Likewise, nature has been rendered as evil. Pan, the Greek’s horned god of the forest, was transformed into the devil of Christian mythology. Most Western cultures have feared wild nature and have thought of it as unruly, a realm whose laws clash with society’s. We have, in short, been led to believe that nature and soul are not merely wild but inherently dangerous, forbidden, tainted, or evil.
We 'descendants' are the embodiment of descent itself. The initial goal of the descent is to cultivate the ego/soul relationship, which is underworld business, that might, at first, make our surface lives more difficult or lonely, or less comfortable, secure, or happy. Soul practices prepare the old self-ego to abandon its social stability and psychological composure and to be reassigned through initiation as an active, adult agent for soul, as opposed to its former role as an adolescent agent for itself.
This journey of descent prepares us to live in the world with its harsh need to change us, and shows us where and how to make our stand on solid groundwork, firmly and uniquely. On this half of the spiritual journey, we do not rise toward heaven but fall toward the center of our longing. Although equally sacred and perhaps even more ancient than the journey of ascent, this second spiritual realm may be unfamiliar.
The concept of soul embraces the essence of our particular individuality while spirit is universal. Spirit and soul are both sacred; they imbue life with meaning, beauty, and mystery. Spirit and soul are both spiritual or transpersonal—they exist beyond the personal, beyond the conventional mind or personality. They might each be referred to as the “sacred Other.”
Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul says whereas in spirit, "we reach for consciousness, awareness, and the highest values," soul "has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart and personal substance."
Spirit wants to go toward beyond every unseen horizon; soul wants to remain in the world and its complexity, to stay within. Spirit wants transcendence; soul wants immanence. Spirit would leave all worldliness behind to escape to heaven, while soul wants to find heaven on earth and in all the earth's messiness.
The inseparable roots systems of the genealogical discipline are mystical practices and healing traditions, providing direct experience of present centered awareness, the numinous, heartful healing, and an embodied awakening, summoning the soul toward a return, a reunion with the origin and the eternal.
The descent into our genealogical roots in the 'land of the dead' has its own rewards both independent of the ascent and in conjunction with it. As Rilke wrote:
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees."
The rooting (of trees, of our selves) is as important and as necessary as the rising. We have the opportunity to sink roots into soul and rise up with branches in heaven.
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could root down ascendant, like trees." Our spiritual growth is meant to go toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upper world—through the trunks of our middle world lives.
Rilke saw the intrinsic value of darkness: "You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore."
Hierosgamos
Heirosgamos is a mystic marriage or union. Symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio, it stands for conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Mysterium Coniunctionis ("mysterious conjunction") is the final alchemical synthesis (for Jung, of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female) that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self). Its highest aspect, as for alchemist Gerard Dorn, was the unus mundus, a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit.
Moore says neither spirit nor soul can work without the other.
In fact, they need to be married to each other:
"Spirit tends to shoot off on its own in ambition, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and perfectionism. Soul gets stuck in its soupy moods, impossible relationships, and obsessive preoccupations. For the marriage to take place, each has to learn to appreciate the other and to be affected by the other--spirit's loftiness tempered by the soul's lowly limitations, soul's unconsciousness stirred by ideas and imagination."
Transcendence must remember its immanent context, and immanence must remember its transcendent implications. However, this marriage isn't just a metaphor. According to Jungian psychology, spirit and soul have definite masculine and feminine correspondences, respectively. The archetype of spirit is what Jungians call the animus, defined as the archetype of masculine being, whereas soul corresponds to the anima as the archetype of primordial femininity. This association deeper than any superficial definition of gender.
In his book Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, James Hillman talks about the way the animus or spirit always appears alongside the anima or soul, and vice versa, whether we like it or not:
"At the very moment of a new psychological move, we hear animus voices, driving us from it by spiritualizing the experience into abstractions, extracting its meaning, carrying it into actions, dogmatizing it into general principles, or using it to prove something. Where anima is vivid, animus enters. Similarly, when at work intellectually, or in spiritual meditation, or where courage is screwed to the sticking place, then anima invades with images and fears, with distractions of attachments and connections, telephoning, natural urges, suicidal despairs, or disturbing with ever deeper questions and puzzling unknowns. Moved by a new idea or spiritual impetus, anima is right there, wanting to make it personal, asking 'How does it relate?' and 'What about me?'
The anima--as soul, relatedness, immanence, the "thick of things"--always appears together with the transcendent animus. You can't separate them even if you tried.
We all share the same connection, as is revealed by the presence of our umbilicus. We cannot split from this source and expect to maintain a quality of life and love in the world. The Sacred Feminine has many names: Kali, Tara, Isis, Asherah, Yemaya, Guanyin, Coatlique, White Buffalo Woman, Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and countless more. She inspired the names of lands, such as Asia, Africa, Europe and Russia, and is calling to us to re-member Her and to re-member ourselves, and re-member our Family Tree.
The thresholds of creativity we behold when we retrieve the Sacred Feminine for ourselves exist in the internal landscapes of our deep inner being. There we uncover the sacred well of the Goddess, where we can drink freely of Her nurturing waters and feel cleansed of our suffering, shedding like the snake, the ancient symbol of the Goddess, our outworn skins of despair. She is the elixir of life, the fountain of youth. Her youth lies not in an eternally youthful appearance, but in Her powers of regeneration, well-known by our ancestors.
In soul retrieval power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma, often linked to family of origin trauma. Lack of conscious connection to this source cuts us off from that which births and sustains us. We become detached and dissociated, losing our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine.
We must do the re-membering in order for the ancestors to inform our lives and to drink from the deep well within. Our approach includes many disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, history, mythology,
comparative religions, psychology, poetry, and the visual arts.
Ancestor retrieval is information retrieval. Like alchemists of old, we become miners of data, trying to turn raw information and literature narratives into meaningful 'gold'. Extraction of characteristics from text is one of the main tasks in text mining. Family relationships help link people across different genealogical documents and sources.
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
Healing Across Life Lines
"I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim, the garden of pomegranates, and the wedding of Tifereth with Malchuth was taking place. Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It was the mystic marriage as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradition. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. I could only think continually, “Now this is the garden of pomegranates! Now this is the marriage of Malchuth with Tifereth!” I do not know exactly what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself: I was the marriage. And my beatitude was that of a blissful wedding."
(C. G. Jung, Memories, dreams, reflections" (A. Jaffe, Ed.). New York: Random House, 1961, p. 293)
She:
Oh why do the leaves
Of the Mulberry tree
Whisper differently now
And why is the nightingale singing
At noon on the Mulberry bow
For some most mysterious reason
This isn't the garden I know
No it's paradise now
That was only a garden
A moment ago
He:
Take my hand
I'm a stranger in paradise
All lost in a wonderland
A stranger in paradise
If I stand starry-eyed
That's a danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside
An angel like you
--Stranger in Paradise, Kismet
Where are apples mentioned in scripture? No, not the Garden of Eden. The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was never named. Apples and apple trees in particular, are mentioned in the Song of Solomon, God's love song to His people. The verse describes the meeting of the young woman and her sweetheart:
"Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I awakened you under the apple tree. ... Place me like a seal over your heart...." - Song of Solomon 8:5
So if the Song of Solomon is an allegory of God's relationship with us, then the apple tree represents the place where God and I meet, where we connect, and our relationship is forged.
*
Pomegranate seeds sprout readily in the right environment. They became a symbol for fertility. Some believe the pomegranate was the forbidden fruit, not the apple, but its Latin name literally means "apple with many seeds."
In kabbalah the Spheres of the Tree of Life are likened to pomegranates. Gods and angels attend to the Tree of Life. A garden is the fantastic place in which to contemplate beauty and the mysteries of nature. A magic place, a safe haven, where man by tending flowers, plants and trees, nurtures the most intimate and delicate part of his being: a garden is a place of the soul. So is our genealogy where we cultivate the fruitful rows of our lineage.
The Spheres relate to major metaphysical concepts, as levels within the Divinity. The Tree of Life in the Kabbalah is the plan used for the creation of the worlds, and the descending path along which souls and creatures have attained their current forms.
In the gematria, the doctrine which attributes a numerical value to every letter, the value of "Pomegranate Garden" is 700 which is equivalent to "the one Lord God".
The Pomegranate Garden is thus equivalent to an affirmation of faith.
Symbolism is a primary and unavoidable for mysticism, that intuitively penetrates the veil of the deepest mystery. It is a means of communication which allows for the message to be adapted to the level of knowledge of the recipient. The special nature of symbolic communication is that it is open to differing levels of interpretation, depending on the level of the reader himself... For those who know and who possess the right key for interpretation and the right sensitivity one single symbolic cue - even in pictorial form - can open wide a world of analogies and implications.
Such is the nature of the pomegranate with its scarlet blossoms, as symbol. In all the cultures of the Near East, the pomegranate has always been seen as a symbol of fertility, fecundity and thus prosperity. This is because of the spherical structure of its fruit, its ruby red color and the countless seeds it contains. In antiquity it was associated with the cult of the Mother Goddess.
For example, in the motif of the tree of life, the multiplication of the subject, prior to having a decorative function, represents the expansion of an important idea, which conceals itself as it reveals itself. The symbolic function is potentially to link people around the same meaning, an experience which can be shared even by people of different generations, so as to create a bridge, a commonality of feeling and a spiritual affinity.
Commonly taken as fertility symbols, in Iraq pinecones and pomegranates are traditionally symbols of unity. In Christian symbolism, the pomegranate represents "multiplicity in unity as the Church, with the seeds as its many members" and, secondarily, "regeneration and resurrection," self-renewal, and victory over death immortality, longevity, victory over death. Ancestral knowledge of forever time.
A carpet is the reflection of this ideal place. The carpet-garden allows us to satisfy our aesthetic and his spiritual sensibility, by setting aside a place for meditation and prayer. A carpet is a space in which the stories of the world can be read, for those multi-colored outlines are traces of myths and legends, principles and life forces, being and becoming and the cosmic cycle. The carpet, a small bounded and decorated space just like a garden, is thus itself a garden of the soul.
The fleshy fruits with numerous blood-red seeds are a good symbol for multiple descendants. From earliest times, the pomegranate has been the fruit of fertility, of death and rebirth, of hope -- and guardian against the evil eye. The folktale goes, "Three pomegranates fell down from heaven: One for the story teller, one for the listener, and one for the whole world."
The "fruit of the gods," or "fruit of heaven," pomegranate is s Semitic symbol of life, abundance and wealth. In the Babylonian empire the fruit was served at weddings and represented the symbol of love and fertility. The pomegranate symbolized the soul’s immortality -- eternal life -- and the perfection of nature for Zoroastrians.
But, maybe it was also a "forbidden fruit." Pomegranate seeds were used by women of antiquity as a hormonal contraceptive. Taken regularly, it prohibited pregnancy during treatment. So, the forbidden fruit is about the knowledge of good and evil, sex, and reproductive power -- to have fertility or knowingly thwart it with reduced fertility rates.
A paradoxical union of opposites it symbolizes both fertility and contraceptive. Modern testing has shown that pomegranate does have contraceptive effects. The uterine contracting property of these fruits may cause serious hazard like abortion, when consumed in early trimesters of pregnancy. Contraction-stimulating compounds increase the chances of miscarriage. In ancient times pomegranate seeds were used as abortifacient.
Hippocrates and others prescribed the seeds and rind of the pomegranate to prevent conception. Oestrone, a compound that is identical to estrogen, is found in high levels in pomegranate seeds. The seeds have tested as the highest concentration of oestrone among all plants.
Soranus writes about six contraceptive and abortive recipes for vaginal suppositories, five of which use the rind or peel of a pomegranate, in addition to recommendations for pomegranate as an oral contraceptive. There are other well known religious traditions involving the testimony of pomegranate as an oral contraceptive.
Pomegranate and its distinctive ruby-red jewel-like seeds have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Ayurveda uses pomegranate as a contraceptive and abortifacient. Consuming the seeds, pulp, or rind is supplemented by using the rind as a vaginal suppository. This practice is recorded in ancient Indian literature, in medieval sources, and in modern folk medicine.
In ancient Greek mythology this fruit was the symbol of life, marriage and rebirth in the abduction story of Persephone by Hades, the god of the underworld, who abducted her to the land of the dead. Pomegranates, as a symbol of fertility, were used in the worship of Demeter during her ancient festival. The third and final day, the Calligenera, was devoted to the fertility of women where eating of pomegranate seeds was an important part of the rituals.
In Asia the pomegranate played a part in the wedding ceremony. The guests were provided with pomegranates and were told to throw them sharply upon the floor of the newlywed’s honeymoon room, scattering the seeds. This ritual was intended to encourage a fruitful union and many children. Jewish tradition teaches that the pomegranate is a symbol for righteousness and fruitfulness.
Likewise, the pomegranate is the Armenian symbol of fertility, abundance and marriage. A bride was given a pomegranate fruit, which she threw against a wall, breaking it into pieces. Scattered pomegranate seeds ensured the bride future children. In medieval legend the pomegranate tree is a symbol of abundance and fertility and an important feature in the hunt for the magical unicorn. Once Adam sprouts his own 'tree' in the garden, human descent begins.
Symbolically, "forbidden fruit" with its unconscious meanings can be relational difficulties, incest, or illegitimate descent -- the fruit of unwed or unwanted unions, or mythically-rooted cross cousin marriage. Just one adoption or family secret can lead to long lost family lines, only retrievable through genetic genealogy.
Yet, unknown family patterns and traits have a way of being passed along. Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio.
Because we do not tend to live out such archaic patterns in modern life, the dynamic is pushed down into the unconscious. But we can see it in our genealogy, especially when it is practiced through generations; it is called pedigree collapse. Reproduction between two individuals who share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be.
A single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have roughly a billion ancestors -- more than the total world population at the time. This apparent paradox is explained by shared ancestors, referred to as pedigree collapse. Instead of consisting of all unique individuals, a tree may have multiple places occupied by a single individual. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are related to each other (sometimes unknown to themselves).
When cousins marry, you get inbreeding, ancestor paradox, pedigree collapse or the 'family braid'. Instead of having all different ancestors, the same couple appears more than once in your pedigree. First cousins share a pair of grandparents, for example, so any children they have will show one pair of great-grand-parents ‘repeated’ in their pedigree.
Pedigree collapse is caused by inbreeding; both recent close breeding and more distant founder effects. When a breeder inbreeds they are cutting the pedigree pyramid of their stock down dramatically. When two cousins mate, they have actually permanently cut out 25% of the possible ancestors for their offspring.
Within the same general population, the chances are almost 100% that your spouse is a distant cousin, and you share a common ancestor from 20 generations ago. Once you go back 20 generations (a million distinct ancestors), you are almost guaranteed to see a common ancestor, and all ancestors of the common ancestor reduce the overall number of unique ancestors.
This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido -- incest -- held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous urge desires a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his wife's brother is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes and the basis of alliance theory.
Native Americans could not marry cousins from the father's line, but they could marry cousins from their mother's line. This was called cross-cousin marriage.
Preferential cross-cousin marriage exists in Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Africa, and elsewhere.
Levi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex - from a male perspective that is either the FZD (father's sister's daughter in kinship abbreviation) or the MBD (mother's brother's daughter in kinship abbreviation). Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures, constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex.
Common reasons behind cousin marriages are:
a) Better to marry in a family we know so that the bride/groom can adjust to their new life easily.
b) Better marry within the family so that our `wealth' does not go out.
c) Better marry within the family because we are better/superior than others.
d) Better marry within the family so disputes can be settled easily, reducing the likelihood of divorce.
e)Agreements are made by parents who are usually related.
Such marriage between 'the respective descendants of a brother and a sister', 'despite the very close degree of consanguinity between the spouses, is regarded as an ideal'. Bilateral cross-cousin marriage is often prescribed.
Diamond Pedigree Collapse -- How the shape of your genealogy expands & contracts with increasing occurrence of cousin marriages the further back you go.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/369435975654167827/
If we consider as a function of time t the number of a given individual's ancestors who were alive at time t, it is likely that for most individuals this function has a maximum at around 1200 AD. Some geneticists believe that everyone on Earth is at most 50th cousin to everyone else. We are born, we fruit, and die.
BEST ROYAL DESCENT
A royal descent is a lineal descent from a past or present monarch. Royal descent is sometimes claimed as a mark of distinction and is seen as a desirable goal of genealogy. Pretenders, impostors and those hoping to improve their social status have often claimed royal descent and some have fabricated lineages.
There were at least 650 colonists with traceable royal ancestry, and 387 left descendants in America (almost always numbering many thousands, and some as many as one million). Due to primogeniture, many colonists of high social status were younger children of English aristocratic families who came to America looking for land because, given their birth order, they could not inherit. Many of these immigrants initially enjoyed high standing where they settled. They could often claim royal descent through a female line or illegitimate descent.
The idea is that the "best" Royal descent is the descent from the most recent Monarch. In other words, a descent from a youngest son of Edward III of England (d. 1377) is considered "better" than descent from a daughter of Edward I of England (d. 1307).
One wrinkle in the idea of "best" is when the person is descended from
Monarchs of two different countries. In the past, several researchers would hold that a descent from any English king (such as Edward I, d. 1307) was "better" than a descent from any Scottish king (such as Robert III, d. 1406), but all of the major genealogy researchers have switched over to the strictly chronological definition.
A descent from, say, Henry VII, is "better" than a descent from Edward III ---- because it means that one is descended from some of those monarchs in between [Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV] ---- giving a greater overall count of Total Overall Royal Descents [TORD].
By the same token, a descent from Queen Victoria would be far better, but not if your main interest is archaic royal lines prior to the Donation of Constantine, which allowed the church to choose merchant kings, rather than ancient lineage heirs.
"Genealogy is an infinite progressive and regressive binary series, propagated by means of a terminal, sexually transmitted disease, producing a 100% death rate -- which we call Life." [DSH] -- 4 June 1997
Healing Across Life Lines
"I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim, the garden of pomegranates, and the wedding of Tifereth with Malchuth was taking place. Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It was the mystic marriage as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradition. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. I could only think continually, “Now this is the garden of pomegranates! Now this is the marriage of Malchuth with Tifereth!” I do not know exactly what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself: I was the marriage. And my beatitude was that of a blissful wedding."
(C. G. Jung, Memories, dreams, reflections" (A. Jaffe, Ed.). New York: Random House, 1961, p. 293)
She:
Oh why do the leaves
Of the Mulberry tree
Whisper differently now
And why is the nightingale singing
At noon on the Mulberry bow
For some most mysterious reason
This isn't the garden I know
No it's paradise now
That was only a garden
A moment ago
He:
Take my hand
I'm a stranger in paradise
All lost in a wonderland
A stranger in paradise
If I stand starry-eyed
That's a danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside
An angel like you
--Stranger in Paradise, Kismet
Where are apples mentioned in scripture? No, not the Garden of Eden. The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was never named. Apples and apple trees in particular, are mentioned in the Song of Solomon, God's love song to His people. The verse describes the meeting of the young woman and her sweetheart:
"Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I awakened you under the apple tree. ... Place me like a seal over your heart...." - Song of Solomon 8:5
So if the Song of Solomon is an allegory of God's relationship with us, then the apple tree represents the place where God and I meet, where we connect, and our relationship is forged.
*
Pomegranate seeds sprout readily in the right environment. They became a symbol for fertility. Some believe the pomegranate was the forbidden fruit, not the apple, but its Latin name literally means "apple with many seeds."
In kabbalah the Spheres of the Tree of Life are likened to pomegranates. Gods and angels attend to the Tree of Life. A garden is the fantastic place in which to contemplate beauty and the mysteries of nature. A magic place, a safe haven, where man by tending flowers, plants and trees, nurtures the most intimate and delicate part of his being: a garden is a place of the soul. So is our genealogy where we cultivate the fruitful rows of our lineage.
The Spheres relate to major metaphysical concepts, as levels within the Divinity. The Tree of Life in the Kabbalah is the plan used for the creation of the worlds, and the descending path along which souls and creatures have attained their current forms.
In the gematria, the doctrine which attributes a numerical value to every letter, the value of "Pomegranate Garden" is 700 which is equivalent to "the one Lord God".
The Pomegranate Garden is thus equivalent to an affirmation of faith.
Symbolism is a primary and unavoidable for mysticism, that intuitively penetrates the veil of the deepest mystery. It is a means of communication which allows for the message to be adapted to the level of knowledge of the recipient. The special nature of symbolic communication is that it is open to differing levels of interpretation, depending on the level of the reader himself... For those who know and who possess the right key for interpretation and the right sensitivity one single symbolic cue - even in pictorial form - can open wide a world of analogies and implications.
Such is the nature of the pomegranate with its scarlet blossoms, as symbol. In all the cultures of the Near East, the pomegranate has always been seen as a symbol of fertility, fecundity and thus prosperity. This is because of the spherical structure of its fruit, its ruby red color and the countless seeds it contains. In antiquity it was associated with the cult of the Mother Goddess.
For example, in the motif of the tree of life, the multiplication of the subject, prior to having a decorative function, represents the expansion of an important idea, which conceals itself as it reveals itself. The symbolic function is potentially to link people around the same meaning, an experience which can be shared even by people of different generations, so as to create a bridge, a commonality of feeling and a spiritual affinity.
Commonly taken as fertility symbols, in Iraq pinecones and pomegranates are traditionally symbols of unity. In Christian symbolism, the pomegranate represents "multiplicity in unity as the Church, with the seeds as its many members" and, secondarily, "regeneration and resurrection," self-renewal, and victory over death immortality, longevity, victory over death. Ancestral knowledge of forever time.
A carpet is the reflection of this ideal place. The carpet-garden allows us to satisfy our aesthetic and his spiritual sensibility, by setting aside a place for meditation and prayer. A carpet is a space in which the stories of the world can be read, for those multi-colored outlines are traces of myths and legends, principles and life forces, being and becoming and the cosmic cycle. The carpet, a small bounded and decorated space just like a garden, is thus itself a garden of the soul.
The fleshy fruits with numerous blood-red seeds are a good symbol for multiple descendants. From earliest times, the pomegranate has been the fruit of fertility, of death and rebirth, of hope -- and guardian against the evil eye. The folktale goes, "Three pomegranates fell down from heaven: One for the story teller, one for the listener, and one for the whole world."
The "fruit of the gods," or "fruit of heaven," pomegranate is s Semitic symbol of life, abundance and wealth. In the Babylonian empire the fruit was served at weddings and represented the symbol of love and fertility. The pomegranate symbolized the soul’s immortality -- eternal life -- and the perfection of nature for Zoroastrians.
But, maybe it was also a "forbidden fruit." Pomegranate seeds were used by women of antiquity as a hormonal contraceptive. Taken regularly, it prohibited pregnancy during treatment. So, the forbidden fruit is about the knowledge of good and evil, sex, and reproductive power -- to have fertility or knowingly thwart it with reduced fertility rates.
A paradoxical union of opposites it symbolizes both fertility and contraceptive. Modern testing has shown that pomegranate does have contraceptive effects. The uterine contracting property of these fruits may cause serious hazard like abortion, when consumed in early trimesters of pregnancy. Contraction-stimulating compounds increase the chances of miscarriage. In ancient times pomegranate seeds were used as abortifacient.
Hippocrates and others prescribed the seeds and rind of the pomegranate to prevent conception. Oestrone, a compound that is identical to estrogen, is found in high levels in pomegranate seeds. The seeds have tested as the highest concentration of oestrone among all plants.
Soranus writes about six contraceptive and abortive recipes for vaginal suppositories, five of which use the rind or peel of a pomegranate, in addition to recommendations for pomegranate as an oral contraceptive. There are other well known religious traditions involving the testimony of pomegranate as an oral contraceptive.
Pomegranate and its distinctive ruby-red jewel-like seeds have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Ayurveda uses pomegranate as a contraceptive and abortifacient. Consuming the seeds, pulp, or rind is supplemented by using the rind as a vaginal suppository. This practice is recorded in ancient Indian literature, in medieval sources, and in modern folk medicine.
In ancient Greek mythology this fruit was the symbol of life, marriage and rebirth in the abduction story of Persephone by Hades, the god of the underworld, who abducted her to the land of the dead. Pomegranates, as a symbol of fertility, were used in the worship of Demeter during her ancient festival. The third and final day, the Calligenera, was devoted to the fertility of women where eating of pomegranate seeds was an important part of the rituals.
In Asia the pomegranate played a part in the wedding ceremony. The guests were provided with pomegranates and were told to throw them sharply upon the floor of the newlywed’s honeymoon room, scattering the seeds. This ritual was intended to encourage a fruitful union and many children. Jewish tradition teaches that the pomegranate is a symbol for righteousness and fruitfulness.
Likewise, the pomegranate is the Armenian symbol of fertility, abundance and marriage. A bride was given a pomegranate fruit, which she threw against a wall, breaking it into pieces. Scattered pomegranate seeds ensured the bride future children. In medieval legend the pomegranate tree is a symbol of abundance and fertility and an important feature in the hunt for the magical unicorn. Once Adam sprouts his own 'tree' in the garden, human descent begins.
Symbolically, "forbidden fruit" with its unconscious meanings can be relational difficulties, incest, or illegitimate descent -- the fruit of unwed or unwanted unions, or mythically-rooted cross cousin marriage. Just one adoption or family secret can lead to long lost family lines, only retrievable through genetic genealogy.
Yet, unknown family patterns and traits have a way of being passed along. Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio.
Because we do not tend to live out such archaic patterns in modern life, the dynamic is pushed down into the unconscious. But we can see it in our genealogy, especially when it is practiced through generations; it is called pedigree collapse. Reproduction between two individuals who share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be.
A single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have roughly a billion ancestors -- more than the total world population at the time. This apparent paradox is explained by shared ancestors, referred to as pedigree collapse. Instead of consisting of all unique individuals, a tree may have multiple places occupied by a single individual. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are related to each other (sometimes unknown to themselves).
When cousins marry, you get inbreeding, ancestor paradox, pedigree collapse or the 'family braid'. Instead of having all different ancestors, the same couple appears more than once in your pedigree. First cousins share a pair of grandparents, for example, so any children they have will show one pair of great-grand-parents ‘repeated’ in their pedigree.
Pedigree collapse is caused by inbreeding; both recent close breeding and more distant founder effects. When a breeder inbreeds they are cutting the pedigree pyramid of their stock down dramatically. When two cousins mate, they have actually permanently cut out 25% of the possible ancestors for their offspring.
Within the same general population, the chances are almost 100% that your spouse is a distant cousin, and you share a common ancestor from 20 generations ago. Once you go back 20 generations (a million distinct ancestors), you are almost guaranteed to see a common ancestor, and all ancestors of the common ancestor reduce the overall number of unique ancestors.
This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido -- incest -- held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous urge desires a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his wife's brother is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes and the basis of alliance theory.
Native Americans could not marry cousins from the father's line, but they could marry cousins from their mother's line. This was called cross-cousin marriage.
Preferential cross-cousin marriage exists in Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Africa, and elsewhere.
Levi-Strauss also discovered that a wide range of historically unrelated cultures had the rule that individuals should marry their cross-cousin, meaning children of siblings of the opposite sex - from a male perspective that is either the FZD (father's sister's daughter in kinship abbreviation) or the MBD (mother's brother's daughter in kinship abbreviation). Accordingly, he grouped all possible kinship systems into a scheme containing three basic kinship structures, constructed out of two types of exchange. He called the three kinship structures elementary, semi-complex and complex.
Common reasons behind cousin marriages are:
a) Better to marry in a family we know so that the bride/groom can adjust to their new life easily.
b) Better marry within the family so that our `wealth' does not go out.
c) Better marry within the family because we are better/superior than others.
d) Better marry within the family so disputes can be settled easily, reducing the likelihood of divorce.
e)Agreements are made by parents who are usually related.
Such marriage between 'the respective descendants of a brother and a sister', 'despite the very close degree of consanguinity between the spouses, is regarded as an ideal'. Bilateral cross-cousin marriage is often prescribed.
Diamond Pedigree Collapse -- How the shape of your genealogy expands & contracts with increasing occurrence of cousin marriages the further back you go.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/369435975654167827/
If we consider as a function of time t the number of a given individual's ancestors who were alive at time t, it is likely that for most individuals this function has a maximum at around 1200 AD. Some geneticists believe that everyone on Earth is at most 50th cousin to everyone else. We are born, we fruit, and die.
BEST ROYAL DESCENT
A royal descent is a lineal descent from a past or present monarch. Royal descent is sometimes claimed as a mark of distinction and is seen as a desirable goal of genealogy. Pretenders, impostors and those hoping to improve their social status have often claimed royal descent and some have fabricated lineages.
There were at least 650 colonists with traceable royal ancestry, and 387 left descendants in America (almost always numbering many thousands, and some as many as one million). Due to primogeniture, many colonists of high social status were younger children of English aristocratic families who came to America looking for land because, given their birth order, they could not inherit. Many of these immigrants initially enjoyed high standing where they settled. They could often claim royal descent through a female line or illegitimate descent.
The idea is that the "best" Royal descent is the descent from the most recent Monarch. In other words, a descent from a youngest son of Edward III of England (d. 1377) is considered "better" than descent from a daughter of Edward I of England (d. 1307).
One wrinkle in the idea of "best" is when the person is descended from
Monarchs of two different countries. In the past, several researchers would hold that a descent from any English king (such as Edward I, d. 1307) was "better" than a descent from any Scottish king (such as Robert III, d. 1406), but all of the major genealogy researchers have switched over to the strictly chronological definition.
A descent from, say, Henry VII, is "better" than a descent from Edward III ---- because it means that one is descended from some of those monarchs in between [Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV] ---- giving a greater overall count of Total Overall Royal Descents [TORD].
By the same token, a descent from Queen Victoria would be far better, but not if your main interest is archaic royal lines prior to the Donation of Constantine, which allowed the church to choose merchant kings, rather than ancient lineage heirs.
"Genealogy is an infinite progressive and regressive binary series, propagated by means of a terminal, sexually transmitted disease, producing a 100% death rate -- which we call Life." [DSH] -- 4 June 1997
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF FAMILY TREES
Sap is a Living Symbol of the Tree
Connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it is a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone.
The circulation of blood in the arteries mirrors the circulation of sap in the tree, and the circularity of cosmological or metaphysical thought — analogical thinking that links the macrocosm and microcosm, above and below. The ancestral field has an immediate effect, both healing and challenging, on our whole lives.
Our genealogical Quest is an introspective as well as investigative journey. We may think that the lines of evidence of our family tree are very neat and orderly, but when it comes to human beings, dead or alive, there is a certain inherent messiness that comes from the sap of living, from the juicy stuff of life that won't ever fit on the page -- the life experiences and felt-sense of Being. Uncanny patterns and systems of occurrences befall families from generation to generation.
Much of the action goes on in the invisible realm, in the roots far below the branches where everything mingles and becomes entangled and from which the nutritious sap flows. Hidden links below the surface inform and affect us at the unconscious level and biogenealogy. Our ancestors, and their original ancestral traumas, even those who died before we were born, do affect us. They are part of the natural environment from which we are formed.
Family patterns persist over generations. It is the hidden hand of the grip the family retains on our lives and being. Transgenerational therapy says the ancestors can be the root of repetition compulsions, couple behavior, unresolved feelings, and a variety of other psychophysical phenomena -- a trans-subjective reality.
Methodical tracing of our family trees uncovers how important events have been interred in our genetic structures, only to pop up generations later. Family conflicts can pass on to future generations, even "the secret that is never told." When we have to live with the circumstances, knowledge is power.
The anniversary date of or a certain tragedy in the past can be stored in unconscious memory and acted out by following generations. Anniversary reactions appear not only as dramatic coincidences in dates or behaviors, but also in health problems, family secrets and accidents which seem to repeat generation after generation without any plausible explanation.
The research of Ernest Rossi, MD and others opens a new model of the relationships between the most interesting and motivating experiences of consciousness and the molecular dynamics of memory and learning that are described as the “novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis effect” (Rossi, 2002).
Gene-expression is the mechanism by which new patterns are called into being (Rossi, 2000). There is also a strong correlation between modulation of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger, 1987; McFadden, 2002). Creative, novel and enriching psychotherapeutic experiences can lead to neurogenesis, gene expression, and healing which facilitate mindbody communication and can have a long-term transformative effect on the whole person (Rossi, 2002).
Activated ancestors, like activated archetypes in complexes, can become like strange attractors, around whom we orbit in weird yet meaningful patterns. The attractor once again exhibits its self-iterating capacity by demonstrating its attractive or seductive power as a phenomenon, idea, or theory. Chaotic systems display certain characteristics including complex feedback loops, self organization, holistic behavior, inherent unpredictability.
It isn't what is expected and easily predictable in human affairs that is motivating, but the exact reverse. That which is surprising, unknown, and unpredicted garners our attention most. We set forth on the human quests for creative problem solving and creative adventure. We can explore the novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis dynamics of mind-body communication and healing in the new discipline of psychosocial genomics with our genealogy.
But what we really want from the generations past are not just the facts or the DNA. We want the stories. Love, passion, success, disappointment, humanity. There may be no way to know — really know — their interior life.
Sap is a Living Symbol of the Tree
Connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it is a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone.
The circulation of blood in the arteries mirrors the circulation of sap in the tree, and the circularity of cosmological or metaphysical thought — analogical thinking that links the macrocosm and microcosm, above and below. The ancestral field has an immediate effect, both healing and challenging, on our whole lives.
Our genealogical Quest is an introspective as well as investigative journey. We may think that the lines of evidence of our family tree are very neat and orderly, but when it comes to human beings, dead or alive, there is a certain inherent messiness that comes from the sap of living, from the juicy stuff of life that won't ever fit on the page -- the life experiences and felt-sense of Being. Uncanny patterns and systems of occurrences befall families from generation to generation.
Much of the action goes on in the invisible realm, in the roots far below the branches where everything mingles and becomes entangled and from which the nutritious sap flows. Hidden links below the surface inform and affect us at the unconscious level and biogenealogy. Our ancestors, and their original ancestral traumas, even those who died before we were born, do affect us. They are part of the natural environment from which we are formed.
Family patterns persist over generations. It is the hidden hand of the grip the family retains on our lives and being. Transgenerational therapy says the ancestors can be the root of repetition compulsions, couple behavior, unresolved feelings, and a variety of other psychophysical phenomena -- a trans-subjective reality.
Methodical tracing of our family trees uncovers how important events have been interred in our genetic structures, only to pop up generations later. Family conflicts can pass on to future generations, even "the secret that is never told." When we have to live with the circumstances, knowledge is power.
The anniversary date of or a certain tragedy in the past can be stored in unconscious memory and acted out by following generations. Anniversary reactions appear not only as dramatic coincidences in dates or behaviors, but also in health problems, family secrets and accidents which seem to repeat generation after generation without any plausible explanation.
The research of Ernest Rossi, MD and others opens a new model of the relationships between the most interesting and motivating experiences of consciousness and the molecular dynamics of memory and learning that are described as the “novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis effect” (Rossi, 2002).
Gene-expression is the mechanism by which new patterns are called into being (Rossi, 2000). There is also a strong correlation between modulation of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger, 1987; McFadden, 2002). Creative, novel and enriching psychotherapeutic experiences can lead to neurogenesis, gene expression, and healing which facilitate mindbody communication and can have a long-term transformative effect on the whole person (Rossi, 2002).
Activated ancestors, like activated archetypes in complexes, can become like strange attractors, around whom we orbit in weird yet meaningful patterns. The attractor once again exhibits its self-iterating capacity by demonstrating its attractive or seductive power as a phenomenon, idea, or theory. Chaotic systems display certain characteristics including complex feedback loops, self organization, holistic behavior, inherent unpredictability.
It isn't what is expected and easily predictable in human affairs that is motivating, but the exact reverse. That which is surprising, unknown, and unpredicted garners our attention most. We set forth on the human quests for creative problem solving and creative adventure. We can explore the novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis dynamics of mind-body communication and healing in the new discipline of psychosocial genomics with our genealogy.
But what we really want from the generations past are not just the facts or the DNA. We want the stories. Love, passion, success, disappointment, humanity. There may be no way to know — really know — their interior life.
ANCESTRAL ALCHEMY
Marriage of the Sun & the Moon: Primordial Parents
"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom." (Gospel of Thomas, 22)
A perennial theme of humankind, transformation as a basic change in character, cognition, and direction has been explored in religion, psychology and art. Rites of passage, as a summons to wisdom, can include a psychological and sacred dimension. Rites of initiation provide a symbolic death and rebirth experience. It addresses the question of how a person finds a personal path worthy of the soul.
Ritual Consummation
The hieros gamos, divine marriage, is usually found at the top of an ancient genealogical line. The genealogical myth begins when younger gods are born. The hieros gamos myth is a genealogical myth connected to the ruling family and fertility from ancient times. Nothing is more sacred than this union, the very fount of life itself.
Cosmic Disaster
The divine marriage is modeled on the union of sun and moon, either in eclipse or at solstice. A sliver of sunlight still enters the earth passage tomb at New Grange on the darkest day of the year fructifying mother earth, and entreating the ancestors to bless their fertility, through meaningful alignment of sun, earth, and moon. By coming together they 'force' or generate the re-creation of the universe. The royal couple mimics cosmological events -- "As above; so below."
The first known megalithic building begun at Gobekli Tepe (navel-like hill) has been linked to the cataclysmic massive Laurentian comet (10,900 BC Younger Dryas impact event) around 12,000 years ago. Many of the circular temples (womb chambers) repeat a 12 around 2 pattern, that is thought to represent primordial parents (Sun/Moon) as humanoid statues and the circle of the zodiac. In womb-like chambers, the souls of shaman and the spirits of the dead, could quite literally journey to the source of creation. The area was rich in essential obsidian for blades and trade.
"The elite of the Halaf and Ubaid were probably the forerunners of the god-kings who ruled the first city-states down on the Mesopotamian plain, which eventually became the civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon. Their scribes preserved in cuneiform writing the ruling dynasties' mythical history, in which the founders of the Neolithic revolution are known as the Anunnaki, the gods of heaven and earth. Their birthplace was said to have been the Duku, a primeval mound located on the summit of a world mountain called Kharsag, or Hursag, and now identified with both Göbekli Tepe and Bingöl Mountain. Here the Anunnaki are said to have given humankind the first sheep and grain, a memory almost certainly of the introduction of animal husbandry and agriculture at the time of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred in the same region as Göbekli Tepe around 9000-8000 BC. The Anunnaki are occasionally likened to serpents, reflecting the snake-like appearance of Göbekli Tepe's ruling elite, as well as those of the later Halaf and Ubaid cultures." (Collins)
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Go_Tep_launch.htm
In the third millennium earth passed through massive debris (The Taurids) from the breakup of comet Encke, and the fall of massive fireballs changed many Neolithics from earth to sky/fire religion. 'Dragons' fought massive battles in the sky, or so the ancestors imagined. Comets are also implicated in Bronze Age collapse.
As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet appeared as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth. The beginning of the Dark Ages came from a comet fall near the equator that virtually blotted out the sun and led to famine and plague.
Crown of Creation
In ancient cities, the priest/king and his temple consort reenacted the rite, the sacred mating of Heaven and Earth. The royal union is called the Marriage of the Sun and Moon in alchemy. The Marriage of Inner & Outer Worlds unites internal/external and macrocosm/microcosm, the sacred and profane. Later clear parallels to the ancient rites turn up in the Grail cycle.
The central theme of alchemy, this marriage is represented by the two snakes of the caduceus, the opposing forces of our nature, joined together at the head, which correspond to the Moon and the Sun. The entwined serpents are an ancient glyph for the DNA double-helix, and might describe how two serpents twine up the trunk of our family tree.
When we each get “infused” with the sacred essence of the divine male and female, we can dissolve in the unity of cosmic consciousness. The celestial pair are reunited. "Heaven on earth” describes divine union on earth, dissolving into time, mirroring the notion of "As above, so below." The ascent or descent is a function or goal of the hieros gamos itself. The union with the Goddess implied the meeting of human and divine.
The genealogical relationship to the soul has to do with its mystical-genealogical origin. Genealogy has its virtually infinite series of primal couples -- the grandfathers and grandmothers who give birth in a cascading union of opposites.
Life feeds on opposites and contradictions will always appear in life. They engender the souls of the newborn -- the seed of a fate-laden new creation. So, if we are whole we are full of contradictions -- ambiguous and paradoxical. The unconscious holds the whole creation in potential.
Alchemical symbolism calls this a marriage of the Sun (spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that might conceive a magical child.
Sacred kingship is the basic myth of genealogy, destiny, and eros. Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance.
The hieros gamos myth is multifunctional, combining enthronement, genealogical myth, cosmology, and legitimization of rule. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Symbolically, their sacred marriage results in the manifestation of all things.
In alchemical manuscripts, coniunctio, mystical marriage, is depicted as the union or coitus of King and Queen, the red man and white woman, or just by man and wife. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. It is a ‘regressus ad uterum’ or the return to the uterus of the mother.
Penetration of the female is the same as the penetration of the water or the unconscious. Thus we see that the coniunctio is depicted as the coitus of man and wife, king and queen, but also by the king taking a bath, or drinking water. Sometimes consummation between man and woman happens in water, in a bath or in a fountain.
In the sacred marriage, such acts refer to the union of our divine spirit with the soul, and finally with the body. As a grand union of opposites, mystic marriage symbolizes the unification of king and queen, man and wife, conscious and unconscious, personality and society, etc.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body. It unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’.
Jung used the poetic term syzygy for the union of opposites, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate.
The parental pair has many symbols from the medieval West and sacred duos of the East, including yin/yang. The Divine inner marriage—or the syzygy—of the masculine/dynamic and feminine/magnetic yokes the anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche, and the animus, the male aspect of the female psyche.
The experience of spiritual rebirth via the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage is characterized as the union of the Sun (+) and Moon (-), positive-negative; male-female; god-devil; spirit-matter; father-mother; etc.
The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne.
The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
Contrasexual (male-female) pairings occur in dream symbolism. They refer to internal communication between the unconscious and conscious minds of any individual.
“It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these identifications we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. ...In this still very obscure field of psychological experience, where we are in direct contact, so to speak, with the archetype, its psychic power is felt in full force. This realm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannot be captured by any formula, but can only be hinted at to one who already knows.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 194)
Female archetypes of earth and sky symbolize the Great Mother, who is both conscious protector, spiritual guide, and nurturer, while at the same time the unconscious forces of birth and death, life and destruction. The anima lurks in the unconscious, wielding her supernatural power to drive our lives either towards mystical knowledge, consciousness and individuation, or towards oblivion in sensual urges.
The sky mothers and animas can transcend the body and ego, but in so many myths, they crave balance through the experience of the underworld, the unconscious drives of the instincts and the non-rational, and through this unity, express a balanced whole.
The union of seemingly separate elements give birth to and reveal a higher form. This is often referred to as the royal marriage. This marriage is of fundamental concern to alchemists because it is a key to transformation. Using an alchemical metaphor, Jung often referred to marriage as the crucible of consciousness.
In Sacred Marriage relationship is Immortality. All our cultural experience and individual conscious existence depends on the fabric of life, the germ line, from the mutual sexual relationship of genders. The female is the sole bearer of cytoplasmic inheritance and the principal investor in time and resources. The male contributes half of the genetic material. Immortality is thus not the domain of one gender but of the relationship between woman and man.
The Philosopher's Stone is equated with the Body of Light, the Resurrection Body, or the Immortal Body. Alchemy strives for spiritual rebirth through the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage. The Philosopher's Stone (lapis) is also a symbol of the embryonic Self. The transcendent function is the product of the sacred marriage, which has been characterized in alchemy as the royal union of the Sun and Moon.
Polarized positions may be symbolized variously as positive-negative, male-female, god-devil, spirit-matter, father-mother, etc. This marriage creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical, numinous, or divine child.
Progeny of the divine couple have various alchemical names: the philosopher’s gold, the filius Philosophorum, the infans solaris (sun child), the red tincture, the sun/moon child, etc. Making the Philosopher's Stone is a repetition of the creation myth via imagery. The Stone is made in Nature, and with and by “Nature” in the visible and invisible worlds -- within the material, spiritual,and psychological worlds. Light unveiled begets light.
The transformative imperative is a a mystic marriage or union, symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio -- conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Individuation is the integration of unconscious contents into consciousness. Potential is embodied as a psychologically whole self-realized or self-actualizing person. The "royal wedding" is the final alchemical synthesis of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female, that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self).
Alchemist Gerard Dorn called the unus mundus a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit -- a perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious. This "one world" is the physical-psychological, transcendental, "third thing" continuum underlying all existence -- the metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius or the Dragon's "treasure hard to attain" are images for the archetype of unity -- the self.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious.
Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness (of our day world) and the feminine unconscious (the night world), this royal marriage is a transcendent symbol of the Self, and embodies the psychic totality of personal wholeness.
Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
This flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness.
It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.
In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Para 623.
Hieros Gamos
Deciphering its inherent meaning is a Quest for the Grail and the journey of psychological transformation. The hierosgamos is the holy grail of sexual rites, a psychobiological and symbolic act. Alchemy refers to the reconciliation of Sol and Luna as The Chymical Wedding. The coniunctio was allegorized as the hieros gamos, the ritual cohabitation of Sol et Luna.
Jung's theory of the psychic conjunction of polarities was inspired by this teaching. Over centuries, the alchemists generated a wide range of symbolic images as homologues for the anatomy of the unconscious, relating form and dynamic function.
In biology, two things are homologous if they bear the same relationship to one another. Homology is a relationship between structures or DNA derived from a common ancestor. Homologous traits of organisms are therefore explained by descent from a common ancestor. Homology can also be described at the level of the gene. In genetics homology can refer to both the gene (DNA) and the corresponding protein product.
What we seek is spiritual union, sacred marriage of the gods -- found by joining the male and female within, returning Eros to our process. They guide us into a new holistic era. We now turn to the Feminine, which gives birth to new forms, including the non-physical field of epigenetic and wave-genetic inheritance patterns. Epigenetics is an active, tuneable inheritance mechanism that can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off.
The balance of opposites is called the ‘alchemical wedding’ or mysterium coniunctionis. It was celebrated in Morganatic marriages between human representatives of the God and Goddess. It has less to do with inheritance and succession than with renewal of community.
Art that contains the archetype, including the genealogical art, is the art that best serves the global community. Like the Caduceus, the two intertwined snakes, it serves as a symbol for perpetually incarnating life, healing and wholeness.
The unification of archetypes embodies the Self. Jung said, “The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.” (Cw 9i) Any distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy.
The Great Rite, also called the Hieros Gamos, dates to Inanna of ancient Sumeria, around 2600 BCE, if not before. Gods and goddesses, kings of the land and queens of sovereignty incarnate on the earth. The Great Rite is one of the earliest recorded public ceremonies in written history, deemed essential for the fertility of the land.
Symbols arising from the changeable coniunctio reflect the natural process of life/death/rebirth arising from the fixed constellations.of the patriarchal archetypes. The feminine gives birth to the Self before she can birth the new man. Hierosgamos is the symbol of the absolute that reigns over the ego.
The myth of the Holy Grail had to do with the Fisher King whose impotence reflected the drought, the wasteland. Sexual union is a microcosm of the god and goddess, the two fundamental aspects of the cosmos whose union completes the whole. Mystically, the sexual union of male and female is the source of both immortality and personal individuation and redemption.
No one who sets forth on the grail quest remains unchanged. The incarnatio is a spontaneous act of creation in the matter of the universe as the result of the today constellated act of the coniunctio. Synchronicity is the conjunction of individual and cosmos in a way that accelerates and deepens life in an unforeseen way that celebrates Life. The only place of power and change is the Present.
Marriage of the Sun & the Moon: Primordial Parents
"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom." (Gospel of Thomas, 22)
A perennial theme of humankind, transformation as a basic change in character, cognition, and direction has been explored in religion, psychology and art. Rites of passage, as a summons to wisdom, can include a psychological and sacred dimension. Rites of initiation provide a symbolic death and rebirth experience. It addresses the question of how a person finds a personal path worthy of the soul.
Ritual Consummation
The hieros gamos, divine marriage, is usually found at the top of an ancient genealogical line. The genealogical myth begins when younger gods are born. The hieros gamos myth is a genealogical myth connected to the ruling family and fertility from ancient times. Nothing is more sacred than this union, the very fount of life itself.
Cosmic Disaster
The divine marriage is modeled on the union of sun and moon, either in eclipse or at solstice. A sliver of sunlight still enters the earth passage tomb at New Grange on the darkest day of the year fructifying mother earth, and entreating the ancestors to bless their fertility, through meaningful alignment of sun, earth, and moon. By coming together they 'force' or generate the re-creation of the universe. The royal couple mimics cosmological events -- "As above; so below."
The first known megalithic building begun at Gobekli Tepe (navel-like hill) has been linked to the cataclysmic massive Laurentian comet (10,900 BC Younger Dryas impact event) around 12,000 years ago. Many of the circular temples (womb chambers) repeat a 12 around 2 pattern, that is thought to represent primordial parents (Sun/Moon) as humanoid statues and the circle of the zodiac. In womb-like chambers, the souls of shaman and the spirits of the dead, could quite literally journey to the source of creation. The area was rich in essential obsidian for blades and trade.
"The elite of the Halaf and Ubaid were probably the forerunners of the god-kings who ruled the first city-states down on the Mesopotamian plain, which eventually became the civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon. Their scribes preserved in cuneiform writing the ruling dynasties' mythical history, in which the founders of the Neolithic revolution are known as the Anunnaki, the gods of heaven and earth. Their birthplace was said to have been the Duku, a primeval mound located on the summit of a world mountain called Kharsag, or Hursag, and now identified with both Göbekli Tepe and Bingöl Mountain. Here the Anunnaki are said to have given humankind the first sheep and grain, a memory almost certainly of the introduction of animal husbandry and agriculture at the time of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred in the same region as Göbekli Tepe around 9000-8000 BC. The Anunnaki are occasionally likened to serpents, reflecting the snake-like appearance of Göbekli Tepe's ruling elite, as well as those of the later Halaf and Ubaid cultures." (Collins)
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Go_Tep_launch.htm
In the third millennium earth passed through massive debris (The Taurids) from the breakup of comet Encke, and the fall of massive fireballs changed many Neolithics from earth to sky/fire religion. 'Dragons' fought massive battles in the sky, or so the ancestors imagined. Comets are also implicated in Bronze Age collapse.
As we approach the end of the Second Millennium, the AD 837 apparition of Halley's Comet appeared as bright as Venus and would have moved through 60 degrees of sky in one day as it passed just 0.03 AU from Earth. The beginning of the Dark Ages came from a comet fall near the equator that virtually blotted out the sun and led to famine and plague.
Crown of Creation
In ancient cities, the priest/king and his temple consort reenacted the rite, the sacred mating of Heaven and Earth. The royal union is called the Marriage of the Sun and Moon in alchemy. The Marriage of Inner & Outer Worlds unites internal/external and macrocosm/microcosm, the sacred and profane. Later clear parallels to the ancient rites turn up in the Grail cycle.
The central theme of alchemy, this marriage is represented by the two snakes of the caduceus, the opposing forces of our nature, joined together at the head, which correspond to the Moon and the Sun. The entwined serpents are an ancient glyph for the DNA double-helix, and might describe how two serpents twine up the trunk of our family tree.
When we each get “infused” with the sacred essence of the divine male and female, we can dissolve in the unity of cosmic consciousness. The celestial pair are reunited. "Heaven on earth” describes divine union on earth, dissolving into time, mirroring the notion of "As above, so below." The ascent or descent is a function or goal of the hieros gamos itself. The union with the Goddess implied the meeting of human and divine.
The genealogical relationship to the soul has to do with its mystical-genealogical origin. Genealogy has its virtually infinite series of primal couples -- the grandfathers and grandmothers who give birth in a cascading union of opposites.
Life feeds on opposites and contradictions will always appear in life. They engender the souls of the newborn -- the seed of a fate-laden new creation. So, if we are whole we are full of contradictions -- ambiguous and paradoxical. The unconscious holds the whole creation in potential.
Alchemical symbolism calls this a marriage of the Sun (spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that might conceive a magical child.
Sacred kingship is the basic myth of genealogy, destiny, and eros. Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance.
The hieros gamos myth is multifunctional, combining enthronement, genealogical myth, cosmology, and legitimization of rule. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Symbolically, their sacred marriage results in the manifestation of all things.
In alchemical manuscripts, coniunctio, mystical marriage, is depicted as the union or coitus of King and Queen, the red man and white woman, or just by man and wife. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. It is a ‘regressus ad uterum’ or the return to the uterus of the mother.
Penetration of the female is the same as the penetration of the water or the unconscious. Thus we see that the coniunctio is depicted as the coitus of man and wife, king and queen, but also by the king taking a bath, or drinking water. Sometimes consummation between man and woman happens in water, in a bath or in a fountain.
In the sacred marriage, such acts refer to the union of our divine spirit with the soul, and finally with the body. As a grand union of opposites, mystic marriage symbolizes the unification of king and queen, man and wife, conscious and unconscious, personality and society, etc.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body. It unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’.
Jung used the poetic term syzygy for the union of opposites, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate.
The parental pair has many symbols from the medieval West and sacred duos of the East, including yin/yang. The Divine inner marriage—or the syzygy—of the masculine/dynamic and feminine/magnetic yokes the anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche, and the animus, the male aspect of the female psyche.
The experience of spiritual rebirth via the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage is characterized as the union of the Sun (+) and Moon (-), positive-negative; male-female; god-devil; spirit-matter; father-mother; etc.
The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne.
The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
Contrasexual (male-female) pairings occur in dream symbolism. They refer to internal communication between the unconscious and conscious minds of any individual.
“It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these identifications we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, its antithesis. It is a field of personal experience which leads directly to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. ...In this still very obscure field of psychological experience, where we are in direct contact, so to speak, with the archetype, its psychic power is felt in full force. This realm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannot be captured by any formula, but can only be hinted at to one who already knows.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 194)
Female archetypes of earth and sky symbolize the Great Mother, who is both conscious protector, spiritual guide, and nurturer, while at the same time the unconscious forces of birth and death, life and destruction. The anima lurks in the unconscious, wielding her supernatural power to drive our lives either towards mystical knowledge, consciousness and individuation, or towards oblivion in sensual urges.
The sky mothers and animas can transcend the body and ego, but in so many myths, they crave balance through the experience of the underworld, the unconscious drives of the instincts and the non-rational, and through this unity, express a balanced whole.
The union of seemingly separate elements give birth to and reveal a higher form. This is often referred to as the royal marriage. This marriage is of fundamental concern to alchemists because it is a key to transformation. Using an alchemical metaphor, Jung often referred to marriage as the crucible of consciousness.
In Sacred Marriage relationship is Immortality. All our cultural experience and individual conscious existence depends on the fabric of life, the germ line, from the mutual sexual relationship of genders. The female is the sole bearer of cytoplasmic inheritance and the principal investor in time and resources. The male contributes half of the genetic material. Immortality is thus not the domain of one gender but of the relationship between woman and man.
The Philosopher's Stone is equated with the Body of Light, the Resurrection Body, or the Immortal Body. Alchemy strives for spiritual rebirth through the union of opposites, or the sacred marriage. The Philosopher's Stone (lapis) is also a symbol of the embryonic Self. The transcendent function is the product of the sacred marriage, which has been characterized in alchemy as the royal union of the Sun and Moon.
Polarized positions may be symbolized variously as positive-negative, male-female, god-devil, spirit-matter, father-mother, etc. This marriage creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials. The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical, numinous, or divine child.
Progeny of the divine couple have various alchemical names: the philosopher’s gold, the filius Philosophorum, the infans solaris (sun child), the red tincture, the sun/moon child, etc. Making the Philosopher's Stone is a repetition of the creation myth via imagery. The Stone is made in Nature, and with and by “Nature” in the visible and invisible worlds -- within the material, spiritual,and psychological worlds. Light unveiled begets light.
The transformative imperative is a a mystic marriage or union, symbolized in alchemy by the coniunctio -- conjunction of conscious and unconscious. Individuation is the integration of unconscious contents into consciousness. Potential is embodied as a psychologically whole self-realized or self-actualizing person. The "royal wedding" is the final alchemical synthesis of ego and unconscious, matter and spirit, male and female, that brings forth the Philosopher's Stone (the Self).
Alchemist Gerard Dorn called the unus mundus a unification of the Stone with body, soul, and spirit -- a perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious. This "one world" is the physical-psychological, transcendental, "third thing" continuum underlying all existence -- the metaphysical equivalent of the collective unconscious. Mercurius or the Dragon's "treasure hard to attain" are images for the archetype of unity -- the self.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious.
Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites. When the opposites to be united are the masculine consciousness (of our day world) and the feminine unconscious (the night world), this royal marriage is a transcendent symbol of the Self, and embodies the psychic totality of personal wholeness.
Clarity is artistic discovery of the universal. There is enchantment in the quality of wholeness. There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our nature. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception.
This flow is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of realization.
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness.
It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness.
In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests.
~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Para 623.
Hieros Gamos
Deciphering its inherent meaning is a Quest for the Grail and the journey of psychological transformation. The hierosgamos is the holy grail of sexual rites, a psychobiological and symbolic act. Alchemy refers to the reconciliation of Sol and Luna as The Chymical Wedding. The coniunctio was allegorized as the hieros gamos, the ritual cohabitation of Sol et Luna.
Jung's theory of the psychic conjunction of polarities was inspired by this teaching. Over centuries, the alchemists generated a wide range of symbolic images as homologues for the anatomy of the unconscious, relating form and dynamic function.
In biology, two things are homologous if they bear the same relationship to one another. Homology is a relationship between structures or DNA derived from a common ancestor. Homologous traits of organisms are therefore explained by descent from a common ancestor. Homology can also be described at the level of the gene. In genetics homology can refer to both the gene (DNA) and the corresponding protein product.
What we seek is spiritual union, sacred marriage of the gods -- found by joining the male and female within, returning Eros to our process. They guide us into a new holistic era. We now turn to the Feminine, which gives birth to new forms, including the non-physical field of epigenetic and wave-genetic inheritance patterns. Epigenetics is an active, tuneable inheritance mechanism that can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off.
The balance of opposites is called the ‘alchemical wedding’ or mysterium coniunctionis. It was celebrated in Morganatic marriages between human representatives of the God and Goddess. It has less to do with inheritance and succession than with renewal of community.
Art that contains the archetype, including the genealogical art, is the art that best serves the global community. Like the Caduceus, the two intertwined snakes, it serves as a symbol for perpetually incarnating life, healing and wholeness.
The unification of archetypes embodies the Self. Jung said, “The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.” (Cw 9i) Any distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy.
The Great Rite, also called the Hieros Gamos, dates to Inanna of ancient Sumeria, around 2600 BCE, if not before. Gods and goddesses, kings of the land and queens of sovereignty incarnate on the earth. The Great Rite is one of the earliest recorded public ceremonies in written history, deemed essential for the fertility of the land.
Symbols arising from the changeable coniunctio reflect the natural process of life/death/rebirth arising from the fixed constellations.of the patriarchal archetypes. The feminine gives birth to the Self before she can birth the new man. Hierosgamos is the symbol of the absolute that reigns over the ego.
The myth of the Holy Grail had to do with the Fisher King whose impotence reflected the drought, the wasteland. Sexual union is a microcosm of the god and goddess, the two fundamental aspects of the cosmos whose union completes the whole. Mystically, the sexual union of male and female is the source of both immortality and personal individuation and redemption.
No one who sets forth on the grail quest remains unchanged. The incarnatio is a spontaneous act of creation in the matter of the universe as the result of the today constellated act of the coniunctio. Synchronicity is the conjunction of individual and cosmos in a way that accelerates and deepens life in an unforeseen way that celebrates Life. The only place of power and change is the Present.
RECOVERING THE
TREE OF FLESH AND BLOOD
Cosmology, Life, & Death
And everywhere there, the Tree of Life,
and the resurrection of flesh from the Tree … --Origen
Creation myths are symbolic narratives of the world and human origins. Psyche is an autonomous narrator. Many ancient cultures venerated the Milky Way as the World Tree, cosmic axis between Earth, sky, and underworld -- a model of the world and heavenly prototype.
The Tree is an icon of eternal life -- the cosmos in totality. The Sumerian Tree of Life is perhaps 6000 years old, but possibly inherited from 12,000 year old Gobekli Tepe, where a small carving of the tree, serpent, and bird were found. Bird-snake is opposites: the snake is chthonic; the bird transcendent. The Sumerian concept was that wisdom is likened to a tree whose fruits bestow health and longevity, if not immortality. That notion persisted in Gnosticism, where the image of the serpent is the embodiment of the wisdom transmitted by Sophia.
The Pillar in the Osiris Legend represents the Tree of Life, the tree that encloses life and death. Egyptian texts say, "I am the plant which comes from Nu." The Tree of Life grew out of the Sacred Mound, it's branches reaching out and supporting the star and planet studded sky, while it's roots reached down into the watery abyss of the Netherworld.
Our ancestors read the sky and stars for their position in space and time. Constellations imbued with mythological meaning helped as reference points for this observational science. The sky helped guide them home and perhaps save their lives. Lore of the sky bound communities together and established vast cycles. The familiar stars were celestial navigation guides across trackless seas and deserts.
A heaven-spanning tree is also a refuge, associated with the center of the world and the primordial substance of creation. This cosmic axis is also the place "Where Flesh Came Forth." The Sumerian image of the 'tree of life/knowledge' is reminiscent of the later images of Greek 'Omphalos' or woven 'Navel Stones.' Flesh grew where heaven was separated from earth by the Tree in this seminal event. We are presumably the product of such cosmic unions.
Collectively, we project a chaotic darkness into the past, mythologizing our own birth. We inhabit the world and we see it through a certain worldview -- a system of beliefs, symbols, and metaphors. We structure our evolving mythical view into a 'whole,' revealed particularly to us, from which we create the substance of our world and myth. This is the vehicle that connects our intuitions of the infinite with the finite -- our life-world of flesh and blood.
The creation myth is confounded with the empirical history as mythical time segues into the objective world, yet mythos and logos remain in dynamic tension because both are primordial. The gods metamorphose and pervade humanity.
There is an irreducible tension between the unattainable infinitude of the mythic/imaginal worldview and the inevitable restrictions of the finite here-and-now of the logos. Mythology can never be transformed into reason. Paracelsus said, "Everyone must educate and regulate his imagination so as to come thereby into contact with spirits [personified forces], and be taught by them (Philosophia sagax)
Thus, enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment pervade the lineage and its conceptual framework. As we create connections we create a conscious and unconscious narrative. Jung says of his personal myth, “In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.”
It is through memory that the I endures, that memories are formed with emotional charge attached. Our sense of place is entangled with our sense of who we are -- so, to be at no place is akin to being no one, without a story or remembrance. Knowledge born from the image is an emotion that modifies the knower.
The world tree is a world of stories. We all start out with some kind of dream about how life will be. The Family tree emerges from the Tree of Life. The tree numen stands for the development and phases of the transformation process, and its fruits or flowers signify the consummation of the work. We construct stories when we reflect on experience. The way beyond the opposites and the creative process between them is the essence of life. The opposition is a necessary condition of libido flow.
"But when we become aware of the opposites we are driven to seek the way that will resolve them for us...We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death." (1925 Seminar, Pg 86)
Ancient ancestors believed this celestial Tree of Life holds all life in balance and alignment and facilitates our spiritual journey. The 'cosmic' tree emerges from the rootless root of all being, the Pleroma, and often appears upside-down with its roots in heaven and its foliage on earth. The snake in the Tree is the spiral symbol of Life itself and cosmic cycles which characterize the revealed world.
The gathering of souls on heavenly paths and the connections stars have with the birth and death of people is a universal theme. This road of souls, ladder to heaven, or trail of the dead was the path to the Otherworld traveled by spirits, deities, and shamans. The Oglala called the Milky Way the "Ghost Road," Wanagi Tacanku.
The World Tree is linked to the center of the world and our own center. We are each the nexus of the cosmic drama where the Milky Way is also a cosmic womb -- the source of life and where souls return. It mirrors the creative potential of the human womb for birth. The miracle of birth incarnates in woman's body - the mother as source and regenerator of all life. Archaic cave temples also mirrored such ideas. Thus, we find at Lascaux, some of the first cave art depicts heavenly constellations.
We have a nostalgic desire to break the bonds that keep us tied to earth, and to free ourselves from limitation. To break from earth with shamanic flight or ascent similarly signifies an act of transcendence. We long to see the human body act in the manner of a spirit, to transmute our corporeal modality into spirit’s modality. Paradoxically, we want long life, yet we defy life by breaking the rules and often compulsively challenging all boundaries.
Our genealogy is that Tree and cosmic center that keeps us connected and balanced, and upon which we can ascend and descend in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Many mythologies say the world tree was the abode of gods and our genealogical roots show that. The tree is the primordial symbol that unites the physical and the sacred. Hillman cautions that loss of soul, not loss of life should be our main dread.
Jung said, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother" (CW5, Para 321). The Tree of Life fills space with bodies. It restores the lost elements of Nature and our nature.
As Jung also notes, "Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books…" (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 479). He links the Tree with the wisdom of Sophia: "the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pg. 533).
The celestial Tree denotes life of the cosmos; its growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes. It stands for inexhaustible life, which is equivalent to immortality. Your innermost being is identical to the innermost Cosmos. Some families plant a tree for every child born; others plant a memorial tree when someone dies.
The Serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors, including legendary and divine progenitors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know and what we thought we knew about our roots. Jung says, in the Red Book that, "The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious….it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother." (Pg. 247)
The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. (Pg.247)
These 'serpents' offer us Knowledge. They are still a part of our Truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Genealogy is a Ritual in which we climb up and down, through our family tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in time travel that expands consciousness.
Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say “I,” or “me,” or their name. They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it. --C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff, A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Circulation
This Cosmic Tree or World Tree represents the sustaining wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and power of the Universe.
Trees symbolize the living structure of our inner selves. To forget one's ancestors, is like a river without a source, or a tree without roots.
Life-giving sap circulates throughout the Tree much like the ancestral bloodlines circulate through us in an unbroken circle. Life is immortal and we realize we are to the extent we partake of the fruits of that Tree and its eternal Mystery.
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. (Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.)
Jung says, "It is the tree that nourishes all the stars and planets; and it is the tree out of which come the first parents, the primordial parents of humanity, and in which the last couple, also representing the whole of humanity, are buried." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434). Our 'leaf' may fall off the tree and die but what gave us life remains -- interpersonal existence remains.
“The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree… the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven -- the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 198)
Catafalque
We are the crown of the pyramid of ancestral building blocks.
Genealogy is a sort of scaffolding or platform from which we conduct our genealogical project, a metaphorical catafalque or means of conveyance. The term, from the Italian catafalco, or scaffolding, refers to the raised (and often movable) platform that a casket rests on during a funeral or memorial service.
From its root as a 'siege tower', it is that position on the edge of the known from which we 'lay siege' and launch our incursion on the collective unconscious. Sometimes the unconscious conveys information beyond the personal.
Naturally, this is not a martial process or violent incursion, but one of loving attendance to detail and accuracy in hitting the mark that illuminates our targets. Certainly, it's not what we demand of it, but what it demands of us for release from unconscious bondage. Whether we conceive of it as human or archetypal impulse, the contents below consciousness demand to be freed.
The Tree Speaks For Itself
We can be confounded 'barking up the wrong tree,' or stymied by a Brick Wall or missing link -- tough research problems, apparent dead-ends that after many hours of searching still yield no answers. The other side of the brick wall is the distant ancestor that pops up as if he or she was born out of thin air.
Sometimes we can't find that elusive ancestor, set of parents or proof of a link between generations. Then the seeming miracle occurs. The wall is breached. With a dead-end line, the moment of breakthrough can seem like a bomb going off that opens a whole new field of ancestors, from notable Colonials, to more noble and royal lines -- and, yes, more dead ends.
Sometimes it takes a moment of synchronicity to ignite the spark of discovery. Then a single word, an oblique reference, or matching names can open a whole new domain. As well as research, it takes logic, deduction, inference, and inspiration.
Tracking from the known to the unknown, we use clues to unlock the story with literal and metaphorical understanding.
Those stories and how ancestors dealt with adversity can inspire us right back. New voices change our patterns and self-image. Ancestral voices are re-presented in a new context.
Ancestors are those people you directly descend from, not extended family members. An ancestor or forbearer is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, etc). An ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited." Our tree has its roots in the past and is ever putting forth leaves and flowers in the brightness of the present.
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)
Arc of Ages
Ancestral Field, Dream Field, Dialogical Field
Return to Origins
Genealogy is the archaeology of the psyche and way to confront the unconscious. The family tree is the epic narrative arc of origins. Genealogy encapsulates the myth of our lives: the question of inheritance, our relationship to the past, and its relevance to the present.
We need metaphor and mythos to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not fantastic elaborations but are fundamental and essential to our emergent process. Jung considered myth the authentic and primordial voice of the collective unconscious.
We don't have the option not to choose one, so the myth we 'choose' is important to our 'frame' or intuitive understanding of the world. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.
In this sense, both myth and genealogy are conceptual frameworks. In fact, myth is present in all conceptual frameworks, though perhaps not so obvious. Myth and genealogy are embroiled through out history. This is the condition presented to us in our family tree.
We don't introduce mythic figures into genealogy. They are already there for us to contend with. We don't enter genealogy intending to root ourselves in myth, but discover it there already. The family tree is an image of the mythic descending into the socio-cultural-historical dimension. Beginning our project with genesis, we certainly expect some revelations.
We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86
Jung suggested that we can only find our myth if we are together with our dead. We have to answer the call of our own dead. For Jung finding his myth could only take place in conjunction with his dead. Genealogy brings us into conjunction and alignment with our dead.
Cycles of Life
Each of us emerges from the dark light of the soul -- the divine Void, the boundless expanse, pre-differentiated universal ground. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the ouroboros serpent biting its own tail, in an archaeological self-examination of the unconscious horizons of human experience.
Lifeforce pervades the whole body as the basis of consciousness and the flow of energy. The Tibetans suggest that light-bearing cells of the “mother seed essence” and the “father seed essence” retain their identities as the essence of the egg and sperm and separate out in magnetic polar connection, forming the basis of the central energy channel. Biologically, a radial line defines itself from the center of the embryonic disc. The neural groove puckers up and curves over to form a tube. The tube is actually entrapping electromagnetic field lines of force.
Narrative therapies like genealogy help us find innovative moments, unique outcomes, and to change and expand our life story. We remember their stories when we have deep feelings or hear something that reminds us of them. They remind us of stories behind our feelings - the world of personal meaning.
The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of continuous renewal -- duality of creation and destruction and thus the birth of life through opposites. Life changes form and condition, dies and is reborn.
Genealogy helps us stabilize and reconceptualize our life life story from a multi-vocal meta-perspective. Constraints of our problem-saturated stories and plot give way to the Big Picture of unfolding life.
Consanguinity distinguished archaic communities and clans from one another. In the precultural world a mother could be sure of her offspring. The terror of the primitive imagination was filial and mystical. Voices emerge from the dominant narrative plot. Rigid narratives give way to ancestral conversations. We assimilate them as unpredicted meaning bridges that tie our experience together.
Genealogy starts off like humanity did -- by hunting and gathering. We want to be explorers, not just knowers, but seekers. Nietzsche claims, "We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for good reason: How can we ever find what we have never looked for? The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself will hold for us for all eternity. Of ourselves we are “not knowers.”(1887/1956, p. 149)
We hunger for the unknown. The famous T.S. Elliot lines apply to self-knowledge: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Our hunter and gatherer instincts define our research style. It takes hunting to dig up new material, break brick walls, and discover secrets. We may find fossil-traumas in the family record. New stories are therapeutic opportunities we may ignore or trivialize when obsessed with our problematical story. Small but significant changes, emergent properties, mark narrative development.
Genealogy leads from the concrete and known toward the legendary and mythic -- unknown and beyond comprehension -- secrets beyond secrets with no resolution in sight. The ancestors bring a new movement and dynamic to the landscapes of action and consciousness. Time, action, and consciousness converge in transformation of emotions, values, and thoughts. With meta-reflection we can describe that transformation, understanding how and why we've changed.
Gathering quantities of data helps us make broad connections and find patterns and universal life-themes. People and places initially excite our imaginations through their incomprehensible mystery. Gradually, with challenging struggle, purposive suffering, and creative endeavors, we learn to 'cultivate' that mystery and to 'cook' it with integrative work, engaging the opposites and our projective tendencies.
Union of Souls
What can be known is the discernable tree, though much remains occluded. As Jung noted, "...there is a field of the unconscious both above and below us" -- the light and dark, the male and female, spiritual and chthonic/instinctual, legality and maternity, etc. Each ancestor, as with each god, is a way we are shadowed. Indestructible life is simultaneously the the god of death and the dead.
More than a trope of the tree and the blood, or a modular assemblage, the pedigree is established only by valid evidence. Genealogy without proof is mythology. Intelligence emerges with symbolic language. Symbols can be both literal and metaphorical. Alternate stories rich in metaphorical resonance come out of the shadows.
Content, Context, & Reflexivity
The real and symbolic facts of who we are and where we come from, and our ancestors, are fundamental. Reflexivity as interpretation and reflexivity as genealogical identifies unmarked intentionalities in research. In narrative, psychosensory experiences are described from the inside outward, from resonance with one's own body, using meditation and sensory awareness to deepen experience.
Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. Community context or proximity implies a relationship of some kind.
Digital retrieves the medieval information we can use to build context among our many ancestors of that era. The lived psychophysical experience with the nuances of the body can be embodied in writing. Telling such stories honors the ancestors. Narrative patterns include:
People come to genealogy from several motivations: when loved ones die or are born, the desire to carve out a family place in the larger historical picture, to find lost roots or unknown family history, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, to join heritage or communitarian societies, to recognize or embellish descent, to find kin, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.
But self-knowledge is primary, as are symptoms, healing, and synchronicities. Naturally, the web has led to an explosion of interest, research, and communication. Anyone captured by family stories can check them out in a number of ways. The structure of the family tree helps us value our underpinnings, to carry an emotional-cognitive structure across time -- identifying, recognizing, and connecting things, events, places, and people. This is memory, which guarantees continuity to life.
The pedigree is a physical and cognitive instrument of navigation. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning to navigate through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious -- living one's life as a voyage for its own sake.
"The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." (Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol).
As Proust says, "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." We can deepen our consciousness as we adapt to our current situation. This arc carries both divine seed and divine knowledge -- a way for us to circle around and find our ancestral alignment within the precessional ages we can never know.
Being & Not-Being
The genealogy is the map, but the ancestral field is the territory. Once we cross the threshold our genealogical journey begins. In this sense, we are The Fool, like Parcival in the Grail Quest, abandoned to the unknown, entering uncharted areas -- the soul venturing into itself and crossing the threshold to new dimensions. This is the field of interrupted communications between members of different generations. The pedigree and Grail mirror one another as containers for the royal bloodlines.
A true and authentic life resonates over time. Our approach will varying depending on well-being, anxieties, woundedness, optimism, and confidence. This is revealed in the psychological family tree of hidden issues, rather than the simple physical imprint. Genealogy is no longer androlineal. Data bases help us find female ancestors and lines of descent in which women are preferentially included. Paternal primacy is a genealogical relic.
Archaeology of the Soul
We may find Gateway ancestors, each of which has proven lineage back to royal lines. This vastly expands our ancestral horizons. Our notion of what it means to write the family history expands. This is a psychological, not secular or religious approach, describing psychic phenomena (psychic facts, images, human phenomena) not metaphysical assertions. The narrative carries the chronology along, but once in a while you stop and paint a picture.
'Bringing in the sheaves' of numerous groups of ancestors, we reap the abundant harvest of their lives. Each generation doubles their numbers. Though taken by The Reaper, we reap them back and craft them into the Bread of Life, the family story. "He that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." (Amer. King James Bible, Psalms 126:6)
In Asia, the archetype is played out -- sheaves are brought in as effigies of rice ancestors. Some people make pilgrimages to the effigies of their ancestors in cathedrals and country churches, gazing at the blank stares but seeing through to the person. Once we harvest the sheaves of generations they are dried and threshed. After the first collection, we are left with the gleanings, the details we can gather that were lost or first overlooked.
Ideally, like therapy, the genealogical process can release "an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients" as Jung describes it in Seminar 1925 (pg. 111) -- a sort of personal Annunciation of our own connectivity with life. As Giordano Bruno suggests, "there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence."
Rituals of Recognition
Our frame for this genealogical approach is 'this is ritual' -- and a complex one, at that. Ritual is a meta-communication. It tells us this highly-contextualized activity is different, deliberate, and significant, so pay attention. Sometimes trauma-based coping behaviors, repetition, or dysfunctional rituals can become addictive. Compulsions may also lead to purposeful results.
It is a rite -- a series of sequential acts -- because it is a social, religious, cultural procedure that symbolically conveys meaning about events to participants. Like other ritual behaviors it is first experienced in the family. Certain emotions are produced and expressed spontaneously. The ritual evokes, allows, and contains strong emotions, accessing mind-body states.
Genealogical rituals of recognition deepen and rewrite our perception of reality with rituals of induction, remembrance, and modulation of emotion. The integral function in this process is inherent if we can mobilize it. We may in some sense feel that we are 'born to do this,' but there may still be a gulf between our intention and its tangible effects.
In this gap, like the space between breaths, we find transcendence. Genealogy becomes an art when it grips us. Jung also cautions a "new idea always has to fight for its life against these ancestral predispositions."
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
Spirit descends to lower regions from mythic roots. Sometimes we can't perceive things until we have the right metaphor to bridge the gap between matter and spirit.
Metaphor is one of the favorite allegories of ancient and modern poets and philosophers for the process of human transformation. We liken one experience to another as if it were that experience.
As a metaphor, the Grail is always relevant and means many things to many people. It is an undying symbol of the archetypal quest of human life -- a search for accomplishment and meaning. The Grail has been secularized as metaphor, and re-sacralized in Grail scholarship and fiction. It also remains the potential for healing psychic wounds. The question is who can grow this potential into something more.
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Voices of the Past
Jung reminds, "After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control." (1925 Seminar, Page 83)
Hillman sees metaphor as an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itself is a myth -- an expression of creative mythopoesis.
Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82)
Narration is a root metaphor. Self-narrative is an identity construction. We habitually tell people 'who we are' in terms of our short- and long-term past and presumed achievements and experiences. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
Narration is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves, 'growing' one another. There may be a reason we favor 'exemplary' ancestors who were wise while alive and remain so in the invisible world. Being dead does not necessarily make ancestors 'smarter.' Hillman suggests we aspire to be exemplary ancestors ourselves.
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, is the opening of the heart. (Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development and uncovering of intergenerational life-themes. The multigenerational approach has it own coherence and milestones of discovery and exploration.
Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we instinctively seek order for security. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements. But tidy metaphors don't always work; some of them can be very messy and inconsistent, much like the edge of chaos from which order emerges in chaos theory. The missing information may be already within us as insight, though it has not emerged or unfolded.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature." (Campbell)
One Blood; One Field
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests."
Conversation is one of our main ways of inner and outer thinking and expression. Dialogue bridges conscious and unconscious and activates the transcendent function. It doesn't matter if we do it intentionally or it happens to us spontaneously. Jung says "In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself." (ModPsy, ETH Lectures, p.53).
We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known but not literalized. The dialogical self describes our ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue -- finding a voice for emerging meaning.
Psyche is a semantic, symbolic and noetic field. Duality between consciousness and nonconsciousness is the contrast between our everyday experience (individual consciousness) and all nonconscious processes.
This duality is fundamental; we literally cannot ever know what it is like to be our nonconscious processes. We can only know what it’s like to be our conscious awareness. Yet, all the mind-body processes of which we are unaware are at least as aware if not more aware than our individual conscious awareness, and elements of who we are. Thus, they are related to our ancestry.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. The language of symbols is oldest.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe - how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility.
The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior. Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity.
This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential or phenomenological experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." If we deny the dead, we deny ourselves. Their redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity.
Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of ancient bloodlines. In Greek, drakon (dragon), as in edrakon, is past tense for derkesthai, meaning 'to see clearly.' A dragon was one who saw clearly, and clarity of vision engendered wisdom, which produces the creative power of intuition, prediction, and synthesis. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, then record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. Clarity comes from clarifying the family tree. We participate more knowingly in the process of multigenerational integration. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
Renewing the Mystery
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. They affect us by influence, impact, making a difference. Such impressions touch us by moving our feelings emotionally, even tugging our heartstrings.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The sensory apparatus of our body is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
History, the narrative of our personal, familial,and collective pasts, shapes and informs our identity. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example, when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, though you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
Collateral Grafting & Consanguinity
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - legitimate filiation, dynastic supremacy, elder and younger (cadet) branches, forced coexistence, innumerable clerical errors, transmission gaps, and lapses of focus, to say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. The tree-like structure can conceal exclusion, discrimination, and abusive graftings, even amputations.
The discourse of lineage and descent can be subverted for familial legitimation. For most of history, paternity was a legal fiction. Primogeniture was tied to succession and common-law inheritance. Androlineal genealogy was the necessary instrument of social origins and legal deeds.
Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
The Gift of Life
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Original Awareness
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
As ancient hominids we may have left the trees and our arboreal life but we never entirely abandoned them. When we descended from the canopy, we acquired another sort of tree that went with us -- the family tree and relations of our clan.
In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald (1993) concludes that the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-moment mentality.
Mimesis is the easiest way to learn. The first transition was to a "mimetic'' culture of making sense: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other prelinguistic traditions.
Eric McLcLuhan (2015) says, "Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming,intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer, that is, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence." (p. 27, infra.) He calls mimesis a tangible affective vortex of real power.
The evolution to mythic cultures followed: the result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. The third transition carried oral speech to reading, writing, and an extended external memory-store seen today in cloud technology. Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period.
Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, according to McLuhan who argues that the “mythic or iconic mode of awareness” substitutes a “multi-faceted” perspective for a single, fixed point of view. Mythic environments live beyond time and space, generating little radical social change.
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. ... without any verbalization at all. (McLuhan, Playboy Interview). He claims the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day-world.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/06/this-archaeological-discovery-throws-story-of-human-evolution-into-disarray/
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. The archai are the deepest forms of psychic functioning. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.'
Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice. Hillman describes how soulmaking is revealed in psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way.
He considers death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “The death experience brings down the old order and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous break down’ (synthesizing too, as it goes along), analysis means dying.”
Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul. Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data. But Hillman favored the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. The speech of the soul is always riddled with images and fantasies, which cannot and should not be taken literally or concretely. He points out, the alternative to such literalism is mystery.
Imaginal Understanding
Restoring psyche, we see soul at work, in fantasy, imagination, myth, and metaphor. But, as in metaphor, things can be 'like that,' but not that. Neti neti; neither this nor that. Literalism dominates everyday discourse and is probably the biggest pitfall on the genealogical path. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Such fundamentalism can be a regressive, displaced tendency.
For example, while the heroic notion has served ego psychology for millennia, we can see beyond the urge of the conquering hero to deeper wisdom and insight beyond the manic ego-driven modality which has had its day. The perspective of the human ego certainly isn't superior.
Literalism has more to do with beliefs, religiosity, cult behavior, and esoteric metaphysics than it does with a balanced psychological approach. Psychopathology is also part and parcel of the same process and the source of illusion and delusions about self, others, and world.
Real meaning is beyond the literal and naturalistic fallacies. The poetic approach means exploring images, rather than explaining them. In this sense our ancestors are not allegories but modes of reflection. We cannot 'use' our ancestors, individually or collectively, as some people 'use' dreams in a mundane, prescriptive way.
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Beyond the trendy 'power of Now' lies the power of 'now and again.'
Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us in more ways than one. Perhaps someone else in the family collated the genealogy of their day. The transgenerational challenges will have been passed on and remain, as well as any family aspirational drives.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Each ancestor is the gateway to another timeline back to the past. First they diverge; then they converge. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own great-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. The notion of 'descent' is somehow related to the archaic descent into the cave or tomb of the ancestors.
Descent seems to be very steep & dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well-trodden path. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface; one finds pars of wrecked cars, trousers, shoes & skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 94)
We pay attention to a history created by own ancestors. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call' from the depths of our hearts. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge but in a soulful rather than utilitarian way. The archetypes fill the gaps to compensate our spiritual deficiencies.
The archetype does not become meaningful until it goes out into the world and takes part in life according to its nature and
according to the time in history in which it occurs. The
facts of the specific cultural and personal existence
provide the actual clothing of the archetype. In other words
the archetype is only an inherited mode of expression.
Jung noted, "Besides the obvious personal sources, creative fantasy also draws upon the forgotten and long buried primitive mind with its host of images, which are to be found in the mythologies of all ages and all peoples. The sum of these images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual."
Carl Jung, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, Pages xviii - xvix
Genealogy Beyond the Grave
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- 'my very own', giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Some say, "it does seem I fall into a type of revelatory trance where aspects of these people’s lives are made clear." Or, "downloads as I call them for lack of a better word sometimes come out of the blue, when I am meditating, or even studying the past, mysticism, etc."
Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonment, and a variety of other human concerns and events. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We regard our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators. How do we come to know the sea's dark secrets? As Kabir says, "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."
Navigating the psyche -- the ocean with many shores -- is no easy task. We are all subject to self-delusion, misguided inner authority, the host of psychological illusion from follies to participation mystique, to projective errors, confabulations, and metaphysical beliefs. The imaginal gloss, right or wrong operates throughout the whole process of seeking clarity.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious. Personally acquired contents constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation is to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, life and death, light and dark, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform with awareness, appearing in many forms as consciousness shifts.
To illustrate the multiple personifications of psyche Hillman made reference to gods, goddesses, demigods and other imaginal figures which he referred to as sounding boards "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life" although he insisted that these figures should not be used as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child symbolizing duality merging into union and self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with its metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
The psychological umbilical cord of our genealogy connects us not only to the divine source (realm of the Gods) but also to the vaults of the unconscious (Underworld). We embark on a quest to search for the World-Tree at the center of the Universe. This is a metaphor for our genealogical quest for psychological realignment with our own inner center and spiritual source. The tree is a symbol of the self and model of the psyche, with roots stretching back into our earliest symbolic imaginations.
We sublimate the cosmic energy that enters our being through realignment with the 'axis mundi'. The cosmic axis connects our mundane material realm to the higher realm of sacred power. The journey is perilous because a quest of transformation requires sacrifice of the ego. The World-Tree is also a symbol of initiation and transcendence. At the center of the Universe, we arrive at the sacred center of our own being.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the dreamtime and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in dreamwork, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. Sometimes we can cultivate that information or intuition into evidence. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different natures from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution. Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness. Kabir says, "“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
"Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"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)
"The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life, to time, and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Nature & Nurture
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, outrageous calamities somewhere between coincidence and fate, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father that can be the key to healing.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
TREE OF FLESH AND BLOOD
Cosmology, Life, & Death
And everywhere there, the Tree of Life,
and the resurrection of flesh from the Tree … --Origen
Creation myths are symbolic narratives of the world and human origins. Psyche is an autonomous narrator. Many ancient cultures venerated the Milky Way as the World Tree, cosmic axis between Earth, sky, and underworld -- a model of the world and heavenly prototype.
The Tree is an icon of eternal life -- the cosmos in totality. The Sumerian Tree of Life is perhaps 6000 years old, but possibly inherited from 12,000 year old Gobekli Tepe, where a small carving of the tree, serpent, and bird were found. Bird-snake is opposites: the snake is chthonic; the bird transcendent. The Sumerian concept was that wisdom is likened to a tree whose fruits bestow health and longevity, if not immortality. That notion persisted in Gnosticism, where the image of the serpent is the embodiment of the wisdom transmitted by Sophia.
The Pillar in the Osiris Legend represents the Tree of Life, the tree that encloses life and death. Egyptian texts say, "I am the plant which comes from Nu." The Tree of Life grew out of the Sacred Mound, it's branches reaching out and supporting the star and planet studded sky, while it's roots reached down into the watery abyss of the Netherworld.
Our ancestors read the sky and stars for their position in space and time. Constellations imbued with mythological meaning helped as reference points for this observational science. The sky helped guide them home and perhaps save their lives. Lore of the sky bound communities together and established vast cycles. The familiar stars were celestial navigation guides across trackless seas and deserts.
A heaven-spanning tree is also a refuge, associated with the center of the world and the primordial substance of creation. This cosmic axis is also the place "Where Flesh Came Forth." The Sumerian image of the 'tree of life/knowledge' is reminiscent of the later images of Greek 'Omphalos' or woven 'Navel Stones.' Flesh grew where heaven was separated from earth by the Tree in this seminal event. We are presumably the product of such cosmic unions.
Collectively, we project a chaotic darkness into the past, mythologizing our own birth. We inhabit the world and we see it through a certain worldview -- a system of beliefs, symbols, and metaphors. We structure our evolving mythical view into a 'whole,' revealed particularly to us, from which we create the substance of our world and myth. This is the vehicle that connects our intuitions of the infinite with the finite -- our life-world of flesh and blood.
The creation myth is confounded with the empirical history as mythical time segues into the objective world, yet mythos and logos remain in dynamic tension because both are primordial. The gods metamorphose and pervade humanity.
There is an irreducible tension between the unattainable infinitude of the mythic/imaginal worldview and the inevitable restrictions of the finite here-and-now of the logos. Mythology can never be transformed into reason. Paracelsus said, "Everyone must educate and regulate his imagination so as to come thereby into contact with spirits [personified forces], and be taught by them (Philosophia sagax)
Thus, enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment pervade the lineage and its conceptual framework. As we create connections we create a conscious and unconscious narrative. Jung says of his personal myth, “In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.”
It is through memory that the I endures, that memories are formed with emotional charge attached. Our sense of place is entangled with our sense of who we are -- so, to be at no place is akin to being no one, without a story or remembrance. Knowledge born from the image is an emotion that modifies the knower.
The world tree is a world of stories. We all start out with some kind of dream about how life will be. The Family tree emerges from the Tree of Life. The tree numen stands for the development and phases of the transformation process, and its fruits or flowers signify the consummation of the work. We construct stories when we reflect on experience. The way beyond the opposites and the creative process between them is the essence of life. The opposition is a necessary condition of libido flow.
"But when we become aware of the opposites we are driven to seek the way that will resolve them for us...We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death." (1925 Seminar, Pg 86)
Ancient ancestors believed this celestial Tree of Life holds all life in balance and alignment and facilitates our spiritual journey. The 'cosmic' tree emerges from the rootless root of all being, the Pleroma, and often appears upside-down with its roots in heaven and its foliage on earth. The snake in the Tree is the spiral symbol of Life itself and cosmic cycles which characterize the revealed world.
The gathering of souls on heavenly paths and the connections stars have with the birth and death of people is a universal theme. This road of souls, ladder to heaven, or trail of the dead was the path to the Otherworld traveled by spirits, deities, and shamans. The Oglala called the Milky Way the "Ghost Road," Wanagi Tacanku.
The World Tree is linked to the center of the world and our own center. We are each the nexus of the cosmic drama where the Milky Way is also a cosmic womb -- the source of life and where souls return. It mirrors the creative potential of the human womb for birth. The miracle of birth incarnates in woman's body - the mother as source and regenerator of all life. Archaic cave temples also mirrored such ideas. Thus, we find at Lascaux, some of the first cave art depicts heavenly constellations.
We have a nostalgic desire to break the bonds that keep us tied to earth, and to free ourselves from limitation. To break from earth with shamanic flight or ascent similarly signifies an act of transcendence. We long to see the human body act in the manner of a spirit, to transmute our corporeal modality into spirit’s modality. Paradoxically, we want long life, yet we defy life by breaking the rules and often compulsively challenging all boundaries.
Our genealogy is that Tree and cosmic center that keeps us connected and balanced, and upon which we can ascend and descend in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Many mythologies say the world tree was the abode of gods and our genealogical roots show that. The tree is the primordial symbol that unites the physical and the sacred. Hillman cautions that loss of soul, not loss of life should be our main dread.
Jung said, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother" (CW5, Para 321). The Tree of Life fills space with bodies. It restores the lost elements of Nature and our nature.
As Jung also notes, "Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books…" (Letters Vol. 1, Pg. 479). He links the Tree with the wisdom of Sophia: "the one that is rooted in the earth as well as in the heaven, both root and branch of the tree." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pg. 533).
The celestial Tree denotes life of the cosmos; its growth, proliferation, generative and regenerative processes. It stands for inexhaustible life, which is equivalent to immortality. Your innermost being is identical to the innermost Cosmos. Some families plant a tree for every child born; others plant a memorial tree when someone dies.
The Serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors, including legendary and divine progenitors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know and what we thought we knew about our roots. Jung says, in the Red Book that, "The serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious….it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother." (Pg. 247)
The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. (Pg.247)
These 'serpents' offer us Knowledge. They are still a part of our Truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Genealogy is a Ritual in which we climb up and down, through our family tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in time travel that expands consciousness.
Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say “I,” or “me,” or their name. They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it. --C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff, A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
Circulation
This Cosmic Tree or World Tree represents the sustaining wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and power of the Universe.
Trees symbolize the living structure of our inner selves. To forget one's ancestors, is like a river without a source, or a tree without roots.
Life-giving sap circulates throughout the Tree much like the ancestral bloodlines circulate through us in an unbroken circle. Life is immortal and we realize we are to the extent we partake of the fruits of that Tree and its eternal Mystery.
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. (Jung, The Red Book, Page 275.)
Jung says, "It is the tree that nourishes all the stars and planets; and it is the tree out of which come the first parents, the primordial parents of humanity, and in which the last couple, also representing the whole of humanity, are buried." (Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1432-1434). Our 'leaf' may fall off the tree and die but what gave us life remains -- interpersonal existence remains.
“The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree… the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven -- the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 198)
Catafalque
We are the crown of the pyramid of ancestral building blocks.
Genealogy is a sort of scaffolding or platform from which we conduct our genealogical project, a metaphorical catafalque or means of conveyance. The term, from the Italian catafalco, or scaffolding, refers to the raised (and often movable) platform that a casket rests on during a funeral or memorial service.
From its root as a 'siege tower', it is that position on the edge of the known from which we 'lay siege' and launch our incursion on the collective unconscious. Sometimes the unconscious conveys information beyond the personal.
Naturally, this is not a martial process or violent incursion, but one of loving attendance to detail and accuracy in hitting the mark that illuminates our targets. Certainly, it's not what we demand of it, but what it demands of us for release from unconscious bondage. Whether we conceive of it as human or archetypal impulse, the contents below consciousness demand to be freed.
The Tree Speaks For Itself
We can be confounded 'barking up the wrong tree,' or stymied by a Brick Wall or missing link -- tough research problems, apparent dead-ends that after many hours of searching still yield no answers. The other side of the brick wall is the distant ancestor that pops up as if he or she was born out of thin air.
Sometimes we can't find that elusive ancestor, set of parents or proof of a link between generations. Then the seeming miracle occurs. The wall is breached. With a dead-end line, the moment of breakthrough can seem like a bomb going off that opens a whole new field of ancestors, from notable Colonials, to more noble and royal lines -- and, yes, more dead ends.
Sometimes it takes a moment of synchronicity to ignite the spark of discovery. Then a single word, an oblique reference, or matching names can open a whole new domain. As well as research, it takes logic, deduction, inference, and inspiration.
Tracking from the known to the unknown, we use clues to unlock the story with literal and metaphorical understanding.
Those stories and how ancestors dealt with adversity can inspire us right back. New voices change our patterns and self-image. Ancestral voices are re-presented in a new context.
Ancestors are those people you directly descend from, not extended family members. An ancestor or forbearer is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, etc). An ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited." Our tree has its roots in the past and is ever putting forth leaves and flowers in the brightness of the present.
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)
Arc of Ages
Ancestral Field, Dream Field, Dialogical Field
Return to Origins
Genealogy is the archaeology of the psyche and way to confront the unconscious. The family tree is the epic narrative arc of origins. Genealogy encapsulates the myth of our lives: the question of inheritance, our relationship to the past, and its relevance to the present.
We need metaphor and mythos to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not fantastic elaborations but are fundamental and essential to our emergent process. Jung considered myth the authentic and primordial voice of the collective unconscious.
We don't have the option not to choose one, so the myth we 'choose' is important to our 'frame' or intuitive understanding of the world. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.
In this sense, both myth and genealogy are conceptual frameworks. In fact, myth is present in all conceptual frameworks, though perhaps not so obvious. Myth and genealogy are embroiled through out history. This is the condition presented to us in our family tree.
We don't introduce mythic figures into genealogy. They are already there for us to contend with. We don't enter genealogy intending to root ourselves in myth, but discover it there already. The family tree is an image of the mythic descending into the socio-cultural-historical dimension. Beginning our project with genesis, we certainly expect some revelations.
We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86
Jung suggested that we can only find our myth if we are together with our dead. We have to answer the call of our own dead. For Jung finding his myth could only take place in conjunction with his dead. Genealogy brings us into conjunction and alignment with our dead.
Cycles of Life
Each of us emerges from the dark light of the soul -- the divine Void, the boundless expanse, pre-differentiated universal ground. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the ouroboros serpent biting its own tail, in an archaeological self-examination of the unconscious horizons of human experience.
Lifeforce pervades the whole body as the basis of consciousness and the flow of energy. The Tibetans suggest that light-bearing cells of the “mother seed essence” and the “father seed essence” retain their identities as the essence of the egg and sperm and separate out in magnetic polar connection, forming the basis of the central energy channel. Biologically, a radial line defines itself from the center of the embryonic disc. The neural groove puckers up and curves over to form a tube. The tube is actually entrapping electromagnetic field lines of force.
Narrative therapies like genealogy help us find innovative moments, unique outcomes, and to change and expand our life story. We remember their stories when we have deep feelings or hear something that reminds us of them. They remind us of stories behind our feelings - the world of personal meaning.
The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of continuous renewal -- duality of creation and destruction and thus the birth of life through opposites. Life changes form and condition, dies and is reborn.
Genealogy helps us stabilize and reconceptualize our life life story from a multi-vocal meta-perspective. Constraints of our problem-saturated stories and plot give way to the Big Picture of unfolding life.
Consanguinity distinguished archaic communities and clans from one another. In the precultural world a mother could be sure of her offspring. The terror of the primitive imagination was filial and mystical. Voices emerge from the dominant narrative plot. Rigid narratives give way to ancestral conversations. We assimilate them as unpredicted meaning bridges that tie our experience together.
Genealogy starts off like humanity did -- by hunting and gathering. We want to be explorers, not just knowers, but seekers. Nietzsche claims, "We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for good reason: How can we ever find what we have never looked for? The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself will hold for us for all eternity. Of ourselves we are “not knowers.”(1887/1956, p. 149)
We hunger for the unknown. The famous T.S. Elliot lines apply to self-knowledge: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Our hunter and gatherer instincts define our research style. It takes hunting to dig up new material, break brick walls, and discover secrets. We may find fossil-traumas in the family record. New stories are therapeutic opportunities we may ignore or trivialize when obsessed with our problematical story. Small but significant changes, emergent properties, mark narrative development.
Genealogy leads from the concrete and known toward the legendary and mythic -- unknown and beyond comprehension -- secrets beyond secrets with no resolution in sight. The ancestors bring a new movement and dynamic to the landscapes of action and consciousness. Time, action, and consciousness converge in transformation of emotions, values, and thoughts. With meta-reflection we can describe that transformation, understanding how and why we've changed.
Gathering quantities of data helps us make broad connections and find patterns and universal life-themes. People and places initially excite our imaginations through their incomprehensible mystery. Gradually, with challenging struggle, purposive suffering, and creative endeavors, we learn to 'cultivate' that mystery and to 'cook' it with integrative work, engaging the opposites and our projective tendencies.
Union of Souls
What can be known is the discernable tree, though much remains occluded. As Jung noted, "...there is a field of the unconscious both above and below us" -- the light and dark, the male and female, spiritual and chthonic/instinctual, legality and maternity, etc. Each ancestor, as with each god, is a way we are shadowed. Indestructible life is simultaneously the the god of death and the dead.
More than a trope of the tree and the blood, or a modular assemblage, the pedigree is established only by valid evidence. Genealogy without proof is mythology. Intelligence emerges with symbolic language. Symbols can be both literal and metaphorical. Alternate stories rich in metaphorical resonance come out of the shadows.
Content, Context, & Reflexivity
The real and symbolic facts of who we are and where we come from, and our ancestors, are fundamental. Reflexivity as interpretation and reflexivity as genealogical identifies unmarked intentionalities in research. In narrative, psychosensory experiences are described from the inside outward, from resonance with one's own body, using meditation and sensory awareness to deepen experience.
Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. Community context or proximity implies a relationship of some kind.
Digital retrieves the medieval information we can use to build context among our many ancestors of that era. The lived psychophysical experience with the nuances of the body can be embodied in writing. Telling such stories honors the ancestors. Narrative patterns include:
- Striving toward a goal
- Overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal
- Solving a mystery
- Resolving a problem
- Bringing order to chaos (return to equilibrium)
- The journey
- Flight and pursuit
- Coming of age (from innocence to experience)
- Personal growth
People come to genealogy from several motivations: when loved ones die or are born, the desire to carve out a family place in the larger historical picture, to find lost roots or unknown family history, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, to join heritage or communitarian societies, to recognize or embellish descent, to find kin, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.
But self-knowledge is primary, as are symptoms, healing, and synchronicities. Naturally, the web has led to an explosion of interest, research, and communication. Anyone captured by family stories can check them out in a number of ways. The structure of the family tree helps us value our underpinnings, to carry an emotional-cognitive structure across time -- identifying, recognizing, and connecting things, events, places, and people. This is memory, which guarantees continuity to life.
The pedigree is a physical and cognitive instrument of navigation. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning to navigate through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious -- living one's life as a voyage for its own sake.
"The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." (Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol).
As Proust says, "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." We can deepen our consciousness as we adapt to our current situation. This arc carries both divine seed and divine knowledge -- a way for us to circle around and find our ancestral alignment within the precessional ages we can never know.
Being & Not-Being
The genealogy is the map, but the ancestral field is the territory. Once we cross the threshold our genealogical journey begins. In this sense, we are The Fool, like Parcival in the Grail Quest, abandoned to the unknown, entering uncharted areas -- the soul venturing into itself and crossing the threshold to new dimensions. This is the field of interrupted communications between members of different generations. The pedigree and Grail mirror one another as containers for the royal bloodlines.
A true and authentic life resonates over time. Our approach will varying depending on well-being, anxieties, woundedness, optimism, and confidence. This is revealed in the psychological family tree of hidden issues, rather than the simple physical imprint. Genealogy is no longer androlineal. Data bases help us find female ancestors and lines of descent in which women are preferentially included. Paternal primacy is a genealogical relic.
Archaeology of the Soul
We may find Gateway ancestors, each of which has proven lineage back to royal lines. This vastly expands our ancestral horizons. Our notion of what it means to write the family history expands. This is a psychological, not secular or religious approach, describing psychic phenomena (psychic facts, images, human phenomena) not metaphysical assertions. The narrative carries the chronology along, but once in a while you stop and paint a picture.
'Bringing in the sheaves' of numerous groups of ancestors, we reap the abundant harvest of their lives. Each generation doubles their numbers. Though taken by The Reaper, we reap them back and craft them into the Bread of Life, the family story. "He that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." (Amer. King James Bible, Psalms 126:6)
In Asia, the archetype is played out -- sheaves are brought in as effigies of rice ancestors. Some people make pilgrimages to the effigies of their ancestors in cathedrals and country churches, gazing at the blank stares but seeing through to the person. Once we harvest the sheaves of generations they are dried and threshed. After the first collection, we are left with the gleanings, the details we can gather that were lost or first overlooked.
Ideally, like therapy, the genealogical process can release "an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients" as Jung describes it in Seminar 1925 (pg. 111) -- a sort of personal Annunciation of our own connectivity with life. As Giordano Bruno suggests, "there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence."
Rituals of Recognition
Our frame for this genealogical approach is 'this is ritual' -- and a complex one, at that. Ritual is a meta-communication. It tells us this highly-contextualized activity is different, deliberate, and significant, so pay attention. Sometimes trauma-based coping behaviors, repetition, or dysfunctional rituals can become addictive. Compulsions may also lead to purposeful results.
It is a rite -- a series of sequential acts -- because it is a social, religious, cultural procedure that symbolically conveys meaning about events to participants. Like other ritual behaviors it is first experienced in the family. Certain emotions are produced and expressed spontaneously. The ritual evokes, allows, and contains strong emotions, accessing mind-body states.
Genealogical rituals of recognition deepen and rewrite our perception of reality with rituals of induction, remembrance, and modulation of emotion. The integral function in this process is inherent if we can mobilize it. We may in some sense feel that we are 'born to do this,' but there may still be a gulf between our intention and its tangible effects.
In this gap, like the space between breaths, we find transcendence. Genealogy becomes an art when it grips us. Jung also cautions a "new idea always has to fight for its life against these ancestral predispositions."
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
Spirit descends to lower regions from mythic roots. Sometimes we can't perceive things until we have the right metaphor to bridge the gap between matter and spirit.
Metaphor is one of the favorite allegories of ancient and modern poets and philosophers for the process of human transformation. We liken one experience to another as if it were that experience.
As a metaphor, the Grail is always relevant and means many things to many people. It is an undying symbol of the archetypal quest of human life -- a search for accomplishment and meaning. The Grail has been secularized as metaphor, and re-sacralized in Grail scholarship and fiction. It also remains the potential for healing psychic wounds. The question is who can grow this potential into something more.
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Voices of the Past
Jung reminds, "After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control." (1925 Seminar, Page 83)
Hillman sees metaphor as an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itself is a myth -- an expression of creative mythopoesis.
Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82)
Narration is a root metaphor. Self-narrative is an identity construction. We habitually tell people 'who we are' in terms of our short- and long-term past and presumed achievements and experiences. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
Narration is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves, 'growing' one another. There may be a reason we favor 'exemplary' ancestors who were wise while alive and remain so in the invisible world. Being dead does not necessarily make ancestors 'smarter.' Hillman suggests we aspire to be exemplary ancestors ourselves.
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, is the opening of the heart. (Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development and uncovering of intergenerational life-themes. The multigenerational approach has it own coherence and milestones of discovery and exploration.
Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we instinctively seek order for security. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements. But tidy metaphors don't always work; some of them can be very messy and inconsistent, much like the edge of chaos from which order emerges in chaos theory. The missing information may be already within us as insight, though it has not emerged or unfolded.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature." (Campbell)
One Blood; One Field
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests."
Conversation is one of our main ways of inner and outer thinking and expression. Dialogue bridges conscious and unconscious and activates the transcendent function. It doesn't matter if we do it intentionally or it happens to us spontaneously. Jung says "In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself." (ModPsy, ETH Lectures, p.53).
We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known but not literalized. The dialogical self describes our ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue -- finding a voice for emerging meaning.
Psyche is a semantic, symbolic and noetic field. Duality between consciousness and nonconsciousness is the contrast between our everyday experience (individual consciousness) and all nonconscious processes.
This duality is fundamental; we literally cannot ever know what it is like to be our nonconscious processes. We can only know what it’s like to be our conscious awareness. Yet, all the mind-body processes of which we are unaware are at least as aware if not more aware than our individual conscious awareness, and elements of who we are. Thus, they are related to our ancestry.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. The language of symbols is oldest.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe - how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility.
The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior. Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity.
This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential or phenomenological experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." If we deny the dead, we deny ourselves. Their redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity.
Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of ancient bloodlines. In Greek, drakon (dragon), as in edrakon, is past tense for derkesthai, meaning 'to see clearly.' A dragon was one who saw clearly, and clarity of vision engendered wisdom, which produces the creative power of intuition, prediction, and synthesis. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, then record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. Clarity comes from clarifying the family tree. We participate more knowingly in the process of multigenerational integration. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
Renewing the Mystery
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. They affect us by influence, impact, making a difference. Such impressions touch us by moving our feelings emotionally, even tugging our heartstrings.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The sensory apparatus of our body is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
History, the narrative of our personal, familial,and collective pasts, shapes and informs our identity. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example, when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, though you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
Collateral Grafting & Consanguinity
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - legitimate filiation, dynastic supremacy, elder and younger (cadet) branches, forced coexistence, innumerable clerical errors, transmission gaps, and lapses of focus, to say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. The tree-like structure can conceal exclusion, discrimination, and abusive graftings, even amputations.
The discourse of lineage and descent can be subverted for familial legitimation. For most of history, paternity was a legal fiction. Primogeniture was tied to succession and common-law inheritance. Androlineal genealogy was the necessary instrument of social origins and legal deeds.
Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
The Gift of Life
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Original Awareness
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
As ancient hominids we may have left the trees and our arboreal life but we never entirely abandoned them. When we descended from the canopy, we acquired another sort of tree that went with us -- the family tree and relations of our clan.
In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald (1993) concludes that the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-moment mentality.
Mimesis is the easiest way to learn. The first transition was to a "mimetic'' culture of making sense: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other prelinguistic traditions.
Eric McLcLuhan (2015) says, "Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming,intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer, that is, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence." (p. 27, infra.) He calls mimesis a tangible affective vortex of real power.
The evolution to mythic cultures followed: the result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. The third transition carried oral speech to reading, writing, and an extended external memory-store seen today in cloud technology. Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period.
Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, according to McLuhan who argues that the “mythic or iconic mode of awareness” substitutes a “multi-faceted” perspective for a single, fixed point of view. Mythic environments live beyond time and space, generating little radical social change.
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. ... without any verbalization at all. (McLuhan, Playboy Interview). He claims the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day-world.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/06/this-archaeological-discovery-throws-story-of-human-evolution-into-disarray/
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. The archai are the deepest forms of psychic functioning. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.'
Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice. Hillman describes how soulmaking is revealed in psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way.
He considers death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “The death experience brings down the old order and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous break down’ (synthesizing too, as it goes along), analysis means dying.”
Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul. Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data. But Hillman favored the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. The speech of the soul is always riddled with images and fantasies, which cannot and should not be taken literally or concretely. He points out, the alternative to such literalism is mystery.
Imaginal Understanding
Restoring psyche, we see soul at work, in fantasy, imagination, myth, and metaphor. But, as in metaphor, things can be 'like that,' but not that. Neti neti; neither this nor that. Literalism dominates everyday discourse and is probably the biggest pitfall on the genealogical path. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Such fundamentalism can be a regressive, displaced tendency.
For example, while the heroic notion has served ego psychology for millennia, we can see beyond the urge of the conquering hero to deeper wisdom and insight beyond the manic ego-driven modality which has had its day. The perspective of the human ego certainly isn't superior.
Literalism has more to do with beliefs, religiosity, cult behavior, and esoteric metaphysics than it does with a balanced psychological approach. Psychopathology is also part and parcel of the same process and the source of illusion and delusions about self, others, and world.
Real meaning is beyond the literal and naturalistic fallacies. The poetic approach means exploring images, rather than explaining them. In this sense our ancestors are not allegories but modes of reflection. We cannot 'use' our ancestors, individually or collectively, as some people 'use' dreams in a mundane, prescriptive way.
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Beyond the trendy 'power of Now' lies the power of 'now and again.'
Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us in more ways than one. Perhaps someone else in the family collated the genealogy of their day. The transgenerational challenges will have been passed on and remain, as well as any family aspirational drives.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Each ancestor is the gateway to another timeline back to the past. First they diverge; then they converge. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own great-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. The notion of 'descent' is somehow related to the archaic descent into the cave or tomb of the ancestors.
Descent seems to be very steep & dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well-trodden path. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface; one finds pars of wrecked cars, trousers, shoes & skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 94)
We pay attention to a history created by own ancestors. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call' from the depths of our hearts. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge but in a soulful rather than utilitarian way. The archetypes fill the gaps to compensate our spiritual deficiencies.
The archetype does not become meaningful until it goes out into the world and takes part in life according to its nature and
according to the time in history in which it occurs. The
facts of the specific cultural and personal existence
provide the actual clothing of the archetype. In other words
the archetype is only an inherited mode of expression.
Jung noted, "Besides the obvious personal sources, creative fantasy also draws upon the forgotten and long buried primitive mind with its host of images, which are to be found in the mythologies of all ages and all peoples. The sum of these images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual."
Carl Jung, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, Pages xviii - xvix
Genealogy Beyond the Grave
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- 'my very own', giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Some say, "it does seem I fall into a type of revelatory trance where aspects of these people’s lives are made clear." Or, "downloads as I call them for lack of a better word sometimes come out of the blue, when I am meditating, or even studying the past, mysticism, etc."
Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonment, and a variety of other human concerns and events. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We regard our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators. How do we come to know the sea's dark secrets? As Kabir says, "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."
Navigating the psyche -- the ocean with many shores -- is no easy task. We are all subject to self-delusion, misguided inner authority, the host of psychological illusion from follies to participation mystique, to projective errors, confabulations, and metaphysical beliefs. The imaginal gloss, right or wrong operates throughout the whole process of seeking clarity.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious. Personally acquired contents constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation is to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, life and death, light and dark, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform with awareness, appearing in many forms as consciousness shifts.
To illustrate the multiple personifications of psyche Hillman made reference to gods, goddesses, demigods and other imaginal figures which he referred to as sounding boards "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life" although he insisted that these figures should not be used as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child symbolizing duality merging into union and self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with its metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
The psychological umbilical cord of our genealogy connects us not only to the divine source (realm of the Gods) but also to the vaults of the unconscious (Underworld). We embark on a quest to search for the World-Tree at the center of the Universe. This is a metaphor for our genealogical quest for psychological realignment with our own inner center and spiritual source. The tree is a symbol of the self and model of the psyche, with roots stretching back into our earliest symbolic imaginations.
We sublimate the cosmic energy that enters our being through realignment with the 'axis mundi'. The cosmic axis connects our mundane material realm to the higher realm of sacred power. The journey is perilous because a quest of transformation requires sacrifice of the ego. The World-Tree is also a symbol of initiation and transcendence. At the center of the Universe, we arrive at the sacred center of our own being.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the dreamtime and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in dreamwork, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. Sometimes we can cultivate that information or intuition into evidence. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different natures from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution. Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness. Kabir says, "“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
"Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"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)
"The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life, to time, and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Nature & Nurture
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, outrageous calamities somewhere between coincidence and fate, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father that can be the key to healing.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
HOW DID YOU EVER GET HERE?
10,000 Paths to the Passed
Each of our ancestors is a gate to our Inner Sanctum, to the wonder-world of our soul. Genealogy is the relational mode of understanding. The tale of our genesis is our prima materia (cosmic egg, oroboros) and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Like the oroboros serpent we recursively turn back toward our origins.
We must incorporate symbolic relationships. The basic alchemical sequence begins with a male and female soror mystica) sealing the prima materia (original substance; sea, darkness, void) into a vessel -- in this case the family tree. Here we can gently 'cook' our existential woes: rootlessness, anxiety, fear, pain, emptiness, discontent, and despair.
The retort of genealogy gives new meaning to the notion that "like cures like." We fill the retort with our ancestors' names, seal them with documentation, and fire up the slow burning oven of integration. With reflection on the wounds therein we remember past traumas and give voice to feelings previously inexpressible in metaphorical language.
We cling to our surface story and impressions as we bunge jump down our lines of descent. As we work, the House of our Flesh becomes a high tempered glass house, transparent to transcendence. Their breath is our breath, including aspirations and A-ha moments that enliven the experience within.
We have no choice but to live through unendurable times in our lives that nearly break us. Our dreams and their life stories will indicate if the hot fires of an initiatory
experience are to be. Psyche leads us through the labyrinth with her dim light.
In the beginning everything is chaotic, fluid, co-mingled, and undifferentiated. The chaos hides the Stone, contains it, yet is it, but hidden by our inability to see it. Its metaphorical names include quicksilver, shadow, water of life, dragon, and poison of the contaminated opposites. The problems that block us are like the brick walls in our pedigree.
The shadow that plagues us is an undead zombie -- not just a historical profile wrongly marked as living. This is the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, made mute and will-less, by a seemingly supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.
We must endure and endure with devotion, dissolving defenses with emotional congruence to illuminate our undiscovered inner life, clarifying the step-by-step process. In the stillness we feel what needs attention. As the opposites co-mingle through the centuries, it changes our life potential.
We must be patient, humble, and loving with this work. We must handle the tension of not-knowing, of ambiguity, of caring for the unloved, rejected, and forgotten. Our first attempts to extract the gold from the unrefined narrative may be difficult. It is a long journey, sorting through undifferentiated hurt feelings, anger, traumatic reactions, fear, depressed moods, and restlessness, back to find our first royal marriage. Symptoms become patterns.
Its alchemical symbol is a 3-headed serpent or dragon, of Sulpher, Mercury, and Salt. This represents the dance of Sun and Moon, King and Queen, the archetypal superpatterns of male and female, and their material offspring. We spring from the soul and remain the child of our ancestors.
In every adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286
First matter gives universe its properties. It organizes into the Elements, (fire, water, air, and earth), which are the building blocks of words, thought-ideas or archetypes. It is liminal, between manifest and unmanifest. It is the spiritualized essence or soul of substance: identity, form, and function oscillating between creation and destruction.
We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive something; the creation in its own essence is also destructive. You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people's organic health. It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing. Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it.
(Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654).
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560).
"The transformation of Mercurius, as prima materia, in the heated, sealed vessel is comparable to cooking the basic instinctive drives in their own affect until their essential fantasy content becomes conscious."
“Instead of arguing with the drives which carry us away, we prefer to cook them and . ask then what they want. . . . That can be discovered by active imagination, or through experimenting in reality, but always with the introverted attitude of observing objectively what the drive really wants.” (Marie von Franz, Alchemy, p. 129)
It is often suggested the prima materia is found in "feces" or lead which is alchemical code for matter or the physical body and what gets shoved down into the unconscious. The first matter is cyclic, contains all the elements, and is the source of the Philosopher's Stone -- the egg or light of Nature; Anima Mundi or Soul of the World.
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. Emotions are part of the reasoning process itself -- bodily intelligence.
This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for the treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation & Suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetic inheritance is constantly remodeled and demonstrates that our parents' trauma and family secrets are passed along. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Traumas are events that induce intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state in PTSD. Trigger a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system under-regulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.
To be whole is to be full of contradictions. The unity never becomes apparent because the opposites within us operate and mingle in various ways and it is their interaction that makes the whole man. The complete human being, the hermaphrodite, is never visible. He is indescribable, always a mystical experience. (Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung - Ostrowski,)
So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
Serpent's Breath
The serpent in that Tree is its numinous voice, with its active dynamic kundalini -- the Serpent Power, the Secret Fire, the life force or basic animating principle -- the quintessence of matter. Never calling it evil, Genesis 3:1 says, "Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."
Our serpentine lines of ancestral descent recursively bite their own tails in the primordial archetype of the Orobouros. “"All human things are a circle” was inscribed on the temple at Athens.
The Hermetic "Holy Grail" was a circular crater or bowl of regeneration described in the fourth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was a font of immersion symbolizing the constant decay and renewal of all things, present in all Nature. The genealogical Holy Grail is found in royal lines that include the Arthurian legends then trace back to roots in various gods and goddesses.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
Grail symbolism encompasses the womb that always makes children, the horn and cup that serve drink, and the cauldron and bowl that give food. The quest for the Grail comes from these primal facts of life.
The holy bowl -- the cranium, where heaven meets earth -- is where individual souls mix with universal mind in a metaphor of immersive experience, The immersive baptism of wisdom or gnosis means 'living water' that springs up in creativity and illumination -- "the drink of the soul by the sweet stream of wisdom (Sophia)."
What Are They Remembering For Us?
Our history is our collective transgenerational memory. No people can successfully live outside of their memory. Jung tells us that, "Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force." (MDR, Page 277). The past plays one of the most critical roles in Western civilization. but it is so embedded, so obvious that it becomes invisible. The past remains with us as experiences change sperm and eggs.
Genes aren't the cause of most disease; the cause of most disease alters genetic expression. Epigenetics is revealing the biological transmission of molecular memory -- that we can pass down altered responses, emotional trauma, agitated nervous systems, under-regulated immune systems, chronic over-inflammation, and somatic disorders.
Biological Legacy
Ancestral behavior can also mutate single genes. Everybody has a different level of tolerance for alcohol, but some people act very strangely, exhibiting reckless, impulsive, violent, or even dangerous behavior on alcohol. Finnish researchers found that a fairly common mutation in serotonin 2B receptor gene can render some prone to impulsive behavior by nature, sober or under the influence of alcohol. They struggle with self-control or mood disorders.
“One of our main findings was that the HTR2B Q20* predicted alcohol-related risk-behaviors. The HTR2B Q20* carriers demonstrated aggressive out-bursts, got into fights and behaved in an impulsive manner under the influence of alcohol. They were also arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol more often than the controls."
“The HTR2B Q20* carriers were not alcoholics per se, as measured by average alcohol consumption, and were not diagnosed as alcoholics, but they had a tendency to lose behavioral control while under the influence of alcohol.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/common-genetic-mutation-linked-to-reckless-drunken-behaviour?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore
All cells have a genetic code with information to produce certain proteins to carry out vital processes. Chemical switches can turn genes on or off, or crank them up or down, so the cells know which proteins to produce and in what quantities. These switches or epigenetic tags are altered by environment, bad habits, and experience, passed on to their offspring, and their offspring's offspring.
Sperm and eggs carry genetic memories of parents' health well before conception. Even what grandparents ate and the father's behavior long before conception can influence the child's health in a range from mood disorders to mental illness. They inherit parents' psychic burdens, anxiety, low impulse control. Older people can unconsciously externalizes their traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. The physical transmission of the horrors of the past is “embodied history.”
Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors by complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Epigenetics changes the way instructions in the genetic code were translated and carried out by the body.
We are more than our transgenerational wounds. Our essence transcends our identification with history. In healing we are not alone, we trust a path to greater freedom, and feel our relationship to the suffering of our family lineage. We feel lighter when we release the burdens of our own trauma or family history. We can make wider choices and expand our sense of belonging in the world.
The Spent Breath of Millions
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique. As Jung says, "But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world." (Letters Vol. II, Page 567)
Perhaps the ancestors inform us in their own way. Intuition is information that is received by the mind. But for that information to be useful, it must be analyzed and purposefully acted upon. When integrated we act on those intuitive impulses with wise judgment and confidence. Creative ideas then take shape in manifest form.
Primordial Psyche
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession. But they also have complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns we can discern. This is the realm of the imaginal -- primordial images or instinctual energy which nevertheless have objective cascading effects.
Multifractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. They arise from fractals 'interwoven' with each other in an appropriate manner and in appropriate proportions. Multifractals are not simply the sum of fractals and cannot be divided to return back to their original components, because the way they weave is fractal in nature. The result is that in order to see a structure similar to the original, different portions of a multifractal need to expand at different rates. A multifractal is therefore non-linear in nature.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160121110913.htm
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited.
Archetypes & Instincts
That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. In Jungian thought, when we search for our "other half" and perhaps for our ancestors, too, we actually seek the integration of the elements of the unconscious psyche. “It is always important to have something to bring into a relationship, and solitude is often the means by which you acquire it” (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610, Letters Vol. II.)
As Jung notes, "Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of nature and is connected to his own roots." (Symbols of Transformation, Page 23).
If I speak of the collective unconscious I don't assume it as a principle, I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
The Platonic "Idea" is in this case no longer intellectual but a psychic, instinctual pattern. Instinctual patterns can be found in human beings too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
"Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." ("Transformation Symbolism in the Mass", CW 11, para. 401).
Inherent Nature of Man
Jung thought the "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species. They grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena.
Water is the cosmogonic element by which the self sinks into involuntary immersion in the dimensional abysses. Our pre-historical ancestors have sunk in the Atlantis of the waters of the unconscious. This may be more than symbolic as we now know humanity has gone through a few local and global catastrophic events.
Supervolcanoes, repeated glaciation, meteor, and comet falls, massive sea-rise, and climate change are only preserved in myth and legend, leading to speculation that we have a species-wide amnesia. We have only recently found that our genome contains contributions from at least three other species -- Neanderthal, Denisovan, and another as-yet-unknown hominid.
Life is a thread interwoven with hidden archetypes which remain entangled in our eternal present. We're already in our phenomenological graves. If we can embrace the ancient soul of our ancestors soulfully and creatively, we may engage and fall in love with the sacred again. Elemental wisdom is recognizing patterns in life.
In our own genealogy, we begin to reveal a pattern in which we can locate a felt sense of understanding, a resonance that speaks to us within a myth or traces the path of a wounding through therapy. We can followed the thread of understanding using dreamwork, ritual, or other depth psychological methods, or experience the numinous on some unalterable level that changes us forever.
Genealogy can be our approach and return to the sacred. To understand the living we commune with the dead. We approach the phenomena of the psyche as we do the phenomena of nature. We've unwittingly buried with our ancestors any symbolic or revelatory meaning that would otherwise push its way through from the unconscious.
Modern life has short-circuited our connection with the primeval unconscious resulting in an intolerable rift -- psychic dissociation. This division separates us from the sacred, limiting our capacity to navigate divine corridors of the numinous, relegating us to lives of estrangement, isolation, and alienation.
Potentiality of Meaning
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth.
Genealogy becomes our altar to the sacred -- to the Great
Mystery that surrounds ideas of primordial mind, ancestral and shamanic wisdom, visionary transpersonal experiences, and other numinosum. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to our ancestry, wholeness (Self as supra-personal human wholeness), and deep history. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood.
Information Storage & Retrieval
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
Radical new proposals from physics are arising for vectors of information. Ervin Laszlo has linked it with psi phenomena and an integral theory recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. He bootstraps from the Sanskrit, calling non-local interaction the Akasha Paradigm -- an entangled self-actualizing cosmos not limited to the here and now. We can connect and feel into each other. Laszlo shows the cosmos of the Akasha to be a self-actualizing, self-organizing whole. Each part is in coherence with all others and all parts together create the conditions for the emergence of life and consciousness. (2007; 2014).
http://manifestdestinytriforce.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-akashic-records-what-are-they-do.html
Igor V. Limar (2012) proposes linking synchronicity, correlated mental processes, and quantum entanglement. Mental processes of two different persons correlate not just when the subjects are located at a distance from each other, but also when both persons are alternately (and sequentially, one after the other) located in the same point of space. In this case, there is a time gap between manifestation of mental process in one person and manifestation of mental process in the other person.
NeuroQuantology, Sept. 2012, Vol. 10, Issue 3, Page 489-491.
"A Version of Jung’s Synchronicity in the Event of Correlation of Mental Processes in the Past and the Future: Possible Role of Quantum Entanglement in Quantum Vacuum"
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/477/535
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We acquire depth in our attempts to heal ourselves. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets.
Jung spoke of it poetically, "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." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Descent seems to be very steep and dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well trodden path and there are many safeguards. You feel safe because many thousands have gone that way already. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped down, so it has a slippery surface, and one finds parts of wrecked cars and trousers and shoes and skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 93.)
Jung describes how such imagery relates to visions, which only become clear when you look into your heart:
This is very typical of the beginning of visions: it begins at the bottom, as it were, as if the whole world had to be built anew, or as if nothing had ever happened before; and then it carries the thought through until it reaches the stage that is not yet and that never has been: it reaches the future.
It is often as if such a series covered the whole way, as if each series extended from hell to heaven, from the beginning to the end, as if it ware a complete cycle more or less clearly formulated.
Conspectu Mortis
In the beginning the future stage is rather dimly characterized, then later it becomes more and more clear, and the beginning gets blurred. This is a general characteristic of such visions. (Visions Seminar, Page 142)
Today to bring up the inferior function is to live, but we pay dearly for it both in mistakes and in energy. Sometimes it is not our choice—the inferior function takes us unawares.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74
If you leave all your energy and will in the superior function you slowly go to hell—it sucks you dry. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74
What we need is our Great Work, not just mundane work. Jung is making an analogy between the mental archetypes of light being opposite darkness, not a literal Heaven and Hell.
The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. ~Jung, Liber Novus, Fn. 135, Page 243.
"The common ideal of today is work at all costs, but many people simply work and do not live.
We cannot depreciate the ideal of work, but we can understand that it is valueless when it divorces one from life." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 73
Descent as an archetype of the Way, is a harbinger of a transpersonal future, pre-figuring spiritual development. "No one saves us from the evil of becoming, unless we choose to go through Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 318.) "I used the same technique [Active Imagination] of the descent, but this time I went much deeper. The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 68.
Internal and Infernal
He also remarks, "the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 315). "When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table." (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244). The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Generational Archetypes
Everything we do starts with feeling and feeling starts in the family. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe created the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It identifies a recurring generational cycle in the last five centuries of Anglo-American history. It can be explained by four generational archetypes that repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern every 80-100 years. This is the unfixed length of a long human life the ancients called a “saeculum," which can be divided into four "seasons" of approximately 22 years each; these seasons represent youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.
Basically, this sociological generational theory describes how the era a person was born into affects the development of their view of the world. Our value systems are shaped in the first decade or so of our lives, by our families, our friends, our communities, significant events and the general era in which we are born.
All cultures are shared unconscious fantasies about how to live life. Traditional cultures viewed time as cyclical, much as the waxing and waning of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the birth and death of living creatures, the planting and harvesting of crops, and the seasons of the year. The idea of sacred time as an eternal round and the symbol of the ring or wheel are cross-cultural symbols. There is a repeating cycle in historical generational values. Each 20-year long generation faces similar issues and experiences.
http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
Beyond the modern pop nomenclature of Greatest Generation, Boomers, and Gens X, Y, Millennials, and Post-Millennials ("Homeland Generation"), their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, expands the theory focusing on a pulsating fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history. Graeme Codrington summarizes the repeating cycle.
Social Cycle Theory
[Each] 80 year period of human history, we start with a crisis period, when society has to stop and deal with an issue that actually changes institutions and structures. Children born during such a time grow up to be like the Silent generation of today. This is followed by an outer directed and driven period of rebuilding, with grand visions and big dreams, giving rise to a Boomer-like generation. This idealistic world cannot be sustained, however, and a period of disillusionment and breaking down follows, with society being reconfigured and adjusted. The children of this era grow up to be like Generation X is today. This era is followed by an inner-directed era, where leaders, institutions and society itself focuses on consolidating and building new foundations, rebuilding institutions and protecting the young. This era gives rise to the type of people who are from the GI generation and the Millennial generation today. Finally, this inner-directed focus cannot be maintained, and a crisis occurs, sparking a new cycle.
If this is correct, then generational theorists are expecting a major crisis to hit global society in the next few years. This is something that will cause society to stop, reconsider and reconstitute itself. http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
While they focus on the history of the United States, including the Colonial era and British antecedents, they also find similar generational trends around the globe from the late Medieval period. They have defined generational archetypes in cohort groups that express the zeitgeist of their times. While such attributions are arguable they can provide a touchstone for certain eras and their collective culture.
http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/generational-archetypes.html
They group four generations into a series of 80-year cyclic 'turnings' that include an initial 'high', followed by 'awakening,' unraveling,' and 'crisis.' Their archetypes include 'prophet,' 'nomad,' 'hero,' and 'artist' generations. We can think of such themes as collective dreams. Repeating cycles are a common theme for both individuals and whole generations.
As is the generation of leaves, so to of men:
At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth, and the season of spring comes
into existence;
So it is with the generations of men, which
alternately come forth and pass away.
– Homer, The Illiad, Book Six
We might benefit from the generational method in formulating our own Big Picture, as well as broad-stroke insights for our own generation within the pattern. The theory contends that each new generation entering a specific lifestage will redefine that lifestage and change it either subtly or dramatically. As generations clash there is a collision of values, expectations, ambitions, attitudes and behaviors -- the generation gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
Self-Generating Creativity
Prima materia is the "beginning of all," "the abyss," the primary chaotic earth, or principle of existence in general. In his 1941 ETH lecture, Jung describes how many philosophers have sought information about the prima materia from inhabitants of Hades, or in the "habitation of souls." This is the realm of psychic dark matter, what is hidden from view.
This "land of the dead" is also known as "the egg," "Adam's Earth," "Mercurial serpent," "winged dragon," and the "entrance to the West,” "the root of itself," the dark sky of night, the non-created, or eternity. Or, as Jung states, in Liber Novus, "Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of." (Page 244).
Prima materia is also called a neglected, rejected, and abandoned "orphan." The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Such self-organizing complexity is the beginning and end of transformation and renewal. This is the creative process Jung spoke about.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life (CW 15, P. 82)
Edinger (1978) compares the problem of discovering the prima materia to the problem of finding what to work on in psychotherapy. He gives some hints:
(1) It is ubiquitous, to be found everywhere, before the eyes of all. This means that psychotherapeutic material likewise is everywhere, in all the ordinary, everyday occurrences of life. Moods and petty personal reactions of all kinds are suitable matter to be worked on by the therapeutic process.
(2) Although of great inward value, the primal materia is vile in outer appearance and therefore despised, rejected or thrown on the dung heap. The prima materia is treated like the suffering servant in Isaiah. Psychologically, this means that the primal materia is found in the shadow, that part of the personality which is considered most despicable. Those aspects of ourselves most painful and most humiliating are the very ones to be brought forward and worked on.
(3) It appears as multiplicity, "has as many names as there are things," but at the same time is one. This feature corresponds to the fact that initially psychotherapy makes one aware of his/her fragmented, disjointed condition. Very gradually these warring fragments are discovered to be differing aspects of ones underlying unity. It is as though one sees the fingers of a hand touching a table at first only in two dimensions, as separate unconnected fingers. With three-dimensional vision, the fingers are seen as part of a larger unity, the hand.
(4) The prima materia is undifferentiated, without definite boundaries, limits or form. This corresponds to a certain experience of the unconscious which exposes the ego to the infinite. ...It may evoke the terror of dissolution or the awe of eternity. It provides a glimpse of the pleroma. ...the chaos prior to the operation of the World-creating Logos. It is the fear of the boundless that often leads one to be content with the ego-limits he has rather than risk falling into the infinite by attempting to enlarge them.
The different operations to transform the prima materia follow as the natural consequences of finding the material to work on. The imagery associated with these operations is profuse and draws from ancestors (genetic memory), myth, religion and folklore. The symbols for all these imagery-systems comes from the collective unconscious.
Dying to be Heard
Jung implies we cannot get rid of the unconscious and its intuitions, which are rooted in our instinctual, reflexive, and parasympathic systems. But we can go from being 'herd' to being heard. We can engage in intentional multisensory dialogue with our depths. It arises from the primordial ground of the subquantal level of every quantum particle of our being. Jung likened Hades to a black hole without an outlet.
When we enter our genealogy we enter the realm of the dead, so we must find a way to reconcile that metaphor and our surrender to the process. Jung cautions, "Under certain conditions living people can descend into Hades, but it does not agree with them. One must really be dead to go there, for it is the dark land where the dead are imprisoned; and this is a place from which this marvellous substance comes." (ETH, Pages 215-223.)
In Arcadia, the ancients sought out the Necromanteion or "Oracle of Death" where they communed with their dead ancestors in a psychoactive ritual. Though there were many oracles of the dead, the Necromanteion of Ephyra was the most important. Herodotus recounts that Periander, sent emissaries in the 6th century BC to ask questions of his dead wife, Melissa. In his nekyia, Odysseus enters Hades through the Necromanteion.
We can listen to the voice that has no words --the voice of the silence. We're all connected via the interactive sea of energy that connects us to everyone and everything in our world. It seems Hades presides over our descents and perhaps our descendancy. According to Jung, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven." (Liber Novus, Page 240.)
Caves always had their own gods. The underworld with its narrow jagged gaps is essential to many spiritual worldviews. We can imagine that a notion of hell arose early in mankind's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes of deep caverns that seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshipped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
Mankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths that tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
In some sense, hell was our ancient dwelling place to which we returned upon death -- a metaphorical regression to the primal epoch. With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. The dreamworld became a stone cold abyss and the primordial underworld was born.
The first proto-images appeared in cave art. Men and women impulsively desired to participate in the potential transforming powers of the "insides." Hades, the devouring one, could be contacted in the dark cavern of fathomless psychic force. The dismal labyrinthine complexity gave rise to the original trope. The soul is within, below, buried deep in self as within earth itself. This is the archetypal sleepworld of Hypnos and Thanatos.
If we accept that death is not the enemy but a doorway we can rest naturally in what is. The great invitation is to accept death. Lao Tzu invites us to give up the fight against death so existence is revealed as sublime relaxation. Each moment becomes a surrender, one of ‘touch and let go.’ We must not hide, but rather be open to all aspects of being. In sublime relaxation, shadow issues can emerge, some even hidden by our nondual language and cliches. All is grist for death’s mill.
In archetypal psychology, soul remains close to death -- disease, disorder, collapse. We die to the literal and concrete world of the senses for the sake of soul. Hillman imagined Hades right alongside daily life, the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning. It is the gaps between breaths. The dreamworld is also the underworld of Hades. From Hades perspective we are our images. By "letting be," we can allow dream images to speak for themselves, rather than forcing them toward interpretations for mundane life.
The underworld is the primal void -- the prima materia. Underworld is psyche. It is not a place but a hidden domain of liminal experience -- a dimension not available in itself. Our concern with Hades here regarding our ancestors is the spontaneous image-making of the soul. The 'ground' is a fathomless depth.
We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemy. We can understand the "death experience" metaphorically and psychologically, but we still must all confront it with naked awareness without the symbols and images born of nature's own workings.
Some families never forget who they are, while others struggle with a few fragments that don't seem to fit together. Either way it's a puzzle with some missing or damaged pieces. We must keep the big picture in mind to understand the smaller parts. We all have the ability to recognize and seize the deep sense of mystery that lives in our own lives.
Undoubtedly, there is a sacred dimension to the genealogical process, more so when we do the work ourselves. In our first attempts we cross the threshold of initiation. Jung suggests, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation." (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.)
"From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death ..." ~Carl Jung; Soul and death, CW 8, §800.
History, Memories, Stories
With genealogy we dig below the basement of our personal unconscious to find what lies below that still haunts or calls for us. What has been buried in the past yet is not gone nor dormant because it is part of the our psychophysical being. Our adaptive survival styles can distort identity in adult life.
To reclaim our ancestral soul we suffer through the anguish of the unknown as well as the burdens of what we do find from which we wished to protect ourselves. There is shock trauma and developmental trauma. We find things that are great and things that are tragic. Genealogy gives and it takes.
The Trail That Never Ends
Such discoveries have been popularized by media: “Finding Your Roots”‘, "Who Do You Think You Are", “Roots of Faith Ancestry”, "Genealogy Roadshow", and others. Genealogy is touted as the second biggest hobby in America. People want to reconnect with their ancestral homeland to know where and how they lived. http://b.treelines.com/in-defense-of-genealogy-as-a-hobby/
Finding Yourself
Many feel compelled to take on the project. Online genealogy sites are some of the most popular on the web. It's a thrill extending the family heritage back a few more generations or discovering that your family is related to royalty, or allegedly to the legends of history. The progenitor of the clan lies at the root of the male line.
Bi-Lateral Descent
Our own bi-lateral descent includes both of our parents. But each female in our direct descent has her own bi-lateral lines, as well. We honor not only our paternal surname (patrilineal descent), but all those grandmothers whose families keep our lines invigorated with new blood.
New surnames enter the tree with each wife. These are not easy lines to follow, retrieve, or draw without the aid of computers. Maiden names often present brick walls difficult to push beyond. Pedigrees show both family-as-child and their families-as-parent.
Algorithm Genealogy
Rather than mere family trees, massive genealogical sites with billions of records have been likened to Amazonian forests of family connections of blood ties and marriage bridges. Genealogists who explore the family tree information, weeding out false or duplicate information, call themselves "forest rangers." When genealogies were digitally archived it became possible for algorithms to find lines of descent that included both male and female progenitors.
Thus, genealogy reclaimed the realm of the Mothers -- a return of the Feminine to genealogy where female lines are equally valued. Algorithm genealogy finds paths of mixed fathers and mothers to particular ancestors that might not otherwise be discernible. This is particularly so for ancient and legendary ancestors. Usually, the term “Descents from Antiquity” refers to modern efforts to find plausible lines of descent. However, it can also include traditional descents that have varying degrees of reliability.
Matrilineal descent is called a "mother line". An individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as her or his mother. The matriline of historical nobility was also called her or his enatic or uterine ancestry (corresponding to the patrilineal "agnatic" ancestry).
Family Relationships
Algorithms can find all family relationships. Data structure represents a genealogy or genealogies as a stand-alone date structure. Genealogy is considered as a finite, connected graph that enables storage of the minimum of family relationships and recognition of them and others like 'ancestor-descendant', 'sibs', 'twins', 'cousins', 'uncle/aunt-nephew/niece' or 'spouses'. Algorithms for genealogy retrieval are classified as vertical, lateral and parallel. In certain combinations, vertical and lateral algorithms become capable of finding any relatives, no matter if they are in a direct 'ancestor-descendant' relationship or if they have only the same ancestor(s). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8366693
Like miners for meaning we tunnel through our history encountering riches and danger below. But genealogy also has its own myths. As we proceed, we dig deeper into our multigenerational study. Like ancient navigators, we have to course correct along the way for errors, forgeries, and fictitious ancestors. Genealogy is not a mash-up of metaphysical percepts, concepts, and pareidolia. We begin with percepts (i.e. the senses, from which we initially
know reality), not concepts (i.e. what we imagine the world to be or, commonly, wish it would become).
Re-Cording the Ties that Bind
Genealogy directly manifests the psyche as a transpersonal field that informs our personality and sustains us. Each ancestral couple embodies psychic polarities from exaltation to the conscious and unconscious suffering that brings positive developments such as enhanced empathy, wisdom, or spiritual development. Speaking of the opposites in his 1925 Seminar (p.85), Jung says, "Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death."
As we engage our ancestors we engage the numinous. We discover our mythic roots, the injured feminine, sacrifice, and other powerful archetypal forces of the cauldron of generativity -- the central theme of humanity. Sexuality, love, and spirituality play through the epic ancestral drama, uniting the opposites, again and again, shaping who we are and weaving patterns of conditioning and potential wholeness.
Genealogy can help us recapture that sense through creating a sacred space that allows us to reconnect in a direct way with our ancient past. Encounters with our ancestors, historical and imaginal, are encounters with soul. The imaginal becomes virtual and probabilistic vision. We don't need to split our subjective self from the the objective perception of the world. Perhaps "the view from death" enriches and enlarges the improbability of the gift of life. More than 10,000 ancestors are dreaming of you.
Feel It, Reveal It, Heal It
The emotional brain reacts the same way to objective or virtual information. In fact, the later may prompt a stronger brain response. Even when subliminal, the brain produces a global response to the unexpected, but it is more recognition than complex cognition. The neural correlates of conscious, global processing across the entire network are also generated during unconscious activity...even when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, leading to activity over the entire network. We can speculate that waves of virtual particles might indeed create real effects.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28444-leading-theory-of-consciousness-rocked-by-oddball-study/
Physics is finding that the arrow of time does not seem to follow the standard laws of physics. Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
The Crucible of Love
It is well-known to clergy and psychologists that on their deathbeds, people don't wish to discuss God or religion, but their own families. Many are not afraid to die but don't want to leave their living families. They speak and may even call out to their parents, their sons and daughters, or see lost spouses.
Or, we may call on our 'godparents,' those whom we've chosen as nurturing allies, known or unknown, for their inspiration and succor. Hillman noted as we become old we develop character which makes us fit ancestors and mentors. Soul's Code (1997)
We are born into and create our lives in families and families we create. This is where we find meaning, where our purpose becomes clear. There we experience love and first give it, and are hurt, betrayed, or rejected by caregivers and siblings. In this crucible of love we begin asking big spiritual questions to which we come back in the very end. Jung admonishes us, "My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart." (The Red Book, Page 232)
Those images in the conscious mirror reflect both the material and universal soul, our spiritual essence through a "sympathy," an intelligence of spirit that reflects the animation of the material world and the union of cosmic reality.
Some confess what it feels like to know that they neglected, criticized, abandoned, or engulfed and overwhelmed their children, or that drinking destroyed their family. They lament they were physically or psychologically abusive, or failed to care for those who most needed them. It isn't difficult to understand how such behavior leaves its mark on the future. All seem to know what is missing, and what was deserved by the innocent.
On their deathbeds, people often speak of the love they felt and gave away -- or didn't receive or give, or even known how to offer unconditionally. Love may be imperfect, emotionally unavailable, or entirely missing, or full of rage and trauma -- or uncertain and ambiguous. In the end the meaning of life is concerned only with love -- lost and found. Love is what matters -- perhaps the only thing that matters in the end.
We may hope we've had a gift to give. When the love is imperfect, or a family is destructive, forgiveness can be learned. Our spiritual work as human beings is learning how to love and how to forgive. Most have a simple wish that someone will remember them fondly and that they lived and loved fully, even if they know they have not.
But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart. The Egyptians had a ceremony for weighing the lightness of the heart against the weight of a feather of Ma'at for balance. Thought, memory, and emotion came from the heart. Today we speak of the neurological heart-brain and gut-brain. We might imagine weighing our own hearts for such psychic and emotional balance.
Exploring our family tree helps us explore the depths of love. We never say goodbye to those we hold in our hearts. If we listen with our heart, we make a mindful journey as we wend our way along. We won't know where it is leading. As in physics, the very act of our observation disturbs and alters the whole system through our participation.
Long buried issues come up, are unburied, challenge and lay claim to us somatically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. Many develop self-destructive biological processes or behaviors. We may need to reconnect with Death and our own death to reorient ourselves in life and find sanctuary. Doors are opened and closed by the mysterious spirit behind life and death.
Our dreams and the body will tell us. We may come to understand that fate itself rules and as we age we have to give up our own story, our merely personal history, to find peace. We find in some sense the end is in the beginning. Even death may need to feel our love. Death becomes our medicine.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the self-unfolding dynamics. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold generation after generation. It creates a wealth of energy that we find is a source of wisdom and containment. Inner guidance connects us with source. We awaken from our illusion of separateness by embracing our extended family.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children to the parents, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Spontaneous fantasies with all kinds of implications will naturally arise in the genealogical process. Jung notes that such play of ideas and impression can be purposeful and valuable. Hillman says we wrestle with our spirits at night.
"The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. (Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82).
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Such 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes a receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. In-between two physical systems, entrainment synchronizes one entity to vibrate in an identical way in metaphorical response to the Other.
"The Orphan" Soul
Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence -- the instinctual and the luminous. It may at first come as an emotional flooding or an inundation of fantasies before that massa confusa of primal material differentiates. We may experience loss and grief that things haven't worked out as we might have hoped. Powerful events can triggers such feelings.
It evokes an image of the archetypal "orphan soul" sought by alchemists to create the Philosopher's Stone. Secret fire is the "leaded" fuel that cooks under the surface from the "heat" of awareness -- that cooks it into conscious experience. This calcination is Stage 1 of our spiritual alchemy, which is followed by dissolution (solutio) and separation (coagulatio).
We begin in a state of disintegration, of insensibility, and gradually reach greater awareness. We all have a bit of the disillusioned orphan in us. Some have living parents who were never available or are now emotionally unavailable. We may be alienated but long to belong or connect in a meaningful way. Perhaps we resonate with other orphans in our lines.
The experience of "adult orphans" is often underplayed as we consider the death of our parents 'normal' in adulthood, but it is a condition worthy of attention, and genealogy is one way to address it, to deepen it, to deal with abandonment and loss. Jung says, "When one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guide."
This is no seance, spiritualism, hallucination, or lunacy, and should not be approached as such. It is not supernatural. This is an involuntary flood of charged emotions arising from the unconscious. Often double binds and hyperarousal lead to emotional flooding -- that ocean of emotion. Much of the trauma is held in the body in structure, soft tissue, and symptoms.
It's All Relative
For example, we may have internalized the traits of one parent, as well as the other parent's loathing of those qualities. If you are overloaded you may feel swamped. You may dream of tsunamis. Such feelings are linked to helplessness, frustration, anger, feeling trapped, remorse, guilt, and self-hate.
Orphans have to learn to not be loyal to their suffering, the abandonment, trauma, and betrayal. But we must be willing to accept our grief and loneliness and let go. It's not just your pain or hurt, but the hurt of humanity in this vastness. We can learn mercy and forgiveness, within our Tree and for ourselves. We may transform from hating and being incensed, to the sweet fragrance of an incense tree that perfumes our sacred space.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. We can view it as an acronym for "pay attention; integrate now." When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children of the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but if we don't have an urn, we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead. We may house skeletons in the basement of our subconscious.
Even grieving can be a sacred space -- a Grail space where magic can happen. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness, a depression.
We can learn self-compassion to carry our pain more graciously. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process and sea of people.
We are never experts in this task, as Confucious reminds us: "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." In 2009, China acknowledged a new Confucianism by publishing the genealogy of the 800-year-old Kong family on a computer database at China's National Library in Beijing.
China is trying to revive its traditional culture, including genealogy. "The Chinese have always been interested in their past -- worship of ancestors is worship of origins." (Heinz 1999:225). Kong Ming, a 33-year-old businessman from Shanghai, began researching his family in 1998. His elderly grandfather dug up the coffin in which he had hidden the family records to escape persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Heinz, Carolyn Brown, Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, Inc., 1999).
Tian, commonly translated as Heaven or Sky, but philologically meaning the Great One, the Great Whole, is a key concept in Confucianism. "Forming one body with the universe" is a neo-Confucian ideal. As we work, formlessness congeals into form. We arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world."
In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. Our personal family tree merges with the collective World Tree. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has no telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
Pleroma
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..." Jung's plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. Space isn't an empty vacuum but characterized as a fullness and creative flow.
Science tells us the ultimate state of rest is the virtual vacuum of absolute space, the Zero Point, zero-phase geometry. It is the groundstate of being and has been likened to the Akashic Field and universal memory by Ervin Lazlo (2007).
This subquantum coherent field is pure information. Rather than linear lines of ancestors, we might think of them metaphorically as superpositions of our deep ancestry -- a superwave "reaching over" with interference peaks, information states with entangled and partly coherent stimulated emissions.
Jung called it the Pleroma, after the Gnostics. The non-dual is beyond all distinctions, a field that is the only reality. "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness." In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. There is no one in it because they would be differentiated from the Pleroma, according to the Red Book. We must watch out for what we believe, but we can entertain many notions.
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there.
An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey.
Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into historical amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects up- and down-regulation of gene expression and disease development.
Upregulation and downregulation can also happen as a response to toxins or hormones. An example of upregulation in pregnancy is hormones that cause cells in the uterus to become more sensitive to oxytocin.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Because the brain accepts the imaginal as real, changes take place at a physical and mental level. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. We remember the past but not the future because of a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
10,000 Paths to the Passed
Each of our ancestors is a gate to our Inner Sanctum, to the wonder-world of our soul. Genealogy is the relational mode of understanding. The tale of our genesis is our prima materia (cosmic egg, oroboros) and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Like the oroboros serpent we recursively turn back toward our origins.
We must incorporate symbolic relationships. The basic alchemical sequence begins with a male and female soror mystica) sealing the prima materia (original substance; sea, darkness, void) into a vessel -- in this case the family tree. Here we can gently 'cook' our existential woes: rootlessness, anxiety, fear, pain, emptiness, discontent, and despair.
The retort of genealogy gives new meaning to the notion that "like cures like." We fill the retort with our ancestors' names, seal them with documentation, and fire up the slow burning oven of integration. With reflection on the wounds therein we remember past traumas and give voice to feelings previously inexpressible in metaphorical language.
We cling to our surface story and impressions as we bunge jump down our lines of descent. As we work, the House of our Flesh becomes a high tempered glass house, transparent to transcendence. Their breath is our breath, including aspirations and A-ha moments that enliven the experience within.
We have no choice but to live through unendurable times in our lives that nearly break us. Our dreams and their life stories will indicate if the hot fires of an initiatory
experience are to be. Psyche leads us through the labyrinth with her dim light.
In the beginning everything is chaotic, fluid, co-mingled, and undifferentiated. The chaos hides the Stone, contains it, yet is it, but hidden by our inability to see it. Its metaphorical names include quicksilver, shadow, water of life, dragon, and poison of the contaminated opposites. The problems that block us are like the brick walls in our pedigree.
The shadow that plagues us is an undead zombie -- not just a historical profile wrongly marked as living. This is the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, made mute and will-less, by a seemingly supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose.
We must endure and endure with devotion, dissolving defenses with emotional congruence to illuminate our undiscovered inner life, clarifying the step-by-step process. In the stillness we feel what needs attention. As the opposites co-mingle through the centuries, it changes our life potential.
We must be patient, humble, and loving with this work. We must handle the tension of not-knowing, of ambiguity, of caring for the unloved, rejected, and forgotten. Our first attempts to extract the gold from the unrefined narrative may be difficult. It is a long journey, sorting through undifferentiated hurt feelings, anger, traumatic reactions, fear, depressed moods, and restlessness, back to find our first royal marriage. Symptoms become patterns.
Its alchemical symbol is a 3-headed serpent or dragon, of Sulpher, Mercury, and Salt. This represents the dance of Sun and Moon, King and Queen, the archetypal superpatterns of male and female, and their material offspring. We spring from the soul and remain the child of our ancestors.
In every adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. -C. G. Jung CW 17: 286
First matter gives universe its properties. It organizes into the Elements, (fire, water, air, and earth), which are the building blocks of words, thought-ideas or archetypes. It is liminal, between manifest and unmanifest. It is the spiritualized essence or soul of substance: identity, form, and function oscillating between creation and destruction.
We must go a bit deeper and realize that with the instinct of creation is always connected a destructive something; the creation in its own essence is also destructive. You see that quite clearly in the moment when you check the creative impulse; nothing is more poisonous to the nervous system than a disregarded or checked creative impulse. It even destroys people's organic health. It is dangerous because there is that extraordinary destructive quality in the creative thing. Just because it is the deepest instinct, the deeper power in man, a power which is beyond conscious control, and because it is on the other side the function which creates the greatest value, it is most dangerous to interfere with it.
(Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 654).
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560).
"The transformation of Mercurius, as prima materia, in the heated, sealed vessel is comparable to cooking the basic instinctive drives in their own affect until their essential fantasy content becomes conscious."
“Instead of arguing with the drives which carry us away, we prefer to cook them and . ask then what they want. . . . That can be discovered by active imagination, or through experimenting in reality, but always with the introverted attitude of observing objectively what the drive really wants.” (Marie von Franz, Alchemy, p. 129)
It is often suggested the prima materia is found in "feces" or lead which is alchemical code for matter or the physical body and what gets shoved down into the unconscious. The first matter is cyclic, contains all the elements, and is the source of the Philosopher's Stone -- the egg or light of Nature; Anima Mundi or Soul of the World.
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. Emotions are part of the reasoning process itself -- bodily intelligence.
This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for the treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation & Suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role.
Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetic inheritance is constantly remodeled and demonstrates that our parents' trauma and family secrets are passed along. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Traumas are events that induce intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state in PTSD. Trigger a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system under-regulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites.
To be whole is to be full of contradictions. The unity never becomes apparent because the opposites within us operate and mingle in various ways and it is their interaction that makes the whole man. The complete human being, the hermaphrodite, is never visible. He is indescribable, always a mystical experience. (Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung - Ostrowski,)
So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
Serpent's Breath
The serpent in that Tree is its numinous voice, with its active dynamic kundalini -- the Serpent Power, the Secret Fire, the life force or basic animating principle -- the quintessence of matter. Never calling it evil, Genesis 3:1 says, "Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."
Our serpentine lines of ancestral descent recursively bite their own tails in the primordial archetype of the Orobouros. “"All human things are a circle” was inscribed on the temple at Athens.
The Hermetic "Holy Grail" was a circular crater or bowl of regeneration described in the fourth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. It was a font of immersion symbolizing the constant decay and renewal of all things, present in all Nature. The genealogical Holy Grail is found in royal lines that include the Arthurian legends then trace back to roots in various gods and goddesses.
For the gods, time is primordial and unstructured; for mankind it is historical and linear. In the unconscious if there is any notion of time at all, it is circular, arranging events so they return eternally and can be re-entered through myth, symbol, and ritual with no distinction between self and environment.
Grail symbolism encompasses the womb that always makes children, the horn and cup that serve drink, and the cauldron and bowl that give food. The quest for the Grail comes from these primal facts of life.
The holy bowl -- the cranium, where heaven meets earth -- is where individual souls mix with universal mind in a metaphor of immersive experience, The immersive baptism of wisdom or gnosis means 'living water' that springs up in creativity and illumination -- "the drink of the soul by the sweet stream of wisdom (Sophia)."
What Are They Remembering For Us?
Our history is our collective transgenerational memory. No people can successfully live outside of their memory. Jung tells us that, "Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force." (MDR, Page 277). The past plays one of the most critical roles in Western civilization. but it is so embedded, so obvious that it becomes invisible. The past remains with us as experiences change sperm and eggs.
Genes aren't the cause of most disease; the cause of most disease alters genetic expression. Epigenetics is revealing the biological transmission of molecular memory -- that we can pass down altered responses, emotional trauma, agitated nervous systems, under-regulated immune systems, chronic over-inflammation, and somatic disorders.
Biological Legacy
Ancestral behavior can also mutate single genes. Everybody has a different level of tolerance for alcohol, but some people act very strangely, exhibiting reckless, impulsive, violent, or even dangerous behavior on alcohol. Finnish researchers found that a fairly common mutation in serotonin 2B receptor gene can render some prone to impulsive behavior by nature, sober or under the influence of alcohol. They struggle with self-control or mood disorders.
“One of our main findings was that the HTR2B Q20* predicted alcohol-related risk-behaviors. The HTR2B Q20* carriers demonstrated aggressive out-bursts, got into fights and behaved in an impulsive manner under the influence of alcohol. They were also arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol more often than the controls."
“The HTR2B Q20* carriers were not alcoholics per se, as measured by average alcohol consumption, and were not diagnosed as alcoholics, but they had a tendency to lose behavioral control while under the influence of alcohol.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/common-genetic-mutation-linked-to-reckless-drunken-behaviour?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore
All cells have a genetic code with information to produce certain proteins to carry out vital processes. Chemical switches can turn genes on or off, or crank them up or down, so the cells know which proteins to produce and in what quantities. These switches or epigenetic tags are altered by environment, bad habits, and experience, passed on to their offspring, and their offspring's offspring.
Sperm and eggs carry genetic memories of parents' health well before conception. Even what grandparents ate and the father's behavior long before conception can influence the child's health in a range from mood disorders to mental illness. They inherit parents' psychic burdens, anxiety, low impulse control. Older people can unconsciously externalizes their traumatized self onto a developing child’s personality. The physical transmission of the horrors of the past is “embodied history.”
Transgenerational trauma is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors by complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Epigenetics changes the way instructions in the genetic code were translated and carried out by the body.
We are more than our transgenerational wounds. Our essence transcends our identification with history. In healing we are not alone, we trust a path to greater freedom, and feel our relationship to the suffering of our family lineage. We feel lighter when we release the burdens of our own trauma or family history. We can make wider choices and expand our sense of belonging in the world.
The Spent Breath of Millions
We all carry and relive the primordial psyche which is reliving the soul of our ancestors. They may be gone, but primordial psyche remains alive within us, and available for interaction. Some live closer to it than others, but we all have creative, rational, and intuitive faculties. These are rooted in this primordial ground, an unalterable level of creative imagination, primordial unity, and instinctive participation mystique. As Jung says, "But in these days we live by our brains alone and ignore the very definite laws of our body and the instinctive world." (Letters Vol. II, Page 567)
Perhaps the ancestors inform us in their own way. Intuition is information that is received by the mind. But for that information to be useful, it must be analyzed and purposefully acted upon. When integrated we act on those intuitive impulses with wise judgment and confidence. Creative ideas then take shape in manifest form.
Primordial Psyche
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession. But they also have complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns we can discern. This is the realm of the imaginal -- primordial images or instinctual energy which nevertheless have objective cascading effects.
Multifractals are more highly advanced mathematical structures: fractals of fractals. They arise from fractals 'interwoven' with each other in an appropriate manner and in appropriate proportions. Multifractals are not simply the sum of fractals and cannot be divided to return back to their original components, because the way they weave is fractal in nature. The result is that in order to see a structure similar to the original, different portions of a multifractal need to expand at different rates. A multifractal is therefore non-linear in nature.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160121110913.htm
We consciously and unconsciously mourn the loss of the sacred in our lives to the abyss of evolution and our primordial relationship with Mother Earth. We've forgotten our connection to the dark animal orobouric Great Mother. Mother Nature may be the oldest motif but it is the underlying pattern of symbol-formation that is inherited.
Archetypes & Instincts
That something missing in the lives of so many people isn't found in another's form, it's found in the dark of the unconscious. In Jungian thought, when we search for our "other half" and perhaps for our ancestors, too, we actually seek the integration of the elements of the unconscious psyche. “It is always important to have something to bring into a relationship, and solitude is often the means by which you acquire it” (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 610, Letters Vol. II.)
As Jung notes, "Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of nature and is connected to his own roots." (Symbols of Transformation, Page 23).
If I speak of the collective unconscious I don't assume it as a principle, I only give a name to the totality of observable facts, i.e., archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 567
The main difficulty here is that the eternal ideas have been dragged down from their "supracelestial place" into the biological sphere, and this is somewhat confusing for the trained philosopher and may even come to him as a shock. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
The Platonic "Idea" is in this case no longer intellectual but a psychic, instinctual pattern. Instinctual patterns can be found in human beings too. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 559-560
"Self-reflection, or - what comes to the same thing - the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." ("Transformation Symbolism in the Mass", CW 11, para. 401).
Inherent Nature of Man
Jung thought the "primordial images" are those expressed in the earliest life-history of the human species. They grow out of the rudimentary nature of the psyche in its pre-conscious form. These basic layers of the psyche spontaneously recur in modern psychic phenomena in ever-new forms that vary around certain deeply rooted motifs at the base of consciousness. The generic structural nature of the psyche is unrestricted to collective or group phenomena.
Water is the cosmogonic element by which the self sinks into involuntary immersion in the dimensional abysses. Our pre-historical ancestors have sunk in the Atlantis of the waters of the unconscious. This may be more than symbolic as we now know humanity has gone through a few local and global catastrophic events.
Supervolcanoes, repeated glaciation, meteor, and comet falls, massive sea-rise, and climate change are only preserved in myth and legend, leading to speculation that we have a species-wide amnesia. We have only recently found that our genome contains contributions from at least three other species -- Neanderthal, Denisovan, and another as-yet-unknown hominid.
Life is a thread interwoven with hidden archetypes which remain entangled in our eternal present. We're already in our phenomenological graves. If we can embrace the ancient soul of our ancestors soulfully and creatively, we may engage and fall in love with the sacred again. Elemental wisdom is recognizing patterns in life.
In our own genealogy, we begin to reveal a pattern in which we can locate a felt sense of understanding, a resonance that speaks to us within a myth or traces the path of a wounding through therapy. We can followed the thread of understanding using dreamwork, ritual, or other depth psychological methods, or experience the numinous on some unalterable level that changes us forever.
Genealogy can be our approach and return to the sacred. To understand the living we commune with the dead. We approach the phenomena of the psyche as we do the phenomena of nature. We've unwittingly buried with our ancestors any symbolic or revelatory meaning that would otherwise push its way through from the unconscious.
Modern life has short-circuited our connection with the primeval unconscious resulting in an intolerable rift -- psychic dissociation. This division separates us from the sacred, limiting our capacity to navigate divine corridors of the numinous, relegating us to lives of estrangement, isolation, and alienation.
Potentiality of Meaning
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth.
Genealogy becomes our altar to the sacred -- to the Great
Mystery that surrounds ideas of primordial mind, ancestral and shamanic wisdom, visionary transpersonal experiences, and other numinosum. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to our ancestry, wholeness (Self as supra-personal human wholeness), and deep history. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood.
Information Storage & Retrieval
Akash and the Akashic Records have been linked to primordial informational fields. Even Tesla says, “All perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.” (Man’s Greatest Achievement, 1907)
Radical new proposals from physics are arising for vectors of information. Ervin Laszlo has linked it with psi phenomena and an integral theory recognizing the self-organizing interconnection of all things. He bootstraps from the Sanskrit, calling non-local interaction the Akasha Paradigm -- an entangled self-actualizing cosmos not limited to the here and now. We can connect and feel into each other. Laszlo shows the cosmos of the Akasha to be a self-actualizing, self-organizing whole. Each part is in coherence with all others and all parts together create the conditions for the emergence of life and consciousness. (2007; 2014).
http://manifestdestinytriforce.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-akashic-records-what-are-they-do.html
Igor V. Limar (2012) proposes linking synchronicity, correlated mental processes, and quantum entanglement. Mental processes of two different persons correlate not just when the subjects are located at a distance from each other, but also when both persons are alternately (and sequentially, one after the other) located in the same point of space. In this case, there is a time gap between manifestation of mental process in one person and manifestation of mental process in the other person.
NeuroQuantology, Sept. 2012, Vol. 10, Issue 3, Page 489-491.
"A Version of Jung’s Synchronicity in the Event of Correlation of Mental Processes in the Past and the Future: Possible Role of Quantum Entanglement in Quantum Vacuum"
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/477/535
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We acquire depth in our attempts to heal ourselves. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets.
Jung spoke of it poetically, "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." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Descent seems to be very steep and dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well trodden path and there are many safeguards. You feel safe because many thousands have gone that way already. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped down, so it has a slippery surface, and one finds parts of wrecked cars and trousers and shoes and skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 93.)
Jung describes how such imagery relates to visions, which only become clear when you look into your heart:
This is very typical of the beginning of visions: it begins at the bottom, as it were, as if the whole world had to be built anew, or as if nothing had ever happened before; and then it carries the thought through until it reaches the stage that is not yet and that never has been: it reaches the future.
It is often as if such a series covered the whole way, as if each series extended from hell to heaven, from the beginning to the end, as if it ware a complete cycle more or less clearly formulated.
Conspectu Mortis
In the beginning the future stage is rather dimly characterized, then later it becomes more and more clear, and the beginning gets blurred. This is a general characteristic of such visions. (Visions Seminar, Page 142)
Today to bring up the inferior function is to live, but we pay dearly for it both in mistakes and in energy. Sometimes it is not our choice—the inferior function takes us unawares.
~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74
If you leave all your energy and will in the superior function you slowly go to hell—it sucks you dry. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 74
What we need is our Great Work, not just mundane work. Jung is making an analogy between the mental archetypes of light being opposite darkness, not a literal Heaven and Hell.
The three days descent into Hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. ~Jung, Liber Novus, Fn. 135, Page 243.
"The common ideal of today is work at all costs, but many people simply work and do not live.
We cannot depreciate the ideal of work, but we can understand that it is valueless when it divorces one from life." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 73
Descent as an archetype of the Way, is a harbinger of a transpersonal future, pre-figuring spiritual development. "No one saves us from the evil of becoming, unless we choose to go through Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 318.) "I used the same technique [Active Imagination] of the descent, but this time I went much deeper. The first time I should say I reached a depth of about one thousand feet, but this time it was a cosmic depth." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 68.
Internal and Infernal
He also remarks, "the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 315). "When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table." (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244). The spirit of the depths is pregnant with ice, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Generational Archetypes
Everything we do starts with feeling and feeling starts in the family. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe created the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It identifies a recurring generational cycle in the last five centuries of Anglo-American history. It can be explained by four generational archetypes that repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern every 80-100 years. This is the unfixed length of a long human life the ancients called a “saeculum," which can be divided into four "seasons" of approximately 22 years each; these seasons represent youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.
Basically, this sociological generational theory describes how the era a person was born into affects the development of their view of the world. Our value systems are shaped in the first decade or so of our lives, by our families, our friends, our communities, significant events and the general era in which we are born.
All cultures are shared unconscious fantasies about how to live life. Traditional cultures viewed time as cyclical, much as the waxing and waning of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, the birth and death of living creatures, the planting and harvesting of crops, and the seasons of the year. The idea of sacred time as an eternal round and the symbol of the ring or wheel are cross-cultural symbols. There is a repeating cycle in historical generational values. Each 20-year long generation faces similar issues and experiences.
http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
Beyond the modern pop nomenclature of Greatest Generation, Boomers, and Gens X, Y, Millennials, and Post-Millennials ("Homeland Generation"), their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, expands the theory focusing on a pulsating fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history. Graeme Codrington summarizes the repeating cycle.
Social Cycle Theory
[Each] 80 year period of human history, we start with a crisis period, when society has to stop and deal with an issue that actually changes institutions and structures. Children born during such a time grow up to be like the Silent generation of today. This is followed by an outer directed and driven period of rebuilding, with grand visions and big dreams, giving rise to a Boomer-like generation. This idealistic world cannot be sustained, however, and a period of disillusionment and breaking down follows, with society being reconfigured and adjusted. The children of this era grow up to be like Generation X is today. This era is followed by an inner-directed era, where leaders, institutions and society itself focuses on consolidating and building new foundations, rebuilding institutions and protecting the young. This era gives rise to the type of people who are from the GI generation and the Millennial generation today. Finally, this inner-directed focus cannot be maintained, and a crisis occurs, sparking a new cycle.
If this is correct, then generational theorists are expecting a major crisis to hit global society in the next few years. This is something that will cause society to stop, reconsider and reconstitute itself. http://www.tomorrowtoday.uk.com/articles/article001_intro_gens.htm
While they focus on the history of the United States, including the Colonial era and British antecedents, they also find similar generational trends around the globe from the late Medieval period. They have defined generational archetypes in cohort groups that express the zeitgeist of their times. While such attributions are arguable they can provide a touchstone for certain eras and their collective culture.
http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/generational-archetypes.html
They group four generations into a series of 80-year cyclic 'turnings' that include an initial 'high', followed by 'awakening,' unraveling,' and 'crisis.' Their archetypes include 'prophet,' 'nomad,' 'hero,' and 'artist' generations. We can think of such themes as collective dreams. Repeating cycles are a common theme for both individuals and whole generations.
As is the generation of leaves, so to of men:
At one time the wind shakes the leaves to the ground
but then the flourishing woods
Gives birth, and the season of spring comes
into existence;
So it is with the generations of men, which
alternately come forth and pass away.
– Homer, The Illiad, Book Six
We might benefit from the generational method in formulating our own Big Picture, as well as broad-stroke insights for our own generation within the pattern. The theory contends that each new generation entering a specific lifestage will redefine that lifestage and change it either subtly or dramatically. As generations clash there is a collision of values, expectations, ambitions, attitudes and behaviors -- the generation gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
Self-Generating Creativity
Prima materia is the "beginning of all," "the abyss," the primary chaotic earth, or principle of existence in general. In his 1941 ETH lecture, Jung describes how many philosophers have sought information about the prima materia from inhabitants of Hades, or in the "habitation of souls." This is the realm of psychic dark matter, what is hidden from view.
This "land of the dead" is also known as "the egg," "Adam's Earth," "Mercurial serpent," "winged dragon," and the "entrance to the West,” "the root of itself," the dark sky of night, the non-created, or eternity. Or, as Jung states, in Liber Novus, "Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of." (Page 244).
Prima materia is also called a neglected, rejected, and abandoned "orphan." The original "chaos" or "sea" constitutes all matter. Such self-organizing complexity is the beginning and end of transformation and renewal. This is the creative process Jung spoke about.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life (CW 15, P. 82)
Edinger (1978) compares the problem of discovering the prima materia to the problem of finding what to work on in psychotherapy. He gives some hints:
(1) It is ubiquitous, to be found everywhere, before the eyes of all. This means that psychotherapeutic material likewise is everywhere, in all the ordinary, everyday occurrences of life. Moods and petty personal reactions of all kinds are suitable matter to be worked on by the therapeutic process.
(2) Although of great inward value, the primal materia is vile in outer appearance and therefore despised, rejected or thrown on the dung heap. The prima materia is treated like the suffering servant in Isaiah. Psychologically, this means that the primal materia is found in the shadow, that part of the personality which is considered most despicable. Those aspects of ourselves most painful and most humiliating are the very ones to be brought forward and worked on.
(3) It appears as multiplicity, "has as many names as there are things," but at the same time is one. This feature corresponds to the fact that initially psychotherapy makes one aware of his/her fragmented, disjointed condition. Very gradually these warring fragments are discovered to be differing aspects of ones underlying unity. It is as though one sees the fingers of a hand touching a table at first only in two dimensions, as separate unconnected fingers. With three-dimensional vision, the fingers are seen as part of a larger unity, the hand.
(4) The prima materia is undifferentiated, without definite boundaries, limits or form. This corresponds to a certain experience of the unconscious which exposes the ego to the infinite. ...It may evoke the terror of dissolution or the awe of eternity. It provides a glimpse of the pleroma. ...the chaos prior to the operation of the World-creating Logos. It is the fear of the boundless that often leads one to be content with the ego-limits he has rather than risk falling into the infinite by attempting to enlarge them.
The different operations to transform the prima materia follow as the natural consequences of finding the material to work on. The imagery associated with these operations is profuse and draws from ancestors (genetic memory), myth, religion and folklore. The symbols for all these imagery-systems comes from the collective unconscious.
Dying to be Heard
Jung implies we cannot get rid of the unconscious and its intuitions, which are rooted in our instinctual, reflexive, and parasympathic systems. But we can go from being 'herd' to being heard. We can engage in intentional multisensory dialogue with our depths. It arises from the primordial ground of the subquantal level of every quantum particle of our being. Jung likened Hades to a black hole without an outlet.
When we enter our genealogy we enter the realm of the dead, so we must find a way to reconcile that metaphor and our surrender to the process. Jung cautions, "Under certain conditions living people can descend into Hades, but it does not agree with them. One must really be dead to go there, for it is the dark land where the dead are imprisoned; and this is a place from which this marvellous substance comes." (ETH, Pages 215-223.)
In Arcadia, the ancients sought out the Necromanteion or "Oracle of Death" where they communed with their dead ancestors in a psychoactive ritual. Though there were many oracles of the dead, the Necromanteion of Ephyra was the most important. Herodotus recounts that Periander, sent emissaries in the 6th century BC to ask questions of his dead wife, Melissa. In his nekyia, Odysseus enters Hades through the Necromanteion.
We can listen to the voice that has no words --the voice of the silence. We're all connected via the interactive sea of energy that connects us to everyone and everything in our world. It seems Hades presides over our descents and perhaps our descendancy. According to Jung, "To journey to Hell means to become Hell oneself. It is all frightfully muddled and interwoven." (Liber Novus, Page 240.)
Caves always had their own gods. The underworld with its narrow jagged gaps is essential to many spiritual worldviews. We can imagine that a notion of hell arose early in mankind's emerging consciousness somewhere between the darkness of imagination and physical mazes of deep caverns that seem like uterine spaces or living, breathing internal cavities that snake for miles. Caves -- the original temples -- were worshipped and feared as the center of the earth with miles of crumbling tunnels and steep precipitous drop offs multiple-stories deep.
Mankind has journeyed deep into them and used these dark and treacherous labyrinths that tortured and twisting passages with seemingly bottomless pits, to live, to hide, to explore, and to worship with pilgrimage, art, and rituals. But all who descend into the underworld do so at their own risk. Initiatory passageways and vertical shafts have dangerous hand and footholds etched in lava and ice, and studded with magical curtains, spires, crystals and inscriptions.
In some sense, hell was our ancient dwelling place to which we returned upon death -- a metaphorical regression to the primal epoch. With its flickering fires, smoky caverns, and hidden dangers the cave gave rise to mythic and archetypal recollections and dreams of ancestral spirits. The dreamworld became a stone cold abyss and the primordial underworld was born.
The first proto-images appeared in cave art. Men and women impulsively desired to participate in the potential transforming powers of the "insides." Hades, the devouring one, could be contacted in the dark cavern of fathomless psychic force. The dismal labyrinthine complexity gave rise to the original trope. The soul is within, below, buried deep in self as within earth itself. This is the archetypal sleepworld of Hypnos and Thanatos.
If we accept that death is not the enemy but a doorway we can rest naturally in what is. The great invitation is to accept death. Lao Tzu invites us to give up the fight against death so existence is revealed as sublime relaxation. Each moment becomes a surrender, one of ‘touch and let go.’ We must not hide, but rather be open to all aspects of being. In sublime relaxation, shadow issues can emerge, some even hidden by our nondual language and cliches. All is grist for death’s mill.
In archetypal psychology, soul remains close to death -- disease, disorder, collapse. We die to the literal and concrete world of the senses for the sake of soul. Hillman imagined Hades right alongside daily life, the invisible made visible in psychic events, soul process, and revelatory meaning. It is the gaps between breaths. The dreamworld is also the underworld of Hades. From Hades perspective we are our images. By "letting be," we can allow dream images to speak for themselves, rather than forcing them toward interpretations for mundane life.
The underworld is the primal void -- the prima materia. Underworld is psyche. It is not a place but a hidden domain of liminal experience -- a dimension not available in itself. Our concern with Hades here regarding our ancestors is the spontaneous image-making of the soul. The 'ground' is a fathomless depth.
We experience dread and resistance when we delve too deeply inside ourselves -- this is the devouring darkness of death and desolation before rebirth. Death is at the heart of alchemy. We can understand the "death experience" metaphorically and psychologically, but we still must all confront it with naked awareness without the symbols and images born of nature's own workings.
Some families never forget who they are, while others struggle with a few fragments that don't seem to fit together. Either way it's a puzzle with some missing or damaged pieces. We must keep the big picture in mind to understand the smaller parts. We all have the ability to recognize and seize the deep sense of mystery that lives in our own lives.
Undoubtedly, there is a sacred dimension to the genealogical process, more so when we do the work ourselves. In our first attempts we cross the threshold of initiation. Jung suggests, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation." (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188.)
"From the middle of life, only he who is willing to die with life remains living. Since what takes place in the secret hour of life's midday is the reversal of the parabola, the birth of death ..." ~Carl Jung; Soul and death, CW 8, §800.
History, Memories, Stories
With genealogy we dig below the basement of our personal unconscious to find what lies below that still haunts or calls for us. What has been buried in the past yet is not gone nor dormant because it is part of the our psychophysical being. Our adaptive survival styles can distort identity in adult life.
To reclaim our ancestral soul we suffer through the anguish of the unknown as well as the burdens of what we do find from which we wished to protect ourselves. There is shock trauma and developmental trauma. We find things that are great and things that are tragic. Genealogy gives and it takes.
The Trail That Never Ends
Such discoveries have been popularized by media: “Finding Your Roots”‘, "Who Do You Think You Are", “Roots of Faith Ancestry”, "Genealogy Roadshow", and others. Genealogy is touted as the second biggest hobby in America. People want to reconnect with their ancestral homeland to know where and how they lived. http://b.treelines.com/in-defense-of-genealogy-as-a-hobby/
Finding Yourself
Many feel compelled to take on the project. Online genealogy sites are some of the most popular on the web. It's a thrill extending the family heritage back a few more generations or discovering that your family is related to royalty, or allegedly to the legends of history. The progenitor of the clan lies at the root of the male line.
Bi-Lateral Descent
Our own bi-lateral descent includes both of our parents. But each female in our direct descent has her own bi-lateral lines, as well. We honor not only our paternal surname (patrilineal descent), but all those grandmothers whose families keep our lines invigorated with new blood.
New surnames enter the tree with each wife. These are not easy lines to follow, retrieve, or draw without the aid of computers. Maiden names often present brick walls difficult to push beyond. Pedigrees show both family-as-child and their families-as-parent.
Algorithm Genealogy
Rather than mere family trees, massive genealogical sites with billions of records have been likened to Amazonian forests of family connections of blood ties and marriage bridges. Genealogists who explore the family tree information, weeding out false or duplicate information, call themselves "forest rangers." When genealogies were digitally archived it became possible for algorithms to find lines of descent that included both male and female progenitors.
Thus, genealogy reclaimed the realm of the Mothers -- a return of the Feminine to genealogy where female lines are equally valued. Algorithm genealogy finds paths of mixed fathers and mothers to particular ancestors that might not otherwise be discernible. This is particularly so for ancient and legendary ancestors. Usually, the term “Descents from Antiquity” refers to modern efforts to find plausible lines of descent. However, it can also include traditional descents that have varying degrees of reliability.
Matrilineal descent is called a "mother line". An individual is considered to belong to the same descent group as her or his mother. The matriline of historical nobility was also called her or his enatic or uterine ancestry (corresponding to the patrilineal "agnatic" ancestry).
Family Relationships
Algorithms can find all family relationships. Data structure represents a genealogy or genealogies as a stand-alone date structure. Genealogy is considered as a finite, connected graph that enables storage of the minimum of family relationships and recognition of them and others like 'ancestor-descendant', 'sibs', 'twins', 'cousins', 'uncle/aunt-nephew/niece' or 'spouses'. Algorithms for genealogy retrieval are classified as vertical, lateral and parallel. In certain combinations, vertical and lateral algorithms become capable of finding any relatives, no matter if they are in a direct 'ancestor-descendant' relationship or if they have only the same ancestor(s). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8366693
Like miners for meaning we tunnel through our history encountering riches and danger below. But genealogy also has its own myths. As we proceed, we dig deeper into our multigenerational study. Like ancient navigators, we have to course correct along the way for errors, forgeries, and fictitious ancestors. Genealogy is not a mash-up of metaphysical percepts, concepts, and pareidolia. We begin with percepts (i.e. the senses, from which we initially
know reality), not concepts (i.e. what we imagine the world to be or, commonly, wish it would become).
Re-Cording the Ties that Bind
Genealogy directly manifests the psyche as a transpersonal field that informs our personality and sustains us. Each ancestral couple embodies psychic polarities from exaltation to the conscious and unconscious suffering that brings positive developments such as enhanced empathy, wisdom, or spiritual development. Speaking of the opposites in his 1925 Seminar (p.85), Jung says, "Life is never so beautiful as when surrounded by death."
As we engage our ancestors we engage the numinous. We discover our mythic roots, the injured feminine, sacrifice, and other powerful archetypal forces of the cauldron of generativity -- the central theme of humanity. Sexuality, love, and spirituality play through the epic ancestral drama, uniting the opposites, again and again, shaping who we are and weaving patterns of conditioning and potential wholeness.
Genealogy can help us recapture that sense through creating a sacred space that allows us to reconnect in a direct way with our ancient past. Encounters with our ancestors, historical and imaginal, are encounters with soul. The imaginal becomes virtual and probabilistic vision. We don't need to split our subjective self from the the objective perception of the world. Perhaps "the view from death" enriches and enlarges the improbability of the gift of life. More than 10,000 ancestors are dreaming of you.
Feel It, Reveal It, Heal It
The emotional brain reacts the same way to objective or virtual information. In fact, the later may prompt a stronger brain response. Even when subliminal, the brain produces a global response to the unexpected, but it is more recognition than complex cognition. The neural correlates of conscious, global processing across the entire network are also generated during unconscious activity...even when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, leading to activity over the entire network. We can speculate that waves of virtual particles might indeed create real effects.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28444-leading-theory-of-consciousness-rocked-by-oddball-study/
Physics is finding that the arrow of time does not seem to follow the standard laws of physics. Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
The Crucible of Love
It is well-known to clergy and psychologists that on their deathbeds, people don't wish to discuss God or religion, but their own families. Many are not afraid to die but don't want to leave their living families. They speak and may even call out to their parents, their sons and daughters, or see lost spouses.
Or, we may call on our 'godparents,' those whom we've chosen as nurturing allies, known or unknown, for their inspiration and succor. Hillman noted as we become old we develop character which makes us fit ancestors and mentors. Soul's Code (1997)
We are born into and create our lives in families and families we create. This is where we find meaning, where our purpose becomes clear. There we experience love and first give it, and are hurt, betrayed, or rejected by caregivers and siblings. In this crucible of love we begin asking big spiritual questions to which we come back in the very end. Jung admonishes us, "My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart." (The Red Book, Page 232)
Those images in the conscious mirror reflect both the material and universal soul, our spiritual essence through a "sympathy," an intelligence of spirit that reflects the animation of the material world and the union of cosmic reality.
Some confess what it feels like to know that they neglected, criticized, abandoned, or engulfed and overwhelmed their children, or that drinking destroyed their family. They lament they were physically or psychologically abusive, or failed to care for those who most needed them. It isn't difficult to understand how such behavior leaves its mark on the future. All seem to know what is missing, and what was deserved by the innocent.
On their deathbeds, people often speak of the love they felt and gave away -- or didn't receive or give, or even known how to offer unconditionally. Love may be imperfect, emotionally unavailable, or entirely missing, or full of rage and trauma -- or uncertain and ambiguous. In the end the meaning of life is concerned only with love -- lost and found. Love is what matters -- perhaps the only thing that matters in the end.
We may hope we've had a gift to give. When the love is imperfect, or a family is destructive, forgiveness can be learned. Our spiritual work as human beings is learning how to love and how to forgive. Most have a simple wish that someone will remember them fondly and that they lived and loved fully, even if they know they have not.
But it's not about fixing, or making, or doing, but being in the presence of the Mystery into which we are born and to which we return with a fully open heart. The Egyptians had a ceremony for weighing the lightness of the heart against the weight of a feather of Ma'at for balance. Thought, memory, and emotion came from the heart. Today we speak of the neurological heart-brain and gut-brain. We might imagine weighing our own hearts for such psychic and emotional balance.
Exploring our family tree helps us explore the depths of love. We never say goodbye to those we hold in our hearts. If we listen with our heart, we make a mindful journey as we wend our way along. We won't know where it is leading. As in physics, the very act of our observation disturbs and alters the whole system through our participation.
Long buried issues come up, are unburied, challenge and lay claim to us somatically, emotionally, mentally, even spiritually. Many develop self-destructive biological processes or behaviors. We may need to reconnect with Death and our own death to reorient ourselves in life and find sanctuary. Doors are opened and closed by the mysterious spirit behind life and death.
Our dreams and the body will tell us. We may come to understand that fate itself rules and as we age we have to give up our own story, our merely personal history, to find peace. We find in some sense the end is in the beginning. Even death may need to feel our love. Death becomes our medicine.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the self-unfolding dynamics. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold generation after generation. It creates a wealth of energy that we find is a source of wisdom and containment. Inner guidance connects us with source. We awaken from our illusion of separateness by embracing our extended family.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children to the parents, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Spontaneous fantasies with all kinds of implications will naturally arise in the genealogical process. Jung notes that such play of ideas and impression can be purposeful and valuable. Hillman says we wrestle with our spirits at night.
"The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth. (Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82).
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Such 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes a receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. In-between two physical systems, entrainment synchronizes one entity to vibrate in an identical way in metaphorical response to the Other.
"The Orphan" Soul
Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence -- the instinctual and the luminous. It may at first come as an emotional flooding or an inundation of fantasies before that massa confusa of primal material differentiates. We may experience loss and grief that things haven't worked out as we might have hoped. Powerful events can triggers such feelings.
It evokes an image of the archetypal "orphan soul" sought by alchemists to create the Philosopher's Stone. Secret fire is the "leaded" fuel that cooks under the surface from the "heat" of awareness -- that cooks it into conscious experience. This calcination is Stage 1 of our spiritual alchemy, which is followed by dissolution (solutio) and separation (coagulatio).
We begin in a state of disintegration, of insensibility, and gradually reach greater awareness. We all have a bit of the disillusioned orphan in us. Some have living parents who were never available or are now emotionally unavailable. We may be alienated but long to belong or connect in a meaningful way. Perhaps we resonate with other orphans in our lines.
The experience of "adult orphans" is often underplayed as we consider the death of our parents 'normal' in adulthood, but it is a condition worthy of attention, and genealogy is one way to address it, to deepen it, to deal with abandonment and loss. Jung says, "When one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guide."
This is no seance, spiritualism, hallucination, or lunacy, and should not be approached as such. It is not supernatural. This is an involuntary flood of charged emotions arising from the unconscious. Often double binds and hyperarousal lead to emotional flooding -- that ocean of emotion. Much of the trauma is held in the body in structure, soft tissue, and symptoms.
It's All Relative
For example, we may have internalized the traits of one parent, as well as the other parent's loathing of those qualities. If you are overloaded you may feel swamped. You may dream of tsunamis. Such feelings are linked to helplessness, frustration, anger, feeling trapped, remorse, guilt, and self-hate.
Orphans have to learn to not be loyal to their suffering, the abandonment, trauma, and betrayal. But we must be willing to accept our grief and loneliness and let go. It's not just your pain or hurt, but the hurt of humanity in this vastness. We can learn mercy and forgiveness, within our Tree and for ourselves. We may transform from hating and being incensed, to the sweet fragrance of an incense tree that perfumes our sacred space.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. We can view it as an acronym for "pay attention; integrate now." When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children of the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but if we don't have an urn, we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead. We may house skeletons in the basement of our subconscious.
Even grieving can be a sacred space -- a Grail space where magic can happen. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness, a depression.
We can learn self-compassion to carry our pain more graciously. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process and sea of people.
We are never experts in this task, as Confucious reminds us: "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." In 2009, China acknowledged a new Confucianism by publishing the genealogy of the 800-year-old Kong family on a computer database at China's National Library in Beijing.
China is trying to revive its traditional culture, including genealogy. "The Chinese have always been interested in their past -- worship of ancestors is worship of origins." (Heinz 1999:225). Kong Ming, a 33-year-old businessman from Shanghai, began researching his family in 1998. His elderly grandfather dug up the coffin in which he had hidden the family records to escape persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Heinz, Carolyn Brown, Asian Cultural Traditions (Waveland Press, Inc., 1999).
Tian, commonly translated as Heaven or Sky, but philologically meaning the Great One, the Great Whole, is a key concept in Confucianism. "Forming one body with the universe" is a neo-Confucian ideal. As we work, formlessness congeals into form. We arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world."
In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. Our personal family tree merges with the collective World Tree. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has no telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
Pleroma
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..." Jung's plenum is a field of universal potential, unbound luminosity and infinite awareness. Space isn't an empty vacuum but characterized as a fullness and creative flow.
Science tells us the ultimate state of rest is the virtual vacuum of absolute space, the Zero Point, zero-phase geometry. It is the groundstate of being and has been likened to the Akashic Field and universal memory by Ervin Lazlo (2007).
This subquantum coherent field is pure information. Rather than linear lines of ancestors, we might think of them metaphorically as superpositions of our deep ancestry -- a superwave "reaching over" with interference peaks, information states with entangled and partly coherent stimulated emissions.
Jung called it the Pleroma, after the Gnostics. The non-dual is beyond all distinctions, a field that is the only reality. "Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness." In it thinking and being cease, because the eternal is without qualities. There is no one in it because they would be differentiated from the Pleroma, according to the Red Book. We must watch out for what we believe, but we can entertain many notions.
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there.
An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey.
Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into historical amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects up- and down-regulation of gene expression and disease development.
Upregulation and downregulation can also happen as a response to toxins or hormones. An example of upregulation in pregnancy is hormones that cause cells in the uterus to become more sensitive to oxytocin.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Because the brain accepts the imaginal as real, changes take place at a physical and mental level. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. We remember the past but not the future because of a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
Preface
Facing Your Ancestors
GENEALOGY IS A WAY OF KNOWING
Your Pedigree is Your Own Book of the Dead
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively
from the divine voice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
"My fantasies, my symptoms put me in my place. It is no longer to know at which place I belong - at which God - but at what place I belong, on which altar I give myself, my myth by which suffering is transformed into devotion. "- James Hillman
The old myth, which always holds within it something yet older and more aboriginal, remains the same, this being an essential quality of all forms of religion; it only undergoes a new interpretation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Descent From Antiquity
Families are bound together eternally. The power of genealogy is the power of story. This is the story of the family and the diverse characters that populate the many branches of our family tree. These are stories that matter, that preceded your corporeal existence. This story reveals how things came to be as they are -- as you are.
Genealogy is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories of our ancestors open us to deeper experience. Our personal story is embedded in our larger inherited story and culture. Genealogy helps us connect more deeply with our unique story and meaning in life beyond a personal story. It is a mythic archaeology that connects us with that which has given us shape, opening a path to transformation.
Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.
Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Even if medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention, they retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.
The Tree of Life
Our personal genealogy is a process of self-discovery and self-knowledge with its own procedures and measures of 'truth.' It seems ironic that technology is allowing us to retrieve such essential aspects of our own humanity. Curiously, genealogy is the second most popular online subject, second only to sex, much like sex precedes procreation.
Your family tree is an encyclopedia of human nature. Genealogy doesn't give our lives context; it is the context and material ground of our existence. The Tree of Life carries the evolution of the world, gives life to the universe, and understanding or consciousness. Life originates from and disappears back into the Tree. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a symbol of the process of creation and inner wholeness.
Jung said (CW5, para321) that, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother." It was a central symbol of spiritual unity, wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and the power of the Universe rooted in the divine. Nietzsche pointed out that as with both people and trees, "The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do one's roots struggle earthward, downward into the dark, the the deep -- into evil."
The tree is an early symbol of spiritual development and our own immortal character, the living structure of our inner self -- transcendence to lofty heights. Below the surface, the subtext remains, "Who is this person having these experiences?" We are literally and symbolically the "fruit" of the Tree of Life. We need a powerful new story for our relationship with the Earth: we are, indeed, part of nature and not separate from it in any way. Genealogy helps ground us in this paradigm and helps develop our sense of deep time and rootedness in contemporary life with a global perspective.
The World Tree
Within 5-7 generations our family tree meets up and merges with the World Tree. This is especially true for American Colonial descent, where the progenitors and their droplines are well-known. Once you research back to your Gateway Ancestors who immigrated, you can easily find the lines that connect back as far as professional genealogists have determined and merge even further with fictional, legendary and mythological characters.
Outside of genealogy, the World Tree is often related to shamanism. As a link to ancestral spirits, it is an integral part of the shamanic cosmology. By our 13th Marriage Bridge we find ourselves in Medieval Times and common pool of noble ancestry. The World Tree is also a bridge that connects heaven, earth and underworld. When a shaman "climbs the tree," he or she ascends into the Upper World and the creative sources of power -- to the gods, to the zenith of heaven. The philosophical tree represents a sublimation of our spirit. The shaman receives intercessory messages.
In some ways the World Tree is identical with the shaman. Creatures can appear in the Tree, including snakes, birds, goats, and other totems and signs. The World Tree is a tree of initiation, ordeals, astral or mystic flight, vision quest, and fate or destiny. The shaman mediates between humanity and the spirit world, and in a simpler way, the genealogist performs a similar symbolic service, especially when interpreting a pedigree. To be cut off from the sacred tree is to be cut off from the spirit world, a condition which is likened to 'illness' and requires healing for loss of soul.
The serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know, and what we thought we knew about our roots. They offer us Knowledge. They are part of the larger truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Yet, Jung said we fear our serpent as we fear the numinosum. He concludes, "All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are."
Good and evil unite in the growth of the Tree. It combines masculine phallic representations with feminine nurture and growth. We are the serpent of wisdom, the union of good and evil, in our own Tree. Genealogy is a ritual in which we climb up and down through the branches of our tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in 'time travel' that expands our consciousness.
Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell wrote exhaustively on this Tree as the center of the world, a vertical World Axis or dimension that symbolizes the capacity for non-ordinary experience, including shamanic trance that reinforces community links with cosmic consciousness. The Sacred Tree as such a center is potentially everywhere. The drum, like the heartbeat of the community is a means of climbing the tree and contacting the spirits. Campbell called the cosmic tree a wish-fulfilling, fruitful symbol of fertility, regeneration, and immortality.
Continuity
We need to know that we have a history of continuity that is profound. Our bloodline is our connection to Creation. We follow the steps created by the bodies and minds of the past. Our artform goes back to antiquity and is the measure of man. In this way we penetrate our own unknown origins and the culture of our ancestors. We think, feel, remember, and imagine. Memory is a form of imagination.
As existentially powerful as science or religion, genealogy can expand our worldview and help us weave our own coherent narrative. It helps us unravel our emotional inheritance. Sometimes what the forebearers did somehow becomes our story. We can re-imagine the whole planet as our ancestral lands. It helps us grasp how we are holistically embedded in a vast seamless web of life, a world alive with cosmic spirit, as counterpoint to death, tragedy, destruction, and despair.
Interpretation
Reading our genealogical lines is ultimately a heuristic process -- one requiring deep research and circumspect interpretation. But, connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
If we are too literal about it, we see only a string of corpses. But if we truly assimilate our heritage, we alter it creatively and give life to it through our individual understanding. We can bring our genealogy into meaningful dialogue with artistic and cultural disciplines. Genealogy is arguably one of the most "grounding" activities in which we can participate. From this fertile ground springs the acorn of the soul. It's an old Platonic and Jungian idea that the soul picks the father and mother of the child...and thereby the direct ancestors.
Deliteralization
The ancestors are the symbolic and material ground of our being. Psyche is not in us; we are in it which is everywhere. Jung pointed out in Letters Vol. II that without psyche we can neither know nor believe. We learn to center, reflect, and listen to voices within. The Great Work of genealogy is a small price to pay for turning the unconscious lead of uprootedness into the psychological gold of knowing one's true origins.
We live in relative autonomy but remain enmeshed in the epigenetic memories of our particular family. Our rich descent is about NOW, as much or more than it is about what has gone before. Our personal mythology is shaped in our formative years. The ancient myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. The old gods are there in spirit in our triumphs and struggles. Myths pertain to the primordial gods and goddesses, while legend is about historical human heroes.
Our life stories are personal myths that emulate the characters and themes found in old myths. We act on mythic archetypes without knowing we are doing it. We choose our identity as well as the shape and direction of our lives through such such scripts. When we resonate with our ancestors, it helps us make sense of our own lives.
We are cast in the natural form and and semblance of those who came before us. We must each answer the call of the Ancestors to the adventure of self-discovery in our own way. Group approaches generally devolve into the lowest common denominator, as Jung describes. We can approach our lineage in the spirit of individuation. In the genealogical matrix of personalities, each ancestor has a potential effect on our consciousness. Naturally, that potential will not be realized in full because many of our ancestral lines will stub out sooner or later in the dead ends of unknown individuals and lost family lines.
The Royal We
Because they were recorded better for historical and other reasons, noble and royal lines are more available. Anyone tracing to royal roots will meet and share the same medieval pool of progenitors -- the "usual suspects." It is only natural to identify with some more than others, depending on how we resonate with their stories, for good or evil. In Letters Vol. II, Jung said, "We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality."
We may find ourselves in a participation mystique, or project our feelings onto them, or even become 'possessed' or fascinated by certain individuals and their qualities or deeds. For example, The Da Vinci Code fad has produced a group of fantasists riveted to alternative stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, while ignoring even their most recent ancestors, who are probably as, or more influential psychologically-speaking. In the worst cases such unconscious identification can lead to dissociation, 'possession,' and dysfunctionality. In an ideal world, genealogy supports maintaining our basic integrity, giving new meaning to "knowing who we are," and how deeply we are tied to self, world, and others.
Some people even develop compensatory personas based solely on such spurious connections. Our interpretations of our genealogy may lead to a lowering (abaissment) of consciousness, while others expand awareness. But we cannot retrieve the worldviews of pre-literate, agrarian or feudal societies to solve today's problems of the information age and global society. The problem compounds when we try to grasp the functional realities of ancient civilizations and cultures. What we do experience is our fantasy images of what those individuals and times might have been like. Images are the basic experience of psyche. These images are our prima materia.
Personal Mythology
In The Interior Dialogue (2009), Stanley Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths.
We use our stories as personal myths. Often they can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually. There are four factors that influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and transpersonal experiences and how to work with them. By identifying, evaluating, and transforming dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews, and working with them you can transform them."
We live in a time of many competing mythologies. Genealogy can help us clarify personal, characterological, and familial issues. Our genealogy becomes a psychologically constructed reality. We have no real experience of ancestral habits of thought and expression nor by-gone eras of strife, order and disorder. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and confabulation are poor substitutes. Others spout idiosyncratic doctrines or cliche prophecies based on their so-called supernatural connections. Such raw mythologizing is a far cry from the aesthetic pursuit of personal mythology, as described by Krippner, and others.
Your Genealogical exploration is an archetypal Journey during which you travel back into the worlds inhabited by your ancestors. Some people are rationally motivated to find and preserve their lineage for the family. Others are emotionally driven by conscious and unconscious needs. Those who take a religious approach will emphasize legendary 'holy blood' aspects. Those who are fascinated with myths and tales may embrace them as 'real.'
We can often not put a face to our ancestors, but we can give them back their names, and thus FACE our ancestors in the most direct way possible, with honor and respect.
We create our own ultimate narrative of our genealogical story based on our self-image, beliefs and worldview. Because the 'spiritual' romantics embrace connections others consider 'false' or non-historical, the rationalist genealogists have moved toward removing or cutting off lines they consider 'fictional'. But they cannot cut off the deep root of the collective unconscious for which these ancient ideas are 'real.' For example, immortality may not be 'real', but our unconscious behaves as if it is so. The unconscious believes in immortality, even if we don't.
There is a simple solution to this polarization. Taking a psychological approach to the family and world tree de-literalizes the legendary and mythic lines. We can simply retain their fructifying and life-giving potential without making them into unsupportable 'facts.' Jung said, "mythological motifs are 'facts;' they never change; only theories change," (Letters II, p. 191). We can't deny their existence by pruning them from the World Tree.
Archetypal psychology has worked with such material to provide a viable model for approaching the integration of these ancient figures into our conscious lives. If we apply the methods, we cannot fail to discover archetypal motifs. It isn't a system as much as a way of "seeing through."
If we apply depth psychology methods conscientiously, we can avoid most of the literalization, projection, and ego inflation that affects many amateur genealogists who fail to comprehend the material in a way that reflects best-practice. Instead our approach to the "as if" real portions of the pedigree is poetic and deliteralized, and doesn't seek to retrieve the past as much as live more fully with it. We can "evoke" and "constellate" such material within the hermetically sealed process of Jungian Genealogy.
In one sense, all these lives are yours, but not in the individual new age sense of past lives. You will meet characters of all psychological types, and perhaps re-member your passed lives: villains and heroes, the famous and infamous, saints and sinners, priests and warriors, fair maidens, bastards and bold knights, kings and queens, genius and psychopaths, and a host of supporting ancestors. And they will all be your gr-grandparents.
We may judge, deny, or reject some ancestors while having an instinctive rapport with others. They help us reveal our shadow traits as well as self-actualizing capacities. In most cases they lived in a far more challenging world in which to survive, much less thrive. Their lives can inform and inspire us. The trail back through history can be followed in our lines of descent. History becomes personal. Your sense of time, depth, and intimacy expands. Our whole being, our whole body is an intergenerational as well as personal memory down to the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic level.
If to 'worship' is to show honor or give devotional attention or adoring regard, then in genealogy we can 'worship' our ancestors, without taking that too literally. We can respect, honor, and attend without being consumed in the labyrinthine matrix of the dead or in their many conflicts, infidelities, and vile deeds. We can view the sketchier, legendary parts of our pedigree with an imaginal eye.
Deities and Demigods
This is not concretized personal genealogy, over burdened by the literalized personal conflicts and traumas of the family system. Neither a lie nor a fantasy, it is our underlying archetypal genealogy, without the suffocating pressures of personal genealogy. This allows psychic movement within the archetypal possibilities and situations behind their images. Are Uranus, Aphrodite, Hercules, Isis, and Odin really our "ancestors"? Such deities and demigods represent our transpersonal potential. Are they really in our blood, or the roots of the psyche?
This is the traditional way of showing forth the ancient shared connection with our common roots -- with the collective unconscious, including the gods and goddesses that appear at the foundation of our genealogies. We learn the family trees of godforms in school, but not their specific relationships to our drop lines. Many of the deities are related in more than one way. Stories of gods and creation are not just about the past. They are about us now.
Ancestral Braiding
Our ancestral lines braid together through marriages and migration. Our histories are woven together in cross-cousin and foreign marriage bridges. Long royal genealogies include nearly every war and clash of cultures throughout history. You will have progenitors on both sides of many battles. There will be persecutors and victims, even genocides. While bordering on factual our historical gleanings may or may not be accurate.
We may find it hard to absorb that whole timeline of human turmoil at such a personal level. It takes time to digest and integrate as the actual stories of your ancestors, especially when they fade into myth and legend. They may not be historical facts, but psyche has its own facts and effects on our beliefs and behaviors. Genealogy reflects the psychic facts of our protracted existence. Psychic realities are expressions of soul cultivated by imagination.
Tracing one's lines becomes a meditational activity. Finding the homes and stories of ancestors helps us flesh them out and imaginally travel back to their times and places. Many of these simple tasks have the ritualistic effect of helping us grow closer to the ancestors -- to those whose names we can now readily recite and place.
One's entire pedigree symbolizes the totality of the Self and its transcendent nature. But no one can integrate the wholeness of the entire self because that would limit it. Jung said, "in reality its experience is unlimited and endless." Biologically, we do not contain or express the genes of all of our ancestors, and our specific combination that does manifest is what makes us unique individuals.
Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination
We can expand our awareness further with 'dream genealogy.' Jung said, "In the deepest sense, we all dream not of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the other." We can gather information about our ancestors in our reveries, dreams and shamanic journeys. 'Big dreams' can reveal elusive family history. By entering the world of the ancestors, we tap our deep unconscious, collective memories, intuition, vision, and wisdom. Lucid Dreaming and Dream Walking have been used by some to open ancestral connections.
Rituals, such as a simple ancestral altar, to more elaborate enactments or recitals are an option. More than faith, habit or even magic, Jung saw rites as psychologically effective symbolic acts, "giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious." "Rites give satisfaction to the collective and numinous aspects of the moment, beyond their purely personal significance." (Letters II, p.208-210) Acts of imagination can also be seen as rituals that enrich our perceptions.
We can edit or amend our family story as we gain a more accurate understanding our lines and the past. We are a ripple on the ocean of this past experience. We can move systematically back in time or take quantum leaps into other realities. Other optional methods include hypnosis or even word association. Those with "Second Sight" will draw from those experiences while others try to foster that ability. Perhaps one of the most productive techniques we can use is the dialogical method, such as that outlined by Ira Progoff in his works on journaling.
Some seek answers to questions, while others seek only the Mystery in the darkness. We connect with something greater than ourselves, finding more than we know. Art integrates the material and spiritual. Artistic expression in all forms is another way to let the ancestors in, to give them a voice or presence -- to receive a blessing or healing. Genealogy is an evolving construction of our inner reality.
***********************
References
Cosmic Tree/World Tree http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/cosmic-tree.html
http://www.lib.jmu.edu/genealogy/
Facing Your Ancestors
GENEALOGY IS A WAY OF KNOWING
Your Pedigree is Your Own Book of the Dead
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively
from the divine voice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
"My fantasies, my symptoms put me in my place. It is no longer to know at which place I belong - at which God - but at what place I belong, on which altar I give myself, my myth by which suffering is transformed into devotion. "- James Hillman
The old myth, which always holds within it something yet older and more aboriginal, remains the same, this being an essential quality of all forms of religion; it only undergoes a new interpretation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Descent From Antiquity
Families are bound together eternally. The power of genealogy is the power of story. This is the story of the family and the diverse characters that populate the many branches of our family tree. These are stories that matter, that preceded your corporeal existence. This story reveals how things came to be as they are -- as you are.
Genealogy is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories of our ancestors open us to deeper experience. Our personal story is embedded in our larger inherited story and culture. Genealogy helps us connect more deeply with our unique story and meaning in life beyond a personal story. It is a mythic archaeology that connects us with that which has given us shape, opening a path to transformation.
Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.
Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Even if medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention, they retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.
The Tree of Life
Our personal genealogy is a process of self-discovery and self-knowledge with its own procedures and measures of 'truth.' It seems ironic that technology is allowing us to retrieve such essential aspects of our own humanity. Curiously, genealogy is the second most popular online subject, second only to sex, much like sex precedes procreation.
Your family tree is an encyclopedia of human nature. Genealogy doesn't give our lives context; it is the context and material ground of our existence. The Tree of Life carries the evolution of the world, gives life to the universe, and understanding or consciousness. Life originates from and disappears back into the Tree. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a symbol of the process of creation and inner wholeness.
Jung said (CW5, para321) that, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother." It was a central symbol of spiritual unity, wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and the power of the Universe rooted in the divine. Nietzsche pointed out that as with both people and trees, "The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do one's roots struggle earthward, downward into the dark, the the deep -- into evil."
The tree is an early symbol of spiritual development and our own immortal character, the living structure of our inner self -- transcendence to lofty heights. Below the surface, the subtext remains, "Who is this person having these experiences?" We are literally and symbolically the "fruit" of the Tree of Life. We need a powerful new story for our relationship with the Earth: we are, indeed, part of nature and not separate from it in any way. Genealogy helps ground us in this paradigm and helps develop our sense of deep time and rootedness in contemporary life with a global perspective.
The World Tree
Within 5-7 generations our family tree meets up and merges with the World Tree. This is especially true for American Colonial descent, where the progenitors and their droplines are well-known. Once you research back to your Gateway Ancestors who immigrated, you can easily find the lines that connect back as far as professional genealogists have determined and merge even further with fictional, legendary and mythological characters.
Outside of genealogy, the World Tree is often related to shamanism. As a link to ancestral spirits, it is an integral part of the shamanic cosmology. By our 13th Marriage Bridge we find ourselves in Medieval Times and common pool of noble ancestry. The World Tree is also a bridge that connects heaven, earth and underworld. When a shaman "climbs the tree," he or she ascends into the Upper World and the creative sources of power -- to the gods, to the zenith of heaven. The philosophical tree represents a sublimation of our spirit. The shaman receives intercessory messages.
In some ways the World Tree is identical with the shaman. Creatures can appear in the Tree, including snakes, birds, goats, and other totems and signs. The World Tree is a tree of initiation, ordeals, astral or mystic flight, vision quest, and fate or destiny. The shaman mediates between humanity and the spirit world, and in a simpler way, the genealogist performs a similar symbolic service, especially when interpreting a pedigree. To be cut off from the sacred tree is to be cut off from the spirit world, a condition which is likened to 'illness' and requires healing for loss of soul.
The serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know, and what we thought we knew about our roots. They offer us Knowledge. They are part of the larger truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Yet, Jung said we fear our serpent as we fear the numinosum. He concludes, "All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are."
Good and evil unite in the growth of the Tree. It combines masculine phallic representations with feminine nurture and growth. We are the serpent of wisdom, the union of good and evil, in our own Tree. Genealogy is a ritual in which we climb up and down through the branches of our tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in 'time travel' that expands our consciousness.
Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell wrote exhaustively on this Tree as the center of the world, a vertical World Axis or dimension that symbolizes the capacity for non-ordinary experience, including shamanic trance that reinforces community links with cosmic consciousness. The Sacred Tree as such a center is potentially everywhere. The drum, like the heartbeat of the community is a means of climbing the tree and contacting the spirits. Campbell called the cosmic tree a wish-fulfilling, fruitful symbol of fertility, regeneration, and immortality.
Continuity
We need to know that we have a history of continuity that is profound. Our bloodline is our connection to Creation. We follow the steps created by the bodies and minds of the past. Our artform goes back to antiquity and is the measure of man. In this way we penetrate our own unknown origins and the culture of our ancestors. We think, feel, remember, and imagine. Memory is a form of imagination.
As existentially powerful as science or religion, genealogy can expand our worldview and help us weave our own coherent narrative. It helps us unravel our emotional inheritance. Sometimes what the forebearers did somehow becomes our story. We can re-imagine the whole planet as our ancestral lands. It helps us grasp how we are holistically embedded in a vast seamless web of life, a world alive with cosmic spirit, as counterpoint to death, tragedy, destruction, and despair.
Interpretation
Reading our genealogical lines is ultimately a heuristic process -- one requiring deep research and circumspect interpretation. But, connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
If we are too literal about it, we see only a string of corpses. But if we truly assimilate our heritage, we alter it creatively and give life to it through our individual understanding. We can bring our genealogy into meaningful dialogue with artistic and cultural disciplines. Genealogy is arguably one of the most "grounding" activities in which we can participate. From this fertile ground springs the acorn of the soul. It's an old Platonic and Jungian idea that the soul picks the father and mother of the child...and thereby the direct ancestors.
Deliteralization
The ancestors are the symbolic and material ground of our being. Psyche is not in us; we are in it which is everywhere. Jung pointed out in Letters Vol. II that without psyche we can neither know nor believe. We learn to center, reflect, and listen to voices within. The Great Work of genealogy is a small price to pay for turning the unconscious lead of uprootedness into the psychological gold of knowing one's true origins.
We live in relative autonomy but remain enmeshed in the epigenetic memories of our particular family. Our rich descent is about NOW, as much or more than it is about what has gone before. Our personal mythology is shaped in our formative years. The ancient myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. The old gods are there in spirit in our triumphs and struggles. Myths pertain to the primordial gods and goddesses, while legend is about historical human heroes.
Our life stories are personal myths that emulate the characters and themes found in old myths. We act on mythic archetypes without knowing we are doing it. We choose our identity as well as the shape and direction of our lives through such such scripts. When we resonate with our ancestors, it helps us make sense of our own lives.
We are cast in the natural form and and semblance of those who came before us. We must each answer the call of the Ancestors to the adventure of self-discovery in our own way. Group approaches generally devolve into the lowest common denominator, as Jung describes. We can approach our lineage in the spirit of individuation. In the genealogical matrix of personalities, each ancestor has a potential effect on our consciousness. Naturally, that potential will not be realized in full because many of our ancestral lines will stub out sooner or later in the dead ends of unknown individuals and lost family lines.
The Royal We
Because they were recorded better for historical and other reasons, noble and royal lines are more available. Anyone tracing to royal roots will meet and share the same medieval pool of progenitors -- the "usual suspects." It is only natural to identify with some more than others, depending on how we resonate with their stories, for good or evil. In Letters Vol. II, Jung said, "We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality."
We may find ourselves in a participation mystique, or project our feelings onto them, or even become 'possessed' or fascinated by certain individuals and their qualities or deeds. For example, The Da Vinci Code fad has produced a group of fantasists riveted to alternative stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, while ignoring even their most recent ancestors, who are probably as, or more influential psychologically-speaking. In the worst cases such unconscious identification can lead to dissociation, 'possession,' and dysfunctionality. In an ideal world, genealogy supports maintaining our basic integrity, giving new meaning to "knowing who we are," and how deeply we are tied to self, world, and others.
Some people even develop compensatory personas based solely on such spurious connections. Our interpretations of our genealogy may lead to a lowering (abaissment) of consciousness, while others expand awareness. But we cannot retrieve the worldviews of pre-literate, agrarian or feudal societies to solve today's problems of the information age and global society. The problem compounds when we try to grasp the functional realities of ancient civilizations and cultures. What we do experience is our fantasy images of what those individuals and times might have been like. Images are the basic experience of psyche. These images are our prima materia.
Personal Mythology
In The Interior Dialogue (2009), Stanley Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths.
We use our stories as personal myths. Often they can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually. There are four factors that influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and transpersonal experiences and how to work with them. By identifying, evaluating, and transforming dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews, and working with them you can transform them."
We live in a time of many competing mythologies. Genealogy can help us clarify personal, characterological, and familial issues. Our genealogy becomes a psychologically constructed reality. We have no real experience of ancestral habits of thought and expression nor by-gone eras of strife, order and disorder. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and confabulation are poor substitutes. Others spout idiosyncratic doctrines or cliche prophecies based on their so-called supernatural connections. Such raw mythologizing is a far cry from the aesthetic pursuit of personal mythology, as described by Krippner, and others.
Your Genealogical exploration is an archetypal Journey during which you travel back into the worlds inhabited by your ancestors. Some people are rationally motivated to find and preserve their lineage for the family. Others are emotionally driven by conscious and unconscious needs. Those who take a religious approach will emphasize legendary 'holy blood' aspects. Those who are fascinated with myths and tales may embrace them as 'real.'
We can often not put a face to our ancestors, but we can give them back their names, and thus FACE our ancestors in the most direct way possible, with honor and respect.
We create our own ultimate narrative of our genealogical story based on our self-image, beliefs and worldview. Because the 'spiritual' romantics embrace connections others consider 'false' or non-historical, the rationalist genealogists have moved toward removing or cutting off lines they consider 'fictional'. But they cannot cut off the deep root of the collective unconscious for which these ancient ideas are 'real.' For example, immortality may not be 'real', but our unconscious behaves as if it is so. The unconscious believes in immortality, even if we don't.
There is a simple solution to this polarization. Taking a psychological approach to the family and world tree de-literalizes the legendary and mythic lines. We can simply retain their fructifying and life-giving potential without making them into unsupportable 'facts.' Jung said, "mythological motifs are 'facts;' they never change; only theories change," (Letters II, p. 191). We can't deny their existence by pruning them from the World Tree.
Archetypal psychology has worked with such material to provide a viable model for approaching the integration of these ancient figures into our conscious lives. If we apply the methods, we cannot fail to discover archetypal motifs. It isn't a system as much as a way of "seeing through."
If we apply depth psychology methods conscientiously, we can avoid most of the literalization, projection, and ego inflation that affects many amateur genealogists who fail to comprehend the material in a way that reflects best-practice. Instead our approach to the "as if" real portions of the pedigree is poetic and deliteralized, and doesn't seek to retrieve the past as much as live more fully with it. We can "evoke" and "constellate" such material within the hermetically sealed process of Jungian Genealogy.
In one sense, all these lives are yours, but not in the individual new age sense of past lives. You will meet characters of all psychological types, and perhaps re-member your passed lives: villains and heroes, the famous and infamous, saints and sinners, priests and warriors, fair maidens, bastards and bold knights, kings and queens, genius and psychopaths, and a host of supporting ancestors. And they will all be your gr-grandparents.
We may judge, deny, or reject some ancestors while having an instinctive rapport with others. They help us reveal our shadow traits as well as self-actualizing capacities. In most cases they lived in a far more challenging world in which to survive, much less thrive. Their lives can inform and inspire us. The trail back through history can be followed in our lines of descent. History becomes personal. Your sense of time, depth, and intimacy expands. Our whole being, our whole body is an intergenerational as well as personal memory down to the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic level.
If to 'worship' is to show honor or give devotional attention or adoring regard, then in genealogy we can 'worship' our ancestors, without taking that too literally. We can respect, honor, and attend without being consumed in the labyrinthine matrix of the dead or in their many conflicts, infidelities, and vile deeds. We can view the sketchier, legendary parts of our pedigree with an imaginal eye.
Deities and Demigods
This is not concretized personal genealogy, over burdened by the literalized personal conflicts and traumas of the family system. Neither a lie nor a fantasy, it is our underlying archetypal genealogy, without the suffocating pressures of personal genealogy. This allows psychic movement within the archetypal possibilities and situations behind their images. Are Uranus, Aphrodite, Hercules, Isis, and Odin really our "ancestors"? Such deities and demigods represent our transpersonal potential. Are they really in our blood, or the roots of the psyche?
This is the traditional way of showing forth the ancient shared connection with our common roots -- with the collective unconscious, including the gods and goddesses that appear at the foundation of our genealogies. We learn the family trees of godforms in school, but not their specific relationships to our drop lines. Many of the deities are related in more than one way. Stories of gods and creation are not just about the past. They are about us now.
Ancestral Braiding
Our ancestral lines braid together through marriages and migration. Our histories are woven together in cross-cousin and foreign marriage bridges. Long royal genealogies include nearly every war and clash of cultures throughout history. You will have progenitors on both sides of many battles. There will be persecutors and victims, even genocides. While bordering on factual our historical gleanings may or may not be accurate.
We may find it hard to absorb that whole timeline of human turmoil at such a personal level. It takes time to digest and integrate as the actual stories of your ancestors, especially when they fade into myth and legend. They may not be historical facts, but psyche has its own facts and effects on our beliefs and behaviors. Genealogy reflects the psychic facts of our protracted existence. Psychic realities are expressions of soul cultivated by imagination.
Tracing one's lines becomes a meditational activity. Finding the homes and stories of ancestors helps us flesh them out and imaginally travel back to their times and places. Many of these simple tasks have the ritualistic effect of helping us grow closer to the ancestors -- to those whose names we can now readily recite and place.
One's entire pedigree symbolizes the totality of the Self and its transcendent nature. But no one can integrate the wholeness of the entire self because that would limit it. Jung said, "in reality its experience is unlimited and endless." Biologically, we do not contain or express the genes of all of our ancestors, and our specific combination that does manifest is what makes us unique individuals.
Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination
We can expand our awareness further with 'dream genealogy.' Jung said, "In the deepest sense, we all dream not of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the other." We can gather information about our ancestors in our reveries, dreams and shamanic journeys. 'Big dreams' can reveal elusive family history. By entering the world of the ancestors, we tap our deep unconscious, collective memories, intuition, vision, and wisdom. Lucid Dreaming and Dream Walking have been used by some to open ancestral connections.
Rituals, such as a simple ancestral altar, to more elaborate enactments or recitals are an option. More than faith, habit or even magic, Jung saw rites as psychologically effective symbolic acts, "giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious." "Rites give satisfaction to the collective and numinous aspects of the moment, beyond their purely personal significance." (Letters II, p.208-210) Acts of imagination can also be seen as rituals that enrich our perceptions.
We can edit or amend our family story as we gain a more accurate understanding our lines and the past. We are a ripple on the ocean of this past experience. We can move systematically back in time or take quantum leaps into other realities. Other optional methods include hypnosis or even word association. Those with "Second Sight" will draw from those experiences while others try to foster that ability. Perhaps one of the most productive techniques we can use is the dialogical method, such as that outlined by Ira Progoff in his works on journaling.
Some seek answers to questions, while others seek only the Mystery in the darkness. We connect with something greater than ourselves, finding more than we know. Art integrates the material and spiritual. Artistic expression in all forms is another way to let the ancestors in, to give them a voice or presence -- to receive a blessing or healing. Genealogy is an evolving construction of our inner reality.
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References
Cosmic Tree/World Tree http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/cosmic-tree.html
http://www.lib.jmu.edu/genealogy/
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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.