Liminal Entities
Existing At the Threshold
by Iona Miller, 2016
Existing At the Threshold
by Iona Miller, 2016
"This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ‘apparition,’ the whole so-called ‘world of spirit,’ death, all these things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely eliminated from life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied."
—Rainer Maria Rilke (from the *Duino Elegies*)
In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95).
—Rainer Maria Rilke (from the *Duino Elegies*)
In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95).
13,500 year old, Urfa Man. Julian Jaynes, who wrote on eye idols, suggests their mouthless design was to enhance more hypnotically the hallucination of the dead (kings, priests, ancestors, etc.) continuing to speak to the living. Jaynes considered eye idols as speaking statues containing voices of the dead - as figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices, most likely consulted at night.
Scientists working in the cognitive science of religion have offered other explanations, including the hyperactive agency-detecting device (HADD). This tendency explains why a rustle in the bushes in the dark prompts the instinctive thought: ‘There’s someone there!’ We seem to have evolved to be extremely quick to ascribe agency – the capacity for intention and action – even to inanimate objects. In our ancestral environment, this tendency is not particularly costly in terms of survival and reproduction, but a failure to detect agents that are there can be very costly. Fail to detect a sabre-toothed cat, and it’ll likely take you out of the gene pool. The evolution of a HADD can account for the human tendency to believe in the presence of agents even when none can actually be observed. Hence the human belief in invisible person-like beings, such as spirits or gods.
https://aeon.co/ideas/belief-in-supernatural-beings-is-totally-natural-and-false
The psychologist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) produced a significant interpretive model that united ancient religion, archaeology and human neurology in his hypothesis of the bicameral mind. Though his hypothesis attracted criticism
from the time of its inception, it is far from discredited. Jaynes perceived eye idols as belonging to a category of non-ornamental statuary, which would include the Jericho skulls and ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes, that served as ‘speaking statues’ or
figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices. For Jaynes, these hallucinated voices chiefly concern verbal commands of archaic authority issuing from the dead, or ancestors, from memories and impressions stored within
the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Jaynes summarizes the psychological collaboration between eyes and voice in the following way, and explains how a statue might simulates it:
Eye-to-eye contact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is indicative of the hierarchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But in humans, perhaps because of the
much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks
to it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and universal. The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory that has yet to be
traced. It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superior’s authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s
eyes. There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the experience, and withal something of a diminution of consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it would enhance the hallucination of divine speech.12
For Jaynes, the very phenomenon of this species of eye statuary, found in conjunction with early religious environments, props up his bicameral hypothesis in that it reflects a cognitive experience that had not previously been realized. Though a degree of scepticism might be directed at the cultural extent of his bicameral hypothesis, his analysis of an auditory dimension behind classes of ancient statuary lacks in other fields where seeing, rather than hearing, provides the only explanatory solution.
Jaynes’ strength is his emphasis on the eyes of a statue mimicing living presences and overlooked acknowledgment of an affiliation between eyes and voices
specific statuary may have had, an aspect which the archaeological record does not, at surface, retain. Considering Urfa Man’s features we could subject him to the
same scheme as a compelling candidate.
Grim Oracles
A different though not unrelated category of beliefs and practices of the speaking dead sources from a constellation of folk traditions embedded in ancient Europe and elsewhere is the Cult of the Severed Head, typical examples including
disconnected laughing heads, heads that entertain at enchanted feasts, and the head said to occupy some wishing wells. Talking head symbolism and the actual necromantic practice, whether conceived to summon the voices of the dead or to produce aural hallucinations pertaining to, was prevalent. A famous, or rather infamous, necromantic use of the severed head took place close to Urfa Man's home, though distanced by millennia, in Harran, a major centre of Hermetic and Sabaean learning over the medieval period.
The grimoire named Ghayat al-Hakim (Picatrix in Latin) relates devil-worshipers of ‘old Harran’ keeping a severed head acquired through a strange and sinister ritual that gave out prophecies.13
Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Neolithic heritage is a matter of conjecture...
Though Urfa Man is singular, the features of his persona convey symbolic evidence of a communicator from a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape. His purposefully absent mouth suggests that seeing and hearing were not mutually exclusive in summoning the presence of
the dead to the perception of the living within the mind-set that produced him. Indeed, his participation in the physical may have been enhanced further by his choicely pale limestone material that gleams with a spectral appearance as
if shimmering between worlds.
Hearing the Dead: Supernatural Presence in the World of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Reference to the Balikligöl Statue By Alistair Coombs
http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/uploads/7/7/5/3/7753171/paranthropology_vol_7_no_1.pdf
The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live.
--James Hillman, A Blue Fire
Death is an existential recognition of our finitude.
Invisible Agents
The Numinous, Sensed Presence & Transcendent Function
Numinous perception carries a sense of the divine or ecstatic. This expansion of consciousness from contact with numinous archetypal energy is felt as an expansion of consciousness or awe, 'calling,' and a deepening of soul. But we tend to reify the limits of our knowledge and place our notions of God just beyond what we can conceptualize and understand, which is why physics has become so seemingly mystical recently. God = the Unknown or currently unknowable.
With no other psychobiological explanation for sensed presence in his day, Jung took experiences of the Self, or archetypes, 'spirits,' or other positive and negative visitations and impressions as epistemological metaphors, "how we know what we know", if not ontological realities. Research shows "the person feels that the 'presence' is a being they know, like a deity they pray to, the spirit of a person they have known who has died, or a spiritual teacher." It is an excitation of the amygdala. (Murphy)
So Corbin, Jung and others mistook it for a psychospiritual perception ability attributed to the subtle organ of the heart or soul, rather than a psychobiological function [though the archetype is defined as psychophysical]. Common images, often seen in NDE's, include "angels, monks in hooded robes, knights on horseback in shining armor, spirit familiars, deities, aliens, and a variety of other images" (Murphy).
We now know that awareness of the divine is an altered state of consciousness with neurological roots involving the excitation and dampening of brain regions. Under certain kinds of electromagnetic effects, Jung's 'transcendent function' appears as active unconscious systems, urges, and percepts: the Self, archetypes, divinities, personifications, ancestors, ghosts, or a 'visitation'. Some sense a presence; others hear a voice; others see a vision, or combination of percepts. Sensed presence can be a coping resource.
There is a contrast between conscious and unconscious processes that are refreshed in a conscious/unconscious cycle. Thus, complex ideas can enter consciousness automatically. Unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation is generated involuntarily. Consciousness is an interpreter in the passive frame theory -- more of a conduit for information in the brain and nervous system rather than an active creator of information.
Morsella's “Passive Frame Theory,” claims: nearly all of your brain’s work is conducted in different lobes and regions at the unconscious level, completely without your knowledge. “The information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious thought,” Morsella claims. “Nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”
The numinous category includes psychoid, instinctual and archetypal phenomena. Such epiphanies, and pleasant or unpleasant perceptions include gut feelings, visions, tastes, smells, vibrations, buzzing, tingles, sensations of falling or rising, etc. The emotional component comes from the right temporal region, while the explanatory narrative arises in the left hemisphere. (Persinger, Murphy)
https://www.god-helmet.com/sp.htm
https://www.god-helmet.com/neuromed.htm
Such phenomena are amplified in some individual with Temporal Lobe Transients (TLTs), a sub-clinical epilepsy. Electrical lability, or seizures in the temporal lobes do not usually cause physical convulsions, unless they propagate to the motor regions.
The temporal lobes host many structures and functions including memory, orientation of self in space and time, interpretations of meaning and emotional significance, organization of audio and visual patterns, smell, and language. Local discharges can be potentiated by specific memory recall or extremely low biofrequency magnetic fields penetrating brain tissue.
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is accompanied by classic personality changes. Though some researchers disagree, attributed characteristics include the following: loss of humor; intense affect; moodswings (peaks or highs, depressions, distortions, aggression); suggestibility; existential anxiety; neophobia; hypergraphia; an intense active interest in dreams, religion and philosophy; reports of psi experiences. Supreme faith is placed in the validity of subjective experience. They accept logical incongruities, displaying a rigid core of private beliefs.
This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery, a sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences ranging from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html
Such phenomena are amplified in some individual with Temporal Lobe Transients (TLTs), a sub-clinical epilepsy. Electrical lability, or seizures in the temporal lobes do not usually cause physical convulsions, unless they propagate to the motor regions.
The temporal lobes host many structures and functions including memory, orientation of self in space and time, interpretations of meaning and emotional significance, organization of audio and visual patterns, smell, and language. Local discharges can be potentiated by specific memory recall or extremely low biofrequency magnetic fields penetrating brain tissue.
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is accompanied by classic personality changes. Though some researchers disagree, attributed characteristics include the following: loss of humor; intense affect; moodswings (peaks or highs, depressions, distortions, aggression); suggestibility; existential anxiety; neophobia; hypergraphia; an intense active interest in dreams, religion and philosophy; reports of psi experiences. Supreme faith is placed in the validity of subjective experience. They accept logical incongruities, displaying a rigid core of private beliefs.
This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery, a sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences ranging from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html
This neurological frame illuminates Jung's commentary as well as other deeply engrained spiritual and religious belief systems [interpretations] surrounding such phenomena:
Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative power emanating from an archetypal figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 225.
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377
There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience.
This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 52
We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Great Unknown
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.
The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light, the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self, the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which one cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward Heaven or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and unity.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life, social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence. They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The brain is hard-wired for mystical experiences to modify the threat of our hostile existential reality (Alper). Metaphysical explanations developed for the essentially unknowable, for sudden and irresistible seizures of ecstasy. Some of these accounts were more sophisticated than others depending on their cultural background, but all shared a common core by defining the mystery of the relationship between mankind and the Unknown. It might be called a peak experience, spirit possession, epiphany, religious rapture, nirvana, satori, shaktiput, clear light, or illumination. The difference is only one of degrees of absorption, of fulfillment.
The god-experience is a process, a subjective perception, rather than an objectively provable reality. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion, sudden insight, childlike wonder, ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence, dissolution in a timeless moment, fusion, gnosis.
It is direct perception coupled with high emotion and deep realization of what appears to be ultimate truth. It rips away the veil of illusion, revealing the pure ground state of our existence without any emotional, mental, or belief filters. Left with only pure awareness, the natural mind is finally free of earthly trappings. Bathed in emotions of joy, assurance and salvation, Cosmos becomes a living presence. Immortality is sensed, so fear of death vanishes.
Many called that numinous mystery God. In some sense, religion is a reaction to what actually is. But to many, when it comes to their religion, those are fighting words, for theirs is the true way, the only way. Heaven on Earth cannot be achieved so long as those two realms are separated. God comes down to earth in our own psychophysiology, dwelling within us.
https://aeon.co/ideas/belief-in-supernatural-beings-is-totally-natural-and-false
The psychologist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) produced a significant interpretive model that united ancient religion, archaeology and human neurology in his hypothesis of the bicameral mind. Though his hypothesis attracted criticism
from the time of its inception, it is far from discredited. Jaynes perceived eye idols as belonging to a category of non-ornamental statuary, which would include the Jericho skulls and ‘Ain Ghazal statuettes, that served as ‘speaking statues’ or
figurines assisting as aids in the production of hallucinated voices. For Jaynes, these hallucinated voices chiefly concern verbal commands of archaic authority issuing from the dead, or ancestors, from memories and impressions stored within
the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Jaynes summarizes the psychological collaboration between eyes and voice in the following way, and explains how a statue might simulates it:
Eye-to-eye contact in primates is extremely important. Below humans, it is indicative of the hierarchical position of the animal, the submissive animal turning away grinning in many primate species. But in humans, perhaps because of the
much longer juvenile period, eye-to-eye contact has evolved into a social interaction of great importance. An infant child, when its mother speaks
to it, looks at the mother’s eyes, not her lips. This response is automatic and universal. The development of such eye-to-eye contact into authority relationships and love relationships is an exceedingly important trajectory that has yet to be
traced. It is sufficient here merely to suggest that you are more likely to feel a superior’s authority when you and he are staring straight into each other’s
eyes. There is a kind of stress, an unresolvedness about the experience, and withal something of a diminution of consciousness, so that, were such a relationship mimicked in a statue, it would enhance the hallucination of divine speech.12
For Jaynes, the very phenomenon of this species of eye statuary, found in conjunction with early religious environments, props up his bicameral hypothesis in that it reflects a cognitive experience that had not previously been realized. Though a degree of scepticism might be directed at the cultural extent of his bicameral hypothesis, his analysis of an auditory dimension behind classes of ancient statuary lacks in other fields where seeing, rather than hearing, provides the only explanatory solution.
Jaynes’ strength is his emphasis on the eyes of a statue mimicing living presences and overlooked acknowledgment of an affiliation between eyes and voices
specific statuary may have had, an aspect which the archaeological record does not, at surface, retain. Considering Urfa Man’s features we could subject him to the
same scheme as a compelling candidate.
Grim Oracles
A different though not unrelated category of beliefs and practices of the speaking dead sources from a constellation of folk traditions embedded in ancient Europe and elsewhere is the Cult of the Severed Head, typical examples including
disconnected laughing heads, heads that entertain at enchanted feasts, and the head said to occupy some wishing wells. Talking head symbolism and the actual necromantic practice, whether conceived to summon the voices of the dead or to produce aural hallucinations pertaining to, was prevalent. A famous, or rather infamous, necromantic use of the severed head took place close to Urfa Man's home, though distanced by millennia, in Harran, a major centre of Hermetic and Sabaean learning over the medieval period.
The grimoire named Ghayat al-Hakim (Picatrix in Latin) relates devil-worshipers of ‘old Harran’ keeping a severed head acquired through a strange and sinister ritual that gave out prophecies.13
Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Neolithic heritage is a matter of conjecture...
Though Urfa Man is singular, the features of his persona convey symbolic evidence of a communicator from a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape. His purposefully absent mouth suggests that seeing and hearing were not mutually exclusive in summoning the presence of
the dead to the perception of the living within the mind-set that produced him. Indeed, his participation in the physical may have been enhanced further by his choicely pale limestone material that gleams with a spectral appearance as
if shimmering between worlds.
Hearing the Dead: Supernatural Presence in the World of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Reference to the Balikligöl Statue By Alistair Coombs
http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/uploads/7/7/5/3/7753171/paranthropology_vol_7_no_1.pdf
The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live.
--James Hillman, A Blue Fire
Death is an existential recognition of our finitude.
Invisible Agents
The Numinous, Sensed Presence & Transcendent Function
Numinous perception carries a sense of the divine or ecstatic. This expansion of consciousness from contact with numinous archetypal energy is felt as an expansion of consciousness or awe, 'calling,' and a deepening of soul. But we tend to reify the limits of our knowledge and place our notions of God just beyond what we can conceptualize and understand, which is why physics has become so seemingly mystical recently. God = the Unknown or currently unknowable.
With no other psychobiological explanation for sensed presence in his day, Jung took experiences of the Self, or archetypes, 'spirits,' or other positive and negative visitations and impressions as epistemological metaphors, "how we know what we know", if not ontological realities. Research shows "the person feels that the 'presence' is a being they know, like a deity they pray to, the spirit of a person they have known who has died, or a spiritual teacher." It is an excitation of the amygdala. (Murphy)
So Corbin, Jung and others mistook it for a psychospiritual perception ability attributed to the subtle organ of the heart or soul, rather than a psychobiological function [though the archetype is defined as psychophysical]. Common images, often seen in NDE's, include "angels, monks in hooded robes, knights on horseback in shining armor, spirit familiars, deities, aliens, and a variety of other images" (Murphy).
We now know that awareness of the divine is an altered state of consciousness with neurological roots involving the excitation and dampening of brain regions. Under certain kinds of electromagnetic effects, Jung's 'transcendent function' appears as active unconscious systems, urges, and percepts: the Self, archetypes, divinities, personifications, ancestors, ghosts, or a 'visitation'. Some sense a presence; others hear a voice; others see a vision, or combination of percepts. Sensed presence can be a coping resource.
There is a contrast between conscious and unconscious processes that are refreshed in a conscious/unconscious cycle. Thus, complex ideas can enter consciousness automatically. Unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation is generated involuntarily. Consciousness is an interpreter in the passive frame theory -- more of a conduit for information in the brain and nervous system rather than an active creator of information.
Morsella's “Passive Frame Theory,” claims: nearly all of your brain’s work is conducted in different lobes and regions at the unconscious level, completely without your knowledge. “The information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious thought,” Morsella claims. “Nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”
The numinous category includes psychoid, instinctual and archetypal phenomena. Such epiphanies, and pleasant or unpleasant perceptions include gut feelings, visions, tastes, smells, vibrations, buzzing, tingles, sensations of falling or rising, etc. The emotional component comes from the right temporal region, while the explanatory narrative arises in the left hemisphere. (Persinger, Murphy)
https://www.god-helmet.com/sp.htm
https://www.god-helmet.com/neuromed.htm
Such phenomena are amplified in some individual with Temporal Lobe Transients (TLTs), a sub-clinical epilepsy. Electrical lability, or seizures in the temporal lobes do not usually cause physical convulsions, unless they propagate to the motor regions.
The temporal lobes host many structures and functions including memory, orientation of self in space and time, interpretations of meaning and emotional significance, organization of audio and visual patterns, smell, and language. Local discharges can be potentiated by specific memory recall or extremely low biofrequency magnetic fields penetrating brain tissue.
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is accompanied by classic personality changes. Though some researchers disagree, attributed characteristics include the following: loss of humor; intense affect; moodswings (peaks or highs, depressions, distortions, aggression); suggestibility; existential anxiety; neophobia; hypergraphia; an intense active interest in dreams, religion and philosophy; reports of psi experiences. Supreme faith is placed in the validity of subjective experience. They accept logical incongruities, displaying a rigid core of private beliefs.
This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery, a sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences ranging from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html
Such phenomena are amplified in some individual with Temporal Lobe Transients (TLTs), a sub-clinical epilepsy. Electrical lability, or seizures in the temporal lobes do not usually cause physical convulsions, unless they propagate to the motor regions.
The temporal lobes host many structures and functions including memory, orientation of self in space and time, interpretations of meaning and emotional significance, organization of audio and visual patterns, smell, and language. Local discharges can be potentiated by specific memory recall or extremely low biofrequency magnetic fields penetrating brain tissue.
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is accompanied by classic personality changes. Though some researchers disagree, attributed characteristics include the following: loss of humor; intense affect; moodswings (peaks or highs, depressions, distortions, aggression); suggestibility; existential anxiety; neophobia; hypergraphia; an intense active interest in dreams, religion and philosophy; reports of psi experiences. Supreme faith is placed in the validity of subjective experience. They accept logical incongruities, displaying a rigid core of private beliefs.
This later spiritual interest can be rooted in subjective experiences of a variety of phenomena kindled by electrical instabilities in the brain. They include, but are not limited to depersonalization, time distortion, anxiety or panic, floating or falling sensations, peripheral imagery, a sense of presence either sacred or malefic, apparitions, downloading of memory sequences and false memory confabulations or fantasies, voices and visionary experiences ranging from heavenly to hellish, and a panoply of psychophysical manifestations. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/temporal-lobes.html
This neurological frame illuminates Jung's commentary as well as other deeply engrained spiritual and religious belief systems [interpretations] surrounding such phenomena:
Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative power emanating from an archetypal figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 225.
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness.
~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and in as much as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377
There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience.
This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 52
We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Great Unknown
Imagine one of our ancient ancestors, suddenly stricken by illness or a near-fatal accident. Hovering near the brink of death, an ordinary person suddenly finds him or herself locked in an immersive visionary experience of shadowy figures, muted voices and blinding luminescence.
The cosmos opens its enfolding arms and infinity spreads out in a timeless panoply that dissolves all fear, all separation from the Divine. Fear of death vanishes in a comforting flood of bliss, peace and dazzling light, the ultimate ‘holy’ connection. Overwhelming conviction arises that this is the more fundamental Reality. The welcoming gates of a personal heaven open.
Suddenly back in the body, returned to ordinary reality, one is left to interpret that transcendent experience to oneself and others. This near-death experience may not have resulted in physical demise, but it has led to the death of the old self, the personal self -- and the rebirth, rapture, or resurrection of the soul or spirit. It brings a surge of emotions, conviction and even transformation in its wake. The soul has taken a journey from which one cannot return the same.
A descent into psychobiological hell can lead to a transcendent journey toward Heaven or perhaps the yawning abyss of the Void. Shamans, priests, prophets, mystics, and gurus arose to show the Way of navigating these nether regions, of finding healing, the eternal moment, a peaceful heart, and unity.
Our human progenitors had to directly confront existential issues of survival, adaptation, stress, mating, birth, loss, and death. They gradually developed stories about the basics of life, social, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual existence. They created myths, beliefs about creation and our creation to give meaning to life. They developed rituals, ceremonies, and practices to heal body and mind, mark life passages, and placate forces beyond their control. These accounted for their origins as well as voices, visions and experiences that seemed to come from the great Beyond.
The brain is hard-wired for mystical experiences to modify the threat of our hostile existential reality (Alper). Metaphysical explanations developed for the essentially unknowable, for sudden and irresistible seizures of ecstasy. Some of these accounts were more sophisticated than others depending on their cultural background, but all shared a common core by defining the mystery of the relationship between mankind and the Unknown. It might be called a peak experience, spirit possession, epiphany, religious rapture, nirvana, satori, shaktiput, clear light, or illumination. The difference is only one of degrees of absorption, of fulfillment.
The god-experience is a process, a subjective perception, rather than an objectively provable reality. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion, sudden insight, childlike wonder, ecstatic exaltation above bodily and personal existence, dissolution in a timeless moment, fusion, gnosis.
It is direct perception coupled with high emotion and deep realization of what appears to be ultimate truth. It rips away the veil of illusion, revealing the pure ground state of our existence without any emotional, mental, or belief filters. Left with only pure awareness, the natural mind is finally free of earthly trappings. Bathed in emotions of joy, assurance and salvation, Cosmos becomes a living presence. Immortality is sensed, so fear of death vanishes.
Many called that numinous mystery God. In some sense, religion is a reaction to what actually is. But to many, when it comes to their religion, those are fighting words, for theirs is the true way, the only way. Heaven on Earth cannot be achieved so long as those two realms are separated. God comes down to earth in our own psychophysiology, dwelling within us.
I do not think that so-called personal messages from the dead can be dismissed in globo as self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.
To the pagan mind, ghosts were very much alive--the dead could, and did, cross back and forth at will. The Church engineered the transformation of ghosts from the embodied to the amorphous, the better to supplant a form of ancestor worship with its own faith.
How the ghost stories of pagan times reveal the seamless union existing between the world of the living and the afterlife
• Demonstrates how Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today
• Explains how the returning dead were once viewed as either troublemakers or guarantors of the social order
The impermeable border the modern world sees existing between the world of the living and the afterlife was not visible to our ancestors. The dead could--and did--cross back and forth at will. The pagan mind had no fear of death, but some of the dead were definitely to be dreaded: those who failed to go peacefully into the afterlife but remained on this side in order to right a wrong that had befallen them personally or to ensure that the law promoted by the ancestors was being respected. But these dead individuals were a far cry from the amorphous ectoplasm that is featured in modern ghost stories. These earlier visitors from beyond the grave--known as revenants--slept, ate, and fought like men, even when, like Klaufi of the Svarfdaela Saga, they carried their heads in their arms.
Revenants were part of the ancestor worship prevalent in the pagan world and still practiced in indigenous cultures such as the Fang and Kota of equatorial Africa, among others. The Church, eager to supplant this familial faith with its own, engineered the transformation of the corporeal revenant into the disembodied ghost of modern times, which could then be easily discounted as a figment of the imagination or the work of the devil. The sanctified grounds of the church cemetery replaced the burial mounds on the family farm, where the ancestors remained as an integral part of the living community. This exile to the formal graveyard, ironically enough, has contributed to the great loss of the sacred that characterizes the modern world.
To the pagan mind, ghosts were very much alive--the dead could, and did, cross back and forth at will. The Church engineered the transformation of ghosts from the embodied to the amorphous, the better to supplant a form of ancestor worship with its own faith.
How the ghost stories of pagan times reveal the seamless union existing between the world of the living and the afterlife
• Demonstrates how Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today
• Explains how the returning dead were once viewed as either troublemakers or guarantors of the social order
The impermeable border the modern world sees existing between the world of the living and the afterlife was not visible to our ancestors. The dead could--and did--cross back and forth at will. The pagan mind had no fear of death, but some of the dead were definitely to be dreaded: those who failed to go peacefully into the afterlife but remained on this side in order to right a wrong that had befallen them personally or to ensure that the law promoted by the ancestors was being respected. But these dead individuals were a far cry from the amorphous ectoplasm that is featured in modern ghost stories. These earlier visitors from beyond the grave--known as revenants--slept, ate, and fought like men, even when, like Klaufi of the Svarfdaela Saga, they carried their heads in their arms.
Revenants were part of the ancestor worship prevalent in the pagan world and still practiced in indigenous cultures such as the Fang and Kota of equatorial Africa, among others. The Church, eager to supplant this familial faith with its own, engineered the transformation of the corporeal revenant into the disembodied ghost of modern times, which could then be easily discounted as a figment of the imagination or the work of the devil. The sanctified grounds of the church cemetery replaced the burial mounds on the family farm, where the ancestors remained as an integral part of the living community. This exile to the formal graveyard, ironically enough, has contributed to the great loss of the sacred that characterizes the modern world.
Antigone & Oedipus, Plague of Thebes
Functional Integration
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide.
In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away, through 'loss of soul.' But suffering is related to individual destiny, the meaning of life, and identity crises or “spiritual emergencies.” Suffering is not necessarily pathological, and can change our worldview, values, and character, enabling wisdom and understanding.
Etymologically, the word “suffering” comes from two Latin roots: sub—meaning “under”—and ferre, meaning “to carry or bear,” as in “to bear a burden.” ... The root of the word “suffer” is also the root of the English word “fertile,” so it is also related to the idea of bearing fruit. Psychologically, suffering can produce something; it’s not random or meaningless, nor merely something to get rid of. In reality, it can act as either a fertilizer or a poison. It can be harmful or it can be helpful, but we need a framework by which we can understand it. (Bright, http://www.pacificapost.com/)
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression biologically supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
The aim of Greek tragedy, like depth psychology, is catharsis, a healthy purging of fear and pity -- a release of tension. Catastrophes, realization of a set fate or unveiling of what is meant to be, are purges that create the possibility for something new.
Individual death is not the end of destiny, thus the fate of Oedipus is set up in the actions of his ancestors generations earlier. The modern concept of catastrophe is that the past can be reversed in a meaningful narrative. The transcendent supplants the linear narrative. Historical events work retroactively in the past, and that is one key to psychogenealogy.
We have to draw our own conclusions about the true nature of Greek tragedy. As has been seen, the dramas time and again show "a mortal will, engaged in an unequal struggle with destiny, whether that destiny be represented by the forces within or without the mind. The conflict reaches its tragic issue when the individual perishes."
The tragic issue, the defeat of the individual, leads to the realization that human presumption to determine one's destiny is necessarily ruinous. Greek tragedy, then, deals with the most fundamental issue that exists at all: man's relationship to the gods.
The underlying question of all these dramas concerns the laws and standards by which the gods let man live. It is the paradox of tragedy that it will never yield any definite answers. The only result in each drama is one's awareness of the unreliability and deceptiveness of human reason, the realization that the true shape of things cannot always be judged by their surface appearance, the experience that man's view and insight can be clouded over by daemonic forces: in short, the experience of the nothingness of man.
Greek tragedy, then, is an expression of man realizing that his human standards have become questionable.Although Greek tragedies, at first glance, seem to represent the case of individuals, what happens to these individuals could happen to other human beings just as well. The suffering protagonist is closely connected with the species Man, and shows with special distinctness what it means to be human.
Catastrophic Collision of the Freedom to Act and Fate
These Greek dramas transcend all individuality and become dramas about humanity. The real hero of Greek tragedy is humanity itself, Humanity torn between appearance and reality, pride and humility, and always at a loss when in contact with superhuman forces.And in depicting Man's destiny, the possibilities of disaster which can unexpectedly fall upon him, the tragic writer can at the same time show the greatness of man who has to suffer such a tragic lot, representative of mankind. But this is just one side of it.
Essential is the revelation of truth through man's suffering, the insight that gains in and through his catastrophe.Greek tragic drama -- with a few exceptions -- always results in a catastrophe, yet the way in which the hero fails, often evokes our admiration for him.In his suffering, in the entire destruction of his outer and inner self, the tragic hero attains a certain greatness.Sooner or later we have to ask ourselves why the spectacle of a man or of a woman destroying themselves or being destroyed should give the spectator any kind of emotional, intellectual or aesthetic pleasure.
Tragedy is the disaster which comes to those who represent and who symbolize, in a peculiarly intense form, those flaws and short-comings which are universal in a lesser form. Tragedy is a disaster that happens to other people; and the greater the person, so it seems, the more acute is their tragedy. Put at its crudest -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.In a way, also, tragedy is a kind of protest; it is a cry of terror or complaint or rage or anguish to and against whoever or whatever is responsible for "this harsh rack", for suffering, for death, be it God, Nature, Fate, circumstance, chance or just something nameless. It is a about the tragic situation in which the tragic hero or heroine find themselves.
http://www.bsu.edu/classes/magrath/cc201ss/tragedy/GreekTragedy.html
The "Tragic Vision"
In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":
The Catastrophic Conclusion
In tragedy, unlike comedy, the denouement tends to be catastrophic; it is perceived as the concluding phase of a downward movement. In comedy, the change of fortune is upward; the happy ending prevails (more desirable than true, says Northrop Frye in the Anatomy of Criticism), as obstacles are dispelled and the hero and/or heroine are happily incorporated into society or form the nucleus of a new and better society. In tragedy, there is the unhappy ending--the hero's or heroine's fall from fortune and consequent isolation from society, often ending in death.
The Sense of Inevitability
To the audience of a tragedy, the catastrophe will seem, finally, to be inevitable. Although tragedy can not simply be identified with uncontrollable disasters, such as an incurable disease or an earthquake, still there is the feeling that the protagonist is inevitably caught by operating forces which are beyond his control (sometimes like destiny, visible only in their effects). Whether grounded in fate or nemesis, accident or chance, or in a causal sequence set going through some action or decision initiated by the tragic protagonist himself or herself, the operating forces assume the function of a distant and impersonal power.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
Functional Integration
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide.
In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away, through 'loss of soul.' But suffering is related to individual destiny, the meaning of life, and identity crises or “spiritual emergencies.” Suffering is not necessarily pathological, and can change our worldview, values, and character, enabling wisdom and understanding.
Etymologically, the word “suffering” comes from two Latin roots: sub—meaning “under”—and ferre, meaning “to carry or bear,” as in “to bear a burden.” ... The root of the word “suffer” is also the root of the English word “fertile,” so it is also related to the idea of bearing fruit. Psychologically, suffering can produce something; it’s not random or meaningless, nor merely something to get rid of. In reality, it can act as either a fertilizer or a poison. It can be harmful or it can be helpful, but we need a framework by which we can understand it. (Bright, http://www.pacificapost.com/)
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression biologically supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
The aim of Greek tragedy, like depth psychology, is catharsis, a healthy purging of fear and pity -- a release of tension. Catastrophes, realization of a set fate or unveiling of what is meant to be, are purges that create the possibility for something new.
Individual death is not the end of destiny, thus the fate of Oedipus is set up in the actions of his ancestors generations earlier. The modern concept of catastrophe is that the past can be reversed in a meaningful narrative. The transcendent supplants the linear narrative. Historical events work retroactively in the past, and that is one key to psychogenealogy.
We have to draw our own conclusions about the true nature of Greek tragedy. As has been seen, the dramas time and again show "a mortal will, engaged in an unequal struggle with destiny, whether that destiny be represented by the forces within or without the mind. The conflict reaches its tragic issue when the individual perishes."
The tragic issue, the defeat of the individual, leads to the realization that human presumption to determine one's destiny is necessarily ruinous. Greek tragedy, then, deals with the most fundamental issue that exists at all: man's relationship to the gods.
The underlying question of all these dramas concerns the laws and standards by which the gods let man live. It is the paradox of tragedy that it will never yield any definite answers. The only result in each drama is one's awareness of the unreliability and deceptiveness of human reason, the realization that the true shape of things cannot always be judged by their surface appearance, the experience that man's view and insight can be clouded over by daemonic forces: in short, the experience of the nothingness of man.
Greek tragedy, then, is an expression of man realizing that his human standards have become questionable.Although Greek tragedies, at first glance, seem to represent the case of individuals, what happens to these individuals could happen to other human beings just as well. The suffering protagonist is closely connected with the species Man, and shows with special distinctness what it means to be human.
Catastrophic Collision of the Freedom to Act and Fate
These Greek dramas transcend all individuality and become dramas about humanity. The real hero of Greek tragedy is humanity itself, Humanity torn between appearance and reality, pride and humility, and always at a loss when in contact with superhuman forces.And in depicting Man's destiny, the possibilities of disaster which can unexpectedly fall upon him, the tragic writer can at the same time show the greatness of man who has to suffer such a tragic lot, representative of mankind. But this is just one side of it.
Essential is the revelation of truth through man's suffering, the insight that gains in and through his catastrophe.Greek tragic drama -- with a few exceptions -- always results in a catastrophe, yet the way in which the hero fails, often evokes our admiration for him.In his suffering, in the entire destruction of his outer and inner self, the tragic hero attains a certain greatness.Sooner or later we have to ask ourselves why the spectacle of a man or of a woman destroying themselves or being destroyed should give the spectator any kind of emotional, intellectual or aesthetic pleasure.
Tragedy is the disaster which comes to those who represent and who symbolize, in a peculiarly intense form, those flaws and short-comings which are universal in a lesser form. Tragedy is a disaster that happens to other people; and the greater the person, so it seems, the more acute is their tragedy. Put at its crudest -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.In a way, also, tragedy is a kind of protest; it is a cry of terror or complaint or rage or anguish to and against whoever or whatever is responsible for "this harsh rack", for suffering, for death, be it God, Nature, Fate, circumstance, chance or just something nameless. It is a about the tragic situation in which the tragic hero or heroine find themselves.
http://www.bsu.edu/classes/magrath/cc201ss/tragedy/GreekTragedy.html
The "Tragic Vision"
In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":
- The conclusion is catastrophic.
- The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable.
- It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist.
- The protagonist suffers terribly.
- The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability.
- Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human capacities for learning.
- The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral responsibility.
The Catastrophic Conclusion
In tragedy, unlike comedy, the denouement tends to be catastrophic; it is perceived as the concluding phase of a downward movement. In comedy, the change of fortune is upward; the happy ending prevails (more desirable than true, says Northrop Frye in the Anatomy of Criticism), as obstacles are dispelled and the hero and/or heroine are happily incorporated into society or form the nucleus of a new and better society. In tragedy, there is the unhappy ending--the hero's or heroine's fall from fortune and consequent isolation from society, often ending in death.
The Sense of Inevitability
To the audience of a tragedy, the catastrophe will seem, finally, to be inevitable. Although tragedy can not simply be identified with uncontrollable disasters, such as an incurable disease or an earthquake, still there is the feeling that the protagonist is inevitably caught by operating forces which are beyond his control (sometimes like destiny, visible only in their effects). Whether grounded in fate or nemesis, accident or chance, or in a causal sequence set going through some action or decision initiated by the tragic protagonist himself or herself, the operating forces assume the function of a distant and impersonal power.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
"LIMINAL (Latin limin, "threshold"): A liminal space is a blurry boundary zone between two established and clear spatial areas, and a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between two segments of time. Most cultures have special rituals, customs, or markers to indicate the transitional nature of such liminal spaces or liminal times. Examples include boundary stones, rites of passage, high school graduations, births, deaths, burials, marriages, carrying the bride over the threshold, etc. These special markers may involve elaborate ceremonies (wedding vows), special wardrobe (mortarboard caps and medieval scholar's gown), or unusual taboos (the custom of not seeing the bride before the wedding). Liminal zones feature strongly in folklore, mythology, and Arthurian legend." https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_L.html
Liminal Entities
by Iona Miller
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Shaman spirit walkers work in liminal time and space. These edge walkers walk between the worlds, connecting those of the spirit world with those of this one, talking with the spirits, helping keep life in balance and harmony. Similarly, we can communicate with our own ancestral spirits.
These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Intuition demands representation for communication. There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as our ancestors. Where do we draw the line between knowledge and belief? There are differences between attributions of being right and knowing,
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is merely for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is an abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless.
Transitory Situations
Stories need liminality; the middle of every story is liminal -- disruptive, chaotic, disorienting, and transformative. Transformation always requires death of the old person to become something new. Our lives are full of inconvenient setbacks from some purpose we don’t comprehend. In waiting, we become.
Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions. We learn to see and embrace these moments, knowing that a birth of some sort is about to happen, but as with birth there may be discomfort and waiting. This is the time between birth and death, life passages, the time between wounding and healing. Liminality means learning to live with tension and pain and even the boredom of waiting -- contentment in tension.
Liminal Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous or transpersonal phenomenon. Ultimately, it means any place or point of entering or beginning. In psychology the term limen means the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect. Liminal spaces are where the boundaries become thin, as described in "second sight" -- edgy places, in the sense of forefront, excitable, and provocative.
Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity, that abyss.
Between what was and what will be lies kairos or the depth dimension of time and the frontier or wilderness of space. Kairos is the moment when spontaneous change is possible, the opportune moment -- the timely qualities of a given instant. In rhetoric kairos is "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved." We don't really know how to proceed.
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree. How are necessary truths known? An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed participatory relations to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. Liminal time is the moment when something changes from one state to another. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity.”
by Iona Miller
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Shaman spirit walkers work in liminal time and space. These edge walkers walk between the worlds, connecting those of the spirit world with those of this one, talking with the spirits, helping keep life in balance and harmony. Similarly, we can communicate with our own ancestral spirits.
These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Intuition demands representation for communication. There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as our ancestors. Where do we draw the line between knowledge and belief? There are differences between attributions of being right and knowing,
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is merely for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is an abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless.
Transitory Situations
Stories need liminality; the middle of every story is liminal -- disruptive, chaotic, disorienting, and transformative. Transformation always requires death of the old person to become something new. Our lives are full of inconvenient setbacks from some purpose we don’t comprehend. In waiting, we become.
Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions. We learn to see and embrace these moments, knowing that a birth of some sort is about to happen, but as with birth there may be discomfort and waiting. This is the time between birth and death, life passages, the time between wounding and healing. Liminality means learning to live with tension and pain and even the boredom of waiting -- contentment in tension.
Liminal Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous or transpersonal phenomenon. Ultimately, it means any place or point of entering or beginning. In psychology the term limen means the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect. Liminal spaces are where the boundaries become thin, as described in "second sight" -- edgy places, in the sense of forefront, excitable, and provocative.
Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity, that abyss.
Between what was and what will be lies kairos or the depth dimension of time and the frontier or wilderness of space. Kairos is the moment when spontaneous change is possible, the opportune moment -- the timely qualities of a given instant. In rhetoric kairos is "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved." We don't really know how to proceed.
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree. How are necessary truths known? An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed participatory relations to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. Liminal time is the moment when something changes from one state to another. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity.”
Liminal Wisdom
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way. Is the world something fearful or not? Such speculations are part of classical studies: Imagine that Antigone and Creon meet in the Underworld. Write a dialogue in which they argue over which one of them is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness. Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way. Is the world something fearful or not? Such speculations are part of classical studies: Imagine that Antigone and Creon meet in the Underworld. Write a dialogue in which they argue over which one of them is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness. Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
Liminal Archetypes
In Sumerian mythology, Tiamat is a liminal goddess.
Tiamat is often imagined as a huge serpent. Of the typical animal motifs – the snake, the tiger, or the bird – the snake or serpent is the most complex and ambiguous of all. Like the fish or archetypal sea creature, snakes inhabit a non-human underworld – dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces.
Jung provides an example of the anima expressing itself in a dream in the form of a snake. He does not say whether this dream belongs to a man or woman: A female snake comports herself tenderly and insinuatingly, speaking with a human voice (Jung, 1951, p.201). The snake confers upon humanity, in this case via a woman, supernatural knowledge – knowledge forbidden by the god of Genesis, but not necessarily by the gods in contemporaneous cultures at the time this myth was written.
In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is the liminal god of death and rebirth, and cyclic dismemberment. According to Jung, archetypes are the God-likeness in man that are “meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower.” It is through the archetypes that life renewal occurs. It is quite evident that the bereaved enter a transitional, or liminal, period following a sudden separation by death, and this liminal state is revealed in their dreams. In Eastern religions, it is believed that dreams cross the realm of sleep for the living and the place of death for the deceased; therefore, encounters with deceased spirits in dreams are not uncommon. Such encounters, referred to as visitations, may occur for several months or even years following a loss by death, and can be a source of resolution and transition for the bereaved.
Significant dream themes may come upon the bereaved during the early phases of bereavement, all of which connect them symbolically and psychically with the world of the dead. Such themes include the death tunnel and bridal chamber commonly seen in near-death experiences, dismembered Osiris, the Egyptian deity of afterlife, the Dark Night of the Soul, a representation of the deep sorrow of bereavement, images of the Self as encounters with the divine, and the death wedding or sacred marriage in which the soul of the deceased, as well as the bereaved, unite with the universal dimension.
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls -- decision-making and psychological wandering -- and 'wandering spirits'. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Hermes is the inner experience between conscious and unconscious, punctuated by meaningful synchronicities, sudden compelling through and feelings, or vivid image, and twilight or trace states that unexpectedly envelope us. Liminal Hermes suspends us between one familiar ego place and another. At its deepest this feeling is a sense of strangeness or subtle depersonalization, heralding a new leg of journey.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.
In Sumerian mythology, Tiamat is a liminal goddess.
Tiamat is often imagined as a huge serpent. Of the typical animal motifs – the snake, the tiger, or the bird – the snake or serpent is the most complex and ambiguous of all. Like the fish or archetypal sea creature, snakes inhabit a non-human underworld – dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces.
Jung provides an example of the anima expressing itself in a dream in the form of a snake. He does not say whether this dream belongs to a man or woman: A female snake comports herself tenderly and insinuatingly, speaking with a human voice (Jung, 1951, p.201). The snake confers upon humanity, in this case via a woman, supernatural knowledge – knowledge forbidden by the god of Genesis, but not necessarily by the gods in contemporaneous cultures at the time this myth was written.
In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is the liminal god of death and rebirth, and cyclic dismemberment. According to Jung, archetypes are the God-likeness in man that are “meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower.” It is through the archetypes that life renewal occurs. It is quite evident that the bereaved enter a transitional, or liminal, period following a sudden separation by death, and this liminal state is revealed in their dreams. In Eastern religions, it is believed that dreams cross the realm of sleep for the living and the place of death for the deceased; therefore, encounters with deceased spirits in dreams are not uncommon. Such encounters, referred to as visitations, may occur for several months or even years following a loss by death, and can be a source of resolution and transition for the bereaved.
Significant dream themes may come upon the bereaved during the early phases of bereavement, all of which connect them symbolically and psychically with the world of the dead. Such themes include the death tunnel and bridal chamber commonly seen in near-death experiences, dismembered Osiris, the Egyptian deity of afterlife, the Dark Night of the Soul, a representation of the deep sorrow of bereavement, images of the Self as encounters with the divine, and the death wedding or sacred marriage in which the soul of the deceased, as well as the bereaved, unite with the universal dimension.
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls -- decision-making and psychological wandering -- and 'wandering spirits'. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Hermes is the inner experience between conscious and unconscious, punctuated by meaningful synchronicities, sudden compelling through and feelings, or vivid image, and twilight or trace states that unexpectedly envelope us. Liminal Hermes suspends us between one familiar ego place and another. At its deepest this feeling is a sense of strangeness or subtle depersonalization, heralding a new leg of journey.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.
Henry Corbin speaks of the heart as a sacred organ of perception in Sufi thought. The heart is an organ of theophanic perception.” That is, “of the perception through which the encounter between Heaven and Earth” [takes place]; A “mid-zone.”
The heart is the sacred organ of perception which allows us to perceive the middle world between heaven and earth. This mid-zone is the liminal, the borderlands, where the eternal meets the temporal, the finite meets the infinite, freedom meets necessity.
With this view in mind we can understand the sacred nature of the archetypal unconscious: an immanent, liminal space filled with archetypal representation which connect and interweaves the eternal and the temporal.
From this perspective we can be playful with our conceptualizations. Imagining a liminal realm that is also a karmic realm: holding the power to affect, alter, and color our relationship to life. A karmic realm in which our memories, deeds and actions are stored, and worked over until they are worked through in the process of Self-realization. In this realm “life” mixes with the “sacred” creating the karmic dimensions: a dimension that is composed of symbol, affect, representations, and images.
If we barrow from Carl Jung’s concept of the archetypal unconscious we can see these internal representations as part archetypal, part personal. Internal representations can be viewed as as combined internal object representations. Internal objects exist within a liminal space: partly as archetypal materiel, partly as personal representations of reality, and partly as representations of the larger adaptive matrix.
Based on the theories of Carl Jung we might say that our own personal material is mixed and mingled with the archetypal material. Archetypal images contain not only their pure form, but also the remnants of ones own personal representations and narratives. This is the nature of our karma.
In exploring the mid-realm one may confront the gatekeepers of the eternal. The foreboding imagery of psychic life. Some of this imagery is personal in the form; Some of it is collective and archetypal. Whether we are speaking of angels or demons, of growth or dissolution and decay, they are our own personal representations: combined internal objects that represent our particular way of coloring and altering the immanent truths.
One way to imagine it is that all of our life experiences go through a process of spiritual psychic digestion within this karmic (liminal) space. Our life experiences are stored within the liminal realm as traces and fragments, and either integrate into the mental matrix or remain as undigested fragments. The integrated material is stored as unconscious or conscious memory units and images, that we can use for conceptualization. The material that remains undigested is left as fragmented symbols, affect, and images that affect our life course and experience of life.
Fragmented and undigested material is karmic in that it alters both ones relationship to the inner sacred and to the outer “reality”. It colors the sacred “real” by altering the way we perceive the world around us, as well as our relationship with the divine nature of existence.
References: 1 Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi 2 Prologue from Memories, Dreams, Reflections
http://jennalilla.org/2010/05/21/the-unconscious-2/
The heart is the sacred organ of perception which allows us to perceive the middle world between heaven and earth. This mid-zone is the liminal, the borderlands, where the eternal meets the temporal, the finite meets the infinite, freedom meets necessity.
With this view in mind we can understand the sacred nature of the archetypal unconscious: an immanent, liminal space filled with archetypal representation which connect and interweaves the eternal and the temporal.
From this perspective we can be playful with our conceptualizations. Imagining a liminal realm that is also a karmic realm: holding the power to affect, alter, and color our relationship to life. A karmic realm in which our memories, deeds and actions are stored, and worked over until they are worked through in the process of Self-realization. In this realm “life” mixes with the “sacred” creating the karmic dimensions: a dimension that is composed of symbol, affect, representations, and images.
If we barrow from Carl Jung’s concept of the archetypal unconscious we can see these internal representations as part archetypal, part personal. Internal representations can be viewed as as combined internal object representations. Internal objects exist within a liminal space: partly as archetypal materiel, partly as personal representations of reality, and partly as representations of the larger adaptive matrix.
Based on the theories of Carl Jung we might say that our own personal material is mixed and mingled with the archetypal material. Archetypal images contain not only their pure form, but also the remnants of ones own personal representations and narratives. This is the nature of our karma.
In exploring the mid-realm one may confront the gatekeepers of the eternal. The foreboding imagery of psychic life. Some of this imagery is personal in the form; Some of it is collective and archetypal. Whether we are speaking of angels or demons, of growth or dissolution and decay, they are our own personal representations: combined internal objects that represent our particular way of coloring and altering the immanent truths.
One way to imagine it is that all of our life experiences go through a process of spiritual psychic digestion within this karmic (liminal) space. Our life experiences are stored within the liminal realm as traces and fragments, and either integrate into the mental matrix or remain as undigested fragments. The integrated material is stored as unconscious or conscious memory units and images, that we can use for conceptualization. The material that remains undigested is left as fragmented symbols, affect, and images that affect our life course and experience of life.
Fragmented and undigested material is karmic in that it alters both ones relationship to the inner sacred and to the outer “reality”. It colors the sacred “real” by altering the way we perceive the world around us, as well as our relationship with the divine nature of existence.
References: 1 Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi 2 Prologue from Memories, Dreams, Reflections
http://jennalilla.org/2010/05/21/the-unconscious-2/
Oedipus awaits death
HOUSE OF THEBES
Intergenerational Tragedy
"Many of Laius's descendants met with ill fortune, but whether this was because he violated the laws of hospitality and marriage by carrying off his host's son and raping him, or because he ignored the oracle's warning not to have children, or some combination of these, is not clear. Another theory is that the entire line of Cadmus was cursed, either by Ares, when Cadmus killed his serpent, or else by Hephaestus, who resented the fact that Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, Hephaestus's straying wife. Certainly many of Cadmus's descendants had tragic ends." (Wikipedia)
Willing & Unwilling Dupes of Fate
Antigone is about the struggle for balance between mankind and the Divine. Laius' descendants all had an ill fate. In the Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". The newly dead would be ferried across the Acheron, "river of woe," by Charon to the Underworld. The nearby Necromanteion was believed by devotees to be the door to Hades, the realm of the dead.
Antigone descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss. The family of Oedipus is a kinship of tragedy because of ancestral transgressions (Laius abducted and raped the king's son, Chrysippus; attempted infanticide of Oedipus), incest (e.g. Antigone is the fruit of an incestuous union), slaying of kin, ancestral curses and personal errors that can be related to inherited guilt.
Intergenerational Tragedy
"Many of Laius's descendants met with ill fortune, but whether this was because he violated the laws of hospitality and marriage by carrying off his host's son and raping him, or because he ignored the oracle's warning not to have children, or some combination of these, is not clear. Another theory is that the entire line of Cadmus was cursed, either by Ares, when Cadmus killed his serpent, or else by Hephaestus, who resented the fact that Cadmus married Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, Hephaestus's straying wife. Certainly many of Cadmus's descendants had tragic ends." (Wikipedia)
Willing & Unwilling Dupes of Fate
Antigone is about the struggle for balance between mankind and the Divine. Laius' descendants all had an ill fate. In the Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". The newly dead would be ferried across the Acheron, "river of woe," by Charon to the Underworld. The nearby Necromanteion was believed by devotees to be the door to Hades, the realm of the dead.
Antigone descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss. The family of Oedipus is a kinship of tragedy because of ancestral transgressions (Laius abducted and raped the king's son, Chrysippus; attempted infanticide of Oedipus), incest (e.g. Antigone is the fruit of an incestuous union), slaying of kin, ancestral curses and personal errors that can be related to inherited guilt.
"Ismene my true sister, born from the same mother, is there any torment Oedipus suffered which Zeus will not impose on us while we yet live? There is nothing —
neither grief nor violence, shame nor dishonor —no evil you and I have not endured already." (Translation by Fainlight-Littman 2009, 139)
Antigone exposes a tragic ethical rift between the so-called feminine "Divine Law" which Antigone represents and the "Human Law," represented by the ruler Creon. A female figure questions the role of the patriarchal state and challenges the system that writes her off as insignificant. She denies, she refuses, she means it. Her authentic voice and claim to autonomy suggests a knowledge of unknown origin but consequence.
Questioning the system and political struggles and multiple exclusions is a very modern theme for an ancient tragedy. How many times has Antigone been reborn with the same predicament of delayed and displaced punishment? But she demands and maintains her voice, and sticks up for her family values without making her true self disappear. Her name is a homologue of that: Anti-Gone.
Antigone is a paradigm of bodily exposure and exile, political and gender struggles, bare and naked life -- naked awareness. In Sophocles, she puts the will of the gods ahead of man-made laws, but a cascade of fateful deaths still ensues to close the tragedy. But in Euripides, the calamity is averted by the intercession of Dionysus, followed by the marriage of Antigone and Hæmon.
https://ecowatch.com/2016/01/18/fracking-industry-bankrupt/
https://www.academia.edu/4559662/Ancestral_fault_in_Greek_thought_Antigone_s_inherited_%CE%BF%E1%BC%B6%CF%83%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82
neither grief nor violence, shame nor dishonor —no evil you and I have not endured already." (Translation by Fainlight-Littman 2009, 139)
Antigone exposes a tragic ethical rift between the so-called feminine "Divine Law" which Antigone represents and the "Human Law," represented by the ruler Creon. A female figure questions the role of the patriarchal state and challenges the system that writes her off as insignificant. She denies, she refuses, she means it. Her authentic voice and claim to autonomy suggests a knowledge of unknown origin but consequence.
Questioning the system and political struggles and multiple exclusions is a very modern theme for an ancient tragedy. How many times has Antigone been reborn with the same predicament of delayed and displaced punishment? But she demands and maintains her voice, and sticks up for her family values without making her true self disappear. Her name is a homologue of that: Anti-Gone.
Antigone is a paradigm of bodily exposure and exile, political and gender struggles, bare and naked life -- naked awareness. In Sophocles, she puts the will of the gods ahead of man-made laws, but a cascade of fateful deaths still ensues to close the tragedy. But in Euripides, the calamity is averted by the intercession of Dionysus, followed by the marriage of Antigone and Hæmon.
https://ecowatch.com/2016/01/18/fracking-industry-bankrupt/
https://www.academia.edu/4559662/Ancestral_fault_in_Greek_thought_Antigone_s_inherited_%CE%BF%E1%BC%B6%CF%83%CF%84%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82
Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing.
~Philemon to Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 341
Similarly, the unconscious pits itself against the conscious, and it is the special tragedy of man that in order to win consciousness he is forced into dissociation with nature. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38
"What is the human? . . .The myths in which our lives are embedded . . . are built deeply into character, often below awareness, so that they are essentially religious, matters of faith.'' --Gregory Bateson
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.”
--Jung, They Practice of Psychotherapy (1953)
Our genealogy is our natural History. Our psychogenealogy is the natural history of our soul. There is another kind of primordial human in us that responds to a transgenerational approach to the family tree. Jung called it 'the two million year old man," the instinctive self, rooted in nature, who speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. As a whole, the Tree symbolizes the true self.
Consciousness is the alchemical prima materia, our awareness, our true selves -- the essence of the Great Work. The mystical marriage is the unification and transcendence of male/female duality. Conflicting drives originating on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels create splits in the personality. "We can conquer unconsciousness by regular work but never by a grand gesture." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 31)
Jung says that, "The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis."
Further, Jung said that "it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude.
I find that this "choice" is in many cases rather a fate than a voluntary decision.
I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called " free will" and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice.
They are, as a matter of fact, dominants up to a certain point. That is the reason why one is confronted with an archetype, because we cannot undo it by merely making it conscious. It has to be taken into account and that is the main task of any prolonged analysis. The deviation from the dominants causes a certain dissociation, i.e., a loss of vitality, what the primitives call "a loss of soul." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626)
An integrated approach roots us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore, including family ties, legacies, parenting, matriarchy and patriarchy (Gaillard).
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
"It is possible that a certain historical atmosphere is born with us by means of which we can repeat strange details almost as if they were historical facts." (Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy and the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage:
"We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science."
The Transgenerational Integration movement is developing such awareness for both therapists and the general population. Part of that school of thought is an active psychological approach to genealogy and the ebb and flow of life itself, whether self-initiated or in the therapeutic relationship.
TI has its own genealogy rooted in the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm, and other methods, such as Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and Metaphor Therapy. It also draws on established conceptual models from family therapy, including the genogram, a map of the family system that discloses the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviors and emotional experiences.
Entanglement & Re-enactment
TI does not suggest a radical paradigm shift to different tenets or fundamental assumptions, say, about the nature of reality -- changing initial conditions and/or assumptions. It amplifies existing therapeutic models. However, it helps account for errors and anomalies in the old or waning and competing paradigms and provides greater clarity and a higher information ratio.
All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.
Transgenerational therapy focuses on the relationships in a family. We carry many patterns from the generations that preceded us in our family tree. Family patterns are a very important factor that affects the 'inner child’. Many unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, loneliness, alcoholism, and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families.
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide. In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away.
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
~Philemon to Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 341
Similarly, the unconscious pits itself against the conscious, and it is the special tragedy of man that in order to win consciousness he is forced into dissociation with nature. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38
"What is the human? . . .The myths in which our lives are embedded . . . are built deeply into character, often below awareness, so that they are essentially religious, matters of faith.'' --Gregory Bateson
The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, “divine.”
--Jung, They Practice of Psychotherapy (1953)
Our genealogy is our natural History. Our psychogenealogy is the natural history of our soul. There is another kind of primordial human in us that responds to a transgenerational approach to the family tree. Jung called it 'the two million year old man," the instinctive self, rooted in nature, who speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. As a whole, the Tree symbolizes the true self.
Consciousness is the alchemical prima materia, our awareness, our true selves -- the essence of the Great Work. The mystical marriage is the unification and transcendence of male/female duality. Conflicting drives originating on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels create splits in the personality. "We can conquer unconsciousness by regular work but never by a grand gesture." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 31)
Jung says that, "The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis."
Further, Jung said that "it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude.
I find that this "choice" is in many cases rather a fate than a voluntary decision.
I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called " free will" and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice.
They are, as a matter of fact, dominants up to a certain point. That is the reason why one is confronted with an archetype, because we cannot undo it by merely making it conscious. It has to be taken into account and that is the main task of any prolonged analysis. The deviation from the dominants causes a certain dissociation, i.e., a loss of vitality, what the primitives call "a loss of soul." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626)
An integrated approach roots us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore, including family ties, legacies, parenting, matriarchy and patriarchy (Gaillard).
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
"It is possible that a certain historical atmosphere is born with us by means of which we can repeat strange details almost as if they were historical facts." (Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy and the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage:
"We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science."
The Transgenerational Integration movement is developing such awareness for both therapists and the general population. Part of that school of thought is an active psychological approach to genealogy and the ebb and flow of life itself, whether self-initiated or in the therapeutic relationship.
TI has its own genealogy rooted in the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm, and other methods, such as Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and Metaphor Therapy. It also draws on established conceptual models from family therapy, including the genogram, a map of the family system that discloses the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviors and emotional experiences.
Entanglement & Re-enactment
TI does not suggest a radical paradigm shift to different tenets or fundamental assumptions, say, about the nature of reality -- changing initial conditions and/or assumptions. It amplifies existing therapeutic models. However, it helps account for errors and anomalies in the old or waning and competing paradigms and provides greater clarity and a higher information ratio.
All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.
Transgenerational therapy focuses on the relationships in a family. We carry many patterns from the generations that preceded us in our family tree. Family patterns are a very important factor that affects the 'inner child’. Many unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, loneliness, alcoholism, and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families.
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide. In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away.
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
Speaking to the Dead
Originally, ventriloquism was a religious practice.[1] The name comes from the Latin for to speak from the stomach, i.e. venter (belly) and loqui (speak).[2] The Greeks called this gastromancy (Greek: εγγαστριμυθία). The noises produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the unliving, who took up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist. The ventriloquist would then interpret the sounds, as they were thought to be able to speak to the dead, as well as foretell the future. One of the earliest recorded group of prophets to use this technique was the Pythia, the priestess at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, who acted as the conduit for the Delphic Oracle.
The earliest ventriloquists were probably ancient Greeks who "threw" their voices to simulate the pronouncements of oracles or give new life to dead bodies. ... Latin word ventriloquus, meaning "belly speaker"—was regarded as a dark art, a devil in the midsection. One of the most successful early gastromancers was Eurykles, a prophet at Athens; gastromancers came to be referred to as Euryklides in his honour. The ancient ventriloquist often had no puppet to use, so he spoke with ghosts or the spirits ... A person who can talk to the dead (anecromancer) or foresee the future: in ancient times, it was believed that chosen prophets could communicate with spirits of the dead by means of ventriloquism. By producing sounds ... Hence the name “ventriloquist”, which literally means “belly speaker” in Latin. Traces of the art are found in Egyptian and Hebrew archaeology. Eurykles of Athens was the most celebrated of Greek ventriloquists, who were called after him Euryklides, and also Engastrimanteis (belly-prophets). It is not impossible that the priests of ancient times were masters of this art, and that to it may be ascribed such miracles as the speaking statues of the Egyptians, the Greek oracles, and the stone in the river Pactolus, the sound of which put robbers to flight. Many indigenous tribes know ventriloquism, as the Zulus, the Maoris and the Eskimos. It is well known in Hindustan and China, where it is practiced by traveling magicians.
Action, Agency, & Voice Dislocation
Archaeological evidence found in Egypt offers proof that ventriloquism dates back to 2000 B.C. The use of the art probably goes back to the beginning of intelligible language itself. The very early ventriloquists did not have wooden friends and hand puppets, but used their abilities to "throw their voices" for more arcane reasons. Mysterious occurrences that gave rise to superstitions may now be possibly explained as ventriloquism. For example, many people have believed in spirits "talking to them from the other side." More likely, the familiar spirit was a ventriloquist at work.
The temple built at Delphi in the sixth century B.C. had Greek oracles who spoke the words of Apollo through his priestess Pythia. The words came from the sky or out of a sacred stone. The Oracles were obviously ventriloquists. The oracles stood there, words came forth, and their lips did not move. They were practicing gastromancy, a form of ventriloquism. The early Greeks called these belly-talkers "Eurykliden" (named after Euryklides, who produced the sounds of birds and small animals without moving their lips).
In the Middle Ages, it was thought to be similar to witchcraft. As Spiritualism led to stage magic and escapology, so ventriloquism became more of a performance art as, starting around the 19th century, it shed its mystical trappings.
Originally, ventriloquism was a religious practice.[1] The name comes from the Latin for to speak from the stomach, i.e. venter (belly) and loqui (speak).[2] The Greeks called this gastromancy (Greek: εγγαστριμυθία). The noises produced by the stomach were thought to be the voices of the unliving, who took up residence in the stomach of the ventriloquist. The ventriloquist would then interpret the sounds, as they were thought to be able to speak to the dead, as well as foretell the future. One of the earliest recorded group of prophets to use this technique was the Pythia, the priestess at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, who acted as the conduit for the Delphic Oracle.
The earliest ventriloquists were probably ancient Greeks who "threw" their voices to simulate the pronouncements of oracles or give new life to dead bodies. ... Latin word ventriloquus, meaning "belly speaker"—was regarded as a dark art, a devil in the midsection. One of the most successful early gastromancers was Eurykles, a prophet at Athens; gastromancers came to be referred to as Euryklides in his honour. The ancient ventriloquist often had no puppet to use, so he spoke with ghosts or the spirits ... A person who can talk to the dead (anecromancer) or foresee the future: in ancient times, it was believed that chosen prophets could communicate with spirits of the dead by means of ventriloquism. By producing sounds ... Hence the name “ventriloquist”, which literally means “belly speaker” in Latin. Traces of the art are found in Egyptian and Hebrew archaeology. Eurykles of Athens was the most celebrated of Greek ventriloquists, who were called after him Euryklides, and also Engastrimanteis (belly-prophets). It is not impossible that the priests of ancient times were masters of this art, and that to it may be ascribed such miracles as the speaking statues of the Egyptians, the Greek oracles, and the stone in the river Pactolus, the sound of which put robbers to flight. Many indigenous tribes know ventriloquism, as the Zulus, the Maoris and the Eskimos. It is well known in Hindustan and China, where it is practiced by traveling magicians.
Action, Agency, & Voice Dislocation
Archaeological evidence found in Egypt offers proof that ventriloquism dates back to 2000 B.C. The use of the art probably goes back to the beginning of intelligible language itself. The very early ventriloquists did not have wooden friends and hand puppets, but used their abilities to "throw their voices" for more arcane reasons. Mysterious occurrences that gave rise to superstitions may now be possibly explained as ventriloquism. For example, many people have believed in spirits "talking to them from the other side." More likely, the familiar spirit was a ventriloquist at work.
The temple built at Delphi in the sixth century B.C. had Greek oracles who spoke the words of Apollo through his priestess Pythia. The words came from the sky or out of a sacred stone. The Oracles were obviously ventriloquists. The oracles stood there, words came forth, and their lips did not move. They were practicing gastromancy, a form of ventriloquism. The early Greeks called these belly-talkers "Eurykliden" (named after Euryklides, who produced the sounds of birds and small animals without moving their lips).
In the Middle Ages, it was thought to be similar to witchcraft. As Spiritualism led to stage magic and escapology, so ventriloquism became more of a performance art as, starting around the 19th century, it shed its mystical trappings.
RP: How often do you call on your ancestors?
SS: As often as needed. For instance, we speak to our ancestors every morning and every evening. In the morning, we wake up and say: “Wow. Thank you. I am alive today.” We always tell them what we intend to do in that day. We might say something like: “I’m human and I might err here and there. Please show up and help me remember what I said I was going to do today. If there are obstacles, please remove them,” and so forth.
At the end of the day, we report back to them about how our day unfolded. We might say: “Hey, that was a great day. Thank you for helping out,” or “It wasn’t such a great day. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. Here is what I really need,” or “Hey, I asked for this, and I need it delivered. What’s up with that?”
RP: What happens in the case of a relative with whom you or someone in your family didn’t have the best relationship? Is there a way to heal those kinds of relationships once someone has died?
SS: In the Dagara tradition, when someone dies they become smarter. You may need to do some healing work with a particular ancestor. So you pray for them and for yourself and talk to them. You tell them about something they did that might have been an innocent act, but that is still driving you crazy today. You tell them that now that they are smarter and know exactly what happened, that they need to go and unplug those things that are driving you or your family crazy and put in the right “plugs.”
On the other hand, even if you haven’t called on an ancestor, they might call on you first. You might be the only one in your family who feels like something is not right, or that something within your family is making you crazy. Or everybody in your family might be wondering why you think certain things that happened in your family are important when none of them think it is important. In this case, you are the one who was picked by the ancestor to actually be the bridgemaker between this world and the world of the ancestors.
After someone dies, they look around to see who in the family can really help them achieve their goals? They knock on different doorways. They think, maybe if I make enough noise they might wake up, or they find someone who is available and wide open, and why not call on that person? They will call on you to help them make right whatever they have done wrong because of the limitations of the body.
RP: How does a person receive this message from an ancestor?
SS: Through dreams, or through feelings, such as by feeling uncomfortable about things that have happened in the family. Sometimes a person has an uneasy feeling in which they wonder why nobody ever talks about a particular ancestor, or how a person died in a certain way, or why nothing has been done about it by anyone. When you are the one who has been picked by that particular ancestor, you continue to think about the ancestors.
RP: When calling on an ancestor, should we only contact those beings who were from our immediate families?
SS: If it is difficult for you to go to an immediate ancestor, you can go to what we call, “the pool of the ancestor.” The pool of the ancestor has nothing to do with your genealogy; it can be anyone who is an ancestor. It can be the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr, or the spirit of Gandhi, or Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the brave, “crazy” women who encouraged women to speak up and not let their voices go silent.
Trees, animals, rocks, rivers and mountains are also considered to be part of the pool of the ancestors. In the case of someone needing help in creating a bridge to their ancestors, they could call unto the pool of ancestors to come and give them instructions.
http://www.sobonfu.com/articles/interviews/interview-by-randy-peyser/
SS: As often as needed. For instance, we speak to our ancestors every morning and every evening. In the morning, we wake up and say: “Wow. Thank you. I am alive today.” We always tell them what we intend to do in that day. We might say something like: “I’m human and I might err here and there. Please show up and help me remember what I said I was going to do today. If there are obstacles, please remove them,” and so forth.
At the end of the day, we report back to them about how our day unfolded. We might say: “Hey, that was a great day. Thank you for helping out,” or “It wasn’t such a great day. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. Here is what I really need,” or “Hey, I asked for this, and I need it delivered. What’s up with that?”
RP: What happens in the case of a relative with whom you or someone in your family didn’t have the best relationship? Is there a way to heal those kinds of relationships once someone has died?
SS: In the Dagara tradition, when someone dies they become smarter. You may need to do some healing work with a particular ancestor. So you pray for them and for yourself and talk to them. You tell them about something they did that might have been an innocent act, but that is still driving you crazy today. You tell them that now that they are smarter and know exactly what happened, that they need to go and unplug those things that are driving you or your family crazy and put in the right “plugs.”
On the other hand, even if you haven’t called on an ancestor, they might call on you first. You might be the only one in your family who feels like something is not right, or that something within your family is making you crazy. Or everybody in your family might be wondering why you think certain things that happened in your family are important when none of them think it is important. In this case, you are the one who was picked by the ancestor to actually be the bridgemaker between this world and the world of the ancestors.
After someone dies, they look around to see who in the family can really help them achieve their goals? They knock on different doorways. They think, maybe if I make enough noise they might wake up, or they find someone who is available and wide open, and why not call on that person? They will call on you to help them make right whatever they have done wrong because of the limitations of the body.
RP: How does a person receive this message from an ancestor?
SS: Through dreams, or through feelings, such as by feeling uncomfortable about things that have happened in the family. Sometimes a person has an uneasy feeling in which they wonder why nobody ever talks about a particular ancestor, or how a person died in a certain way, or why nothing has been done about it by anyone. When you are the one who has been picked by that particular ancestor, you continue to think about the ancestors.
RP: When calling on an ancestor, should we only contact those beings who were from our immediate families?
SS: If it is difficult for you to go to an immediate ancestor, you can go to what we call, “the pool of the ancestor.” The pool of the ancestor has nothing to do with your genealogy; it can be anyone who is an ancestor. It can be the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr, or the spirit of Gandhi, or Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the brave, “crazy” women who encouraged women to speak up and not let their voices go silent.
Trees, animals, rocks, rivers and mountains are also considered to be part of the pool of the ancestors. In the case of someone needing help in creating a bridge to their ancestors, they could call unto the pool of ancestors to come and give them instructions.
http://www.sobonfu.com/articles/interviews/interview-by-randy-peyser/
Copyright © 2016, Iona Miller,
All Rights Reserved, Sangreality Trust; GenIsis Genealogy
on all graphic and written content.
If you mirror my works, pls include the credit and URL LINK for reference.
iona_m@yahoo.com
http://ionamiller.weebly.com
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
All Rights Reserved, Sangreality Trust; GenIsis Genealogy
on all graphic and written content.
If you mirror my works, pls include the credit and URL LINK for reference.
iona_m@yahoo.com
http://ionamiller.weebly.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
