ECOLOGY OF SOULS
Iona Miller, 2016
Iona Miller, 2016
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
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. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth or resurrection.
Breath & Blood
Genealogy is a written testament to the endurance of the archaic. Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, 'breath' means 'soul.' The breath of life is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. 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.
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. It is a trustworthy framework for understanding a more holistic genealogical process.
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. A descriptive phenomenological psychological method helps us grasp previously unrecognized assumptions regarding meaning -- the means to understand subjective matters. The approach is neither idealist nor realist, but intimate. Like ourselves, most of our ancestors had a lifeworld, place and home.
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).
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. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth or resurrection.
Breath & Blood
Genealogy is a written testament to the endurance of the archaic. Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, 'breath' means 'soul.' The breath of life is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. 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.
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. It is a trustworthy framework for understanding a more holistic genealogical process.
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. A descriptive phenomenological psychological method helps us grasp previously unrecognized assumptions regarding meaning -- the means to understand subjective matters. The approach is neither idealist nor realist, but intimate. Like ourselves, most of our ancestors had a lifeworld, place and home.
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).
loss of autonomy,
Place is a central ontological structure of being-in-the world because of our existence as embodied beings. We are "bound by body to be in place"
involuntary displacement‑-the families' experience of forced relocation and resettlement, metaphorically a forced journey and starting over or rebuilding.
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.
Phenomenology indicates a way of study whereby the researcher seeks to 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 the researcher's personal sensibility and awareness. Direct contact creates an intimacy with the phenomenon through prolonged, firsthand exposure.
We attempt to meet the phenomenon in as free and as unprejudiced 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 considerable practice and training, and students can find their way to intuiting only by themselves, often in hit-and-miss fashion. Intuiting is:
one of the most demanding operations, which requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically. Nevertheless, there is little that the beginning phenomenologist can be given by way of precise instructions beyond such metaphoric phrases as "opening his eyes," "keeping them open," "not getting blinded," looking and listening (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 682).
Through intuiting, the phenomenologist hopes to experience a moment of insight in which she sees the phenomenon in a clearer light. I call this moment of greater clarity the phenomenological disclosure, though it might also be described by such phrases as "the aha! experience," "revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through phenomenological disclosure, the student hopes to see the thing in its own terms and to feel confident that his or her seeing is reasonably correct.
In phenomenological intuiting, therefore, the researcher's personal efforts, experiences, and insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon under study and arriving at moments of disclosure whereby 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 sighting of the phenomenon. In this sense, intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding is had in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through the researcher's wish, effort, and practice, the phenomenon is seen in smaller and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise of which the student was not aware before. In her depiction of phenomenological intuiting as a flow and spiral, Tesch (1987, pp. 231-232) described the unpredictability and serendipity of the process well:
Obviously, the [phenomenological] researcher must begin somewhere and intends to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. It would be wrong, however, to picture this movement as a straight, sequential process. It is even a bit misleading to think of it as a process. To conjure up an image of what this movement is like, it helps to see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion that have no clearly distinguishable steps or phases. Typically, the researcher would be hard pressed to say where this flow begins. The first idea of trying to makes sense of something may evolve during our genealogical research activity.
Uncharted Territory
The phenomenologist must assume that she does not know the phenomenon but wishes 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.
The phenomenon is an uncharted territory that we attempt to explore, flexibly adapting to the nature and circumstances of the phenomenon.
"Duquesne School of Phenomenological Psychology" [search]
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 embed 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.
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Breath & Blood
Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, breath means soul. The breath of life
is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. 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.
Archetypal psychology is a legitimate 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach to genealogy. In this fertile earth 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.
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)
Paradise Myth
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.
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)
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 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 mean leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
"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
Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, breath means soul. The breath of life
is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. 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.
Archetypal psychology is a legitimate 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach to genealogy. In this fertile earth 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.
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)
Paradise Myth
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.
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)
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 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 mean leaving our solid footing and carrying every question into deeper waters, rather than dragging 'the invisibles' out of the underworld and back into the daylight world. They may 'come up' spontaneously if we have no desire to control the outcome.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly to re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
"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.
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Archetypal psychology is a 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy. In this fertile earth 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. The serpent in our archetypal tree is the unconscious with its painful, dangerous interventions and frightening effects. Though totally unconscious, it has a wisdom of its own that is foundational to our origins. The unconscious is not a separate sphere, but found in all things at all times.
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. Images, like the union of opposites, cannot be willed.
Symbols mirror the nuclear family union of opposites and reconciliation in new birth.
"What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, always has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right… the only thing that helps us here is the symbol….with its paradoxical nature it represents the ‘third thing.” (Jung, CW 13, pp. 134)
Recognition of soul images and incorporation into awareness is an ongoing process. In The Red Book, Jung notes, "Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other ...I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words." (Pg. 250.)
Jung cautions, "The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." (The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370)
Jung advised the incorporation of death into one's lived experience. In the Red Book, he says, “The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper like a smooth wave on a sea beach.”
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, a gathering or reunion. Tacitly welcoming us across the years, they have aesthetic and psychological qualities -- subtle bodies clothed with the presence of our deep memories.
Archetypal psychology doesn't insist we integrate them or make them conscious, but actually grant them their own lives and purposes. Interrelationship (personal relationship) is more important than meaning, understanding, or interpretation.
Their lives document our adventures in the imaginal world but can never be objectively "proven." They aren't only parts of our own psyche, or their archetypal core. We can accept the experience as it presents itself, and revel in its sensual presence, without bastardizing it into some sort of "fan-fiction" or ignoring healthy skepticism. We cannot pin these ancestors down nor define their essential nature.
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 -- the taste of our blood. 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 toward the universal (divine) or archetypal constant. So, aesthetics is a form of transformation.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition through the ages. Genealogy is the basis for a configuration, re-configuration, and aesthetic appreciation of our life story. Genealogy is a 'mirror' of aesthetic engagement in the materially based image.
Addressing the needs of unconscious life is fundamental to aesthetic
appreciation. Implied inner needs drive the initial intention to physically create our genealogical image and to act this out imaginatively. We raise the ancestors who carry meaning and value to consciousness from the labyrinth of unconscious form production and creative instinct.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros -- felt-experience or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. Eros connects body and soul with vitality and passion born in the blood. Vivid libidinal participation connects our heart to the heart of the universe. It binds the ordinary and nonordinary worlds together by creating symbols of transcendence.
Genealogy becomes a homage to the power of love in our very creation. We heed the ancestors when we receive, listen, and contain. In that sense, genealogy becomes a temenos, or sacred space, the sanctuary of our holy grove -- the magic circle of extended family. The self-realizing motion performs the transformation. Our ancestors are a revelation. We need to reveal, not just know ourselves. Self-realization is self-revelation.
We can relate to the blunt facts of our genesis and stop there as the genealogical 'realists' do, cutting off the fictional, legendary and mythic elements, but we may do so at our own psychological peril. A myth is not a dream; its archaic images and memories constitute a world.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording, analysis, and investigation. 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. We are drawn back by each story along the way, its context, and its antecedents.
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. It is only reduced to fantasy if ego takes control.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
Archetypal psychology is a 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy. In this fertile earth 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. The serpent in our archetypal tree is the unconscious with its painful, dangerous interventions and frightening effects. Though totally unconscious, it has a wisdom of its own that is foundational to our origins. The unconscious is not a separate sphere, but found in all things at all times.
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. Images, like the union of opposites, cannot be willed.
Symbols mirror the nuclear family union of opposites and reconciliation in new birth.
"What takes place between light and darkness, what unites the opposites, always has a share in both sides and can be judged just as well from the left as from the right… the only thing that helps us here is the symbol….with its paradoxical nature it represents the ‘third thing.” (Jung, CW 13, pp. 134)
Recognition of soul images and incorporation into awareness is an ongoing process. In The Red Book, Jung notes, "Because I sink into my symbol to such an extent, the symbol changes me from my one into my other ...I have interpreted these images, as best I can, with poor words." (Pg. 250.)
Jung cautions, "The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them." (The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370)
Jung advised the incorporation of death into one's lived experience. In the Red Book, he says, “The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live towards death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper like a smooth wave on a sea beach.”
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, a gathering or reunion. Tacitly welcoming us across the years, they have aesthetic and psychological qualities -- subtle bodies clothed with the presence of our deep memories.
Archetypal psychology doesn't insist we integrate them or make them conscious, but actually grant them their own lives and purposes. Interrelationship (personal relationship) is more important than meaning, understanding, or interpretation.
Their lives document our adventures in the imaginal world but can never be objectively "proven." They aren't only parts of our own psyche, or their archetypal core. We can accept the experience as it presents itself, and revel in its sensual presence, without bastardizing it into some sort of "fan-fiction" or ignoring healthy skepticism. We cannot pin these ancestors down nor define their essential nature.
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 -- the taste of our blood. 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 toward the universal (divine) or archetypal constant. So, aesthetics is a form of transformation.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition through the ages. Genealogy is the basis for a configuration, re-configuration, and aesthetic appreciation of our life story. Genealogy is a 'mirror' of aesthetic engagement in the materially based image.
Addressing the needs of unconscious life is fundamental to aesthetic
appreciation. Implied inner needs drive the initial intention to physically create our genealogical image and to act this out imaginatively. We raise the ancestors who carry meaning and value to consciousness from the labyrinth of unconscious form production and creative instinct.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros -- felt-experience or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. Eros connects body and soul with vitality and passion born in the blood. Vivid libidinal participation connects our heart to the heart of the universe. It binds the ordinary and nonordinary worlds together by creating symbols of transcendence.
Genealogy becomes a homage to the power of love in our very creation. We heed the ancestors when we receive, listen, and contain. In that sense, genealogy becomes a temenos, or sacred space, the sanctuary of our holy grove -- the magic circle of extended family. The self-realizing motion performs the transformation. Our ancestors are a revelation. We need to reveal, not just know ourselves. Self-realization is self-revelation.
We can relate to the blunt facts of our genesis and stop there as the genealogical 'realists' do, cutting off the fictional, legendary and mythic elements, but we may do so at our own psychological peril. A myth is not a dream; its archaic images and memories constitute a world.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording, analysis, and investigation. 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. We are drawn back by each story along the way, its context, and its antecedents.
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. It is only reduced to fantasy if ego takes control.
Poiesis, as creative act, is the death and re-birth of the soul. We constantly re-form ourselves with 'soul-making.' Poiesis is integrative affirmation always emerging into form. The naturally therapeutic process evokes the emotions and experiences that give life a deeper meaning. It evokes the ancestors.
"Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, and interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life." (Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 50)
The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible. Ancestral images remain largely ambiguous and are never precisely defined nor fully explained. They appear and are created in dreams, ritual, and art.
We know now there are neural correlates to aesthetic experience, including contemporary genealogical practice. Its effects include spontaneous appearance of intuitive forms and symbolic visualizations of what cannot be directly known. An aesthetic response to perception fosters notions of reverence, symbolism, and role relationships -- aspects of ancestor devotion.
We open to the aesthetic depths of the world, in addition to the physical, social, linguistic, and spiritual modes. Spiritual here is a concept with a voice independent of formal religious structures with essential mystery underscoring its meaning, It has a deep resonance with key elements of religious practice.
The image now exists as an external presence, outside the maker and, at the same time, is temporarily inhabited by a part of the maker. Images are actively imagined internal feeling states now embodied within this external image. The image is both a statement about and a depiction of what was formerly an invisible and largely unconscious inner state. It can be understood in several ways at many levels of meaning.
At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities. The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction, and a virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflecting a principle of totality and primordial origins.
A Forest of Family Trees
Cosmic process provides the potential for life. The life-world is always there as the background of all human experiences. All the living world is aesthetic. Deeply felt aesthetic experiences are very likely to also be numinous. The aesthetic is a way to receive, process, and deal with coherent information.
Pattern is the ultimate "stuff" of reality. Without intent to do so, the patterns of our genealogical structures endure and then disintegrate. This occurs at all levels of explanation. The key is the integrity of the pattern, not the "substrate."
Even largely unconscious flowing information elicits physical responses. The "pattern which connects" is beauty, and the beauty of our connectedness is revealed graphically in the full flowering of our genealogy with its incorporation of the eollective tree -- the archetypal World Tree. At its root is the archetypal drama of our origins, externally validated by sources of recognition and resonance.
Like the sea or the sky, the tree or forest is a kind of archetype of the foundations of the world. Because it reflects our inner and outer reality, genealogy becomes a means of access to insights about the deep nature of both personal and collective reality. The ancestors are transcendent in their value if not their appearance.
Our genealogical chart is a shorthand of minimal graphics -- we are born; we mate; we die. It is a vast treasure of subconscious symbolism, wisdom, collective and self-knowledge that is the enabling of life. We are products of the aesthetic process of evolution, embryology, and life experience. Our bodies exhibit aesthetic proportion and so does a balanced mind.
Our family tree focuses and expands the field of our attention. Genealogy is a metaphor of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. We can be inspired by lived relations with those energies on an ongoing basis...not just as a paper trial. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature, our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
"If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere."
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Archetypal psychology is a ground for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our contemporary and traditional family tree with its potentially vital forms and structures.
Our ancestors are on-going living residents in our psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance and embodied meaning. They have aesthetic and psychological qualities. Genealogy is an aesthetic interaction in which both the Greek chorus of ancestors and ourselves are the medium that makes art of life's remnants. Aesthetics is a form of transformation.
What we think and feel and the intensity of aesthetic engagement, is proportional to the depth of its unconscious content. By implication, its imaginative texture is that which 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. Existence and the world are eternally joined as an aesthetic phenomena.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition. Genealogy is the basis for an 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.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. 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.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording. The aesthetic approach does not rule out other perspectives on genealogy, which can be pursued as we are moved to do so.
But the archetypal approach probably makes the most 'sense' of the roots of our mythologically-based lines, and permits depth exploration without literalism, concretization, or symptomatic concretization. For example, when Native American cultures say they get their wisdom, ceremonies, guidance, and direction from the 'womb at the center of the universe.' they refer to the sacred Feminine.
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. 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.
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 aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making.' The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.
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 deep 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 concretized 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.
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. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature and 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.
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
Archetypal psychology is a ground for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our contemporary and traditional family tree with its potentially vital forms and structures.
Our ancestors are on-going living residents in our psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance and embodied meaning. They have aesthetic and psychological qualities. Genealogy is an aesthetic interaction in which both the Greek chorus of ancestors and ourselves are the medium that makes art of life's remnants. Aesthetics is a form of transformation.
What we think and feel and the intensity of aesthetic engagement, is proportional to the depth of its unconscious content. By implication, its imaginative texture is that which 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. Existence and the world are eternally joined as an aesthetic phenomena.
Genealogy forms both the aesthetic space or context as well as the figurative content in an authentic expression of the human condition. Genealogy is the basis for an 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.
The aesthetic paradigm is admittedly not the only approach, and it may be philosophically romantic, but it embodies a certain eros or love toward the family -- known, unknown, and unknowable. 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.
Aesthetic appeal is certainly a big part of the lure of genealogy that supersedes dry ancestral recording. The aesthetic approach does not rule out other perspectives on genealogy, which can be pursued as we are moved to do so.
But the archetypal approach probably makes the most 'sense' of the roots of our mythologically-based lines, and permits depth exploration without literalism, concretization, or symptomatic concretization. For example, when Native American cultures say they get their wisdom, ceremonies, guidance, and direction from the 'womb at the center of the universe.' they refer to the sacred Feminine.
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. 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.
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 aesthetic response to phenomena is the source of the immediate apprehension that Hillman describes as 'soul-making.' The symbol is a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.
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 deep 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 concretized 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.
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. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature and our inherent place in it, and how we are sustained by it.
Autopoiesis
The genealogical aesthetic emerges somewhere between imagination and rigor as an ecology of souls, a self-organizing biophenomenon, the dynamics and functionality of interrelationships. We can apply ecological hermeneutics to explore our interpretations of disclosure and concealment -- in an imaginal sort of ecological intercorporeality.
Genealogy arouses and enlivens real psychological phenomena, with attention to bodily responses and emotional awareness enhanced by imagination.
Archetypal symbolism is an aesthetic experience, as is symbolic interaction with our ancestors, the archetypal background, and primal states of consciousness of the life-world. We interact through the meaning of symbols, by interpreting and reacting. We each have symbolic meaning to be revealed. Symbols bridge the gap between perceptual reality and and what we understand.
James Hillman’s aesthetic approach to dream images translate directly to genealogical imagery as scene, as context, as mood. Certain ancestors spontaneously suggest a place that we dream into, we enter into and in turn are embraced by it. Hillman noted the image doesn’t lead somewhere else like a story.
We can find nowhere to go but more deeply into the image. The images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead we return, drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as we go "more deeply into the image." Hillman suggests that images acquire autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Hillman’s approach to image is deeply rooted in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard. The image is a free expression created not from pressure but from play, not from necessity but from inventiveness -- the way we engage and embrace the world. Imagination is more than the stuff-sack of trauma; it is the cradle of renewal, a genesis, rather than effect. Imagination mobilizes the potencies of transformation.
In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard says, "By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, should be added a function of irreality, which is equally positive. Any weakness in the function of irreality will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee."
Our self-reference rests on a perceptual dimension of presence-openness not ‘closed’ within any conceptual system. As long as the images are not trapped in a single meaning, they continue as an animating, enlivening presence. You will quickly discover the ancestors various aesthetic preferences. These are forms, styles and archetypes that are inherent in their makeup. Aesthetic satisfaction validates the process.
Joseph Campbell said, "The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant." Clarity is the "aha" quality -- privileged 'moments of grace.' Transient moments of grace and transformation put meaning into aesthetic arrest and creativity that is an intuitive awareness of the required action. The innocent viewer is stopped dead in their tracks and has no choice but to stare in awe at their relationship with the living world.
Aesthetic engagement is active engagement with the (genealogical) process -- engagement with the element of beauty and systemic wisdom. Aesthetic arrangement and metaphorical thought squeeze out the real meaning and value of our experience and the comprehensive properties of our relationships through 'wise relating.'
Like art, genealogy is significant life activity and a way to access systemic wisdom and connectiveness. We cultivate inner beauty in the life-changing play of our own natural history. Information is the stuff of relationship and the living world of context, relevance and integration. The conjunction of the spiritual and aesthetic is a Royal Marriage -- a grand synthesis of wholeness, our frail and mortal selves, revealed in their beauty over the epic panoply of history and myth.
If your life has not three dimensions, if you don't live in the body,
if you live on the two-dimensional plane in the paper world that is flat and printed, as if you were only living your biography, then you are nowhere.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 972.
The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth...
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics
Archetypal psychology is a ground for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our family tree. Our ancestors are on-going living residents in our psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance.
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.
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.
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.
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. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature and 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 translates 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" and more deeply into our genealogy.
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 potential for 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.
--Gregory Bateson
Archetypal Aesthetics
Archetypal psychology is a ground for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach
to genealogy -- the fertile earth in which we can plant our family tree. Our ancestors are on-going living residents in our psychological life that continue to enrich, animate, and inspire us in their enduring significance.
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.
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.
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.
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. Where lines meet dead ends or brick walls, the charts also represent emptiness.
Presence of Absence
The figures of absence inform us with their paradoxical presence. Absence of something is the negation of a presence as ‘non-presence.’ Many figurative strategies confront the notion of absence, and address the aesthetics of absence. For example, a spectre, phantom or absent figure is an archetypal representation of the presence of an absence, distorted shape (anamorphosis, a form of perspective) as uncertain presence.
Our untraceable lines remain profoundly unconscious in the silent margins from which the last known member of a lost line speaks. Such lines of descent do not enclose us but disclose our essential nature. They reflect and map out our embedding in the natural world, intricate in its elegance -- our very aliveness. Seeing with the eye of the heart gives us a very personal sense of the vastness and beauty of nature and 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 translates 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" and more deeply into our genealogy.
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 potential for 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.