ORIGINAL AWARENESS
Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created. The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes. Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb. Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 311.
Eve Bites the Fruit, Iona Miller
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, what and who you love.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Imaginal psychology urges us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective. Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Jung (CW 12, par. 32) cautioned that we must be alone to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience, he said, gives us an indestructible foundation. "Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt." He concludes, "we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse." (Letters, Vol 1, p. 458-459) Jung also notes, "Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of." (Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 442) It isn't rare, but it is a move toward self-actualization or self-realization.
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/t-groups-paranoia.html
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, even if you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process. There are enough inherent problems in genealogy -
innumerable clerical errors and lapses of focus, to
say nothing of successfully hidden births.
While the tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process, and while participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Randy Mack, Birth
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Imaginal psychology urges us to move beyond the monotheistic myth of self-domination by the abstract concepts of a rational heroic ego, self, or god. James Hillman noted the ego too is an image. It makes problems to solve them with will and intentionality, but that is an illusory perspective. Consciousness is not based on concepts of ego or self, though it has been identified as such. Archetypes generate the transformational images and the universal material of myth and drama, but they bear the mark of personal and cultural conditioning. They provide archaic and timeless meaning.
Hillman dubs ego a "myth of inflation", not the secret key to the development of consciousness, but a source of fallacies, defining its literal fantasies as reality. In A Blue Fire (pg. 34), he suggests, "placing in abeyance such metaphors as: choice and light, problem solving and reality testing, strengthening, developing, controlling, progressing." He condemns new age insistence on transformation - sloughing off the old self and interpretive schemes for an idealization that is essentially another self-delusion.
Jung (CW 12, par. 32) cautioned that we must be alone to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience, he said, gives us an indestructible foundation. "Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt." He concludes, "we must be able to stand alone vis a vis the unconscious for better or worse." (Letters, Vol 1, p. 458-459) Jung also notes, "Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of." (Letters, Vol. 1, pg. 442) It isn't rare, but it is a move toward self-actualization or self-realization.
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/t-groups-paranoia.html
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, even if you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process. There are enough inherent problems in genealogy -
innumerable clerical errors and lapses of focus, to
say nothing of successfully hidden births.
While the tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process, and while participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Randy Mack, Birth
Our Book of Remembrance
Narrative Arc, Tracing Our Lineage, Self-Awareness, The Great Work, Amplification, Raising Cain, Syzygy, Atavisms, Ancestral Beings, Family Wisdom, Time Conceals, How You Came to Be, Transferred Guilt, Legacy of Misfortune, Future Behind; Past In Front, Timeless Unconscious
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. We recursively turn back to our origins like the oroboros serpent biting its own tail. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, what and who you love, and how you interpret what you find. Your pedigree is your Book of Remembrance.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." That redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own insights and clarity. Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of the First Families of history. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and the word video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. That presumes we are capable of doing so -- integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms.
“Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament
and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
Therefore, by denying the dead we are denying ourselves.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy is based in part on the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, even if you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - innumerable clerical errors and lapses of focus, to
say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Narrative Arc, Tracing Our Lineage, Self-Awareness, The Great Work, Amplification, Raising Cain, Syzygy, Atavisms, Ancestral Beings, Family Wisdom, Time Conceals, How You Came to Be, Transferred Guilt, Legacy of Misfortune, Future Behind; Past In Front, Timeless Unconscious
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. We recursively turn back to our origins like the oroboros serpent biting its own tail. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, what and who you love, and how you interpret what you find. Your pedigree is your Book of Remembrance.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." That redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own insights and clarity. Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of the First Families of history. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and the word video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. That presumes we are capable of doing so -- integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms.
“Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament
and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
Therefore, by denying the dead we are denying ourselves.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy is based in part on the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, even if you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - innumerable clerical errors and lapses of focus, to
say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Original Awareness
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
These archetypal structures are part of our common biological, cultural and personal heritages. They are rooted in matter as much as in spirit. They are, if you like, divine. In any case, they are potent and given, and they transcend the ego. Further, these structures are autonomous and independent of our moral systems, both personal and social. They are no more purely good nor purely evil than is the force of gravity. Therefore, it behooves us, personally and collectively, to become aware of these forces so that we are not driven blindly by them (Fortuna dragging us by the forelock). Instead, we can work in conscious consonance with them (in dialogue with Providence). -Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice.
“Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own gr-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call'. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- my very own, giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonmnet, and a variety of other human concerns. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We can construe our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious, personally acquired contents which constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation it to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform as awareness transforms, appearing in various forms as consciousness shifts.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child as a symbol of moving from duality to union, self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with attendant metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the 'dreamtime' and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in therapy, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
“Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines.. Naturally, the royal lines are simply the most well-documented, while more common lines were not, but are genetically or ancestrally actually a bigger portion of our allotment.
The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation or self-delusion, and shadow effects.
“Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness.
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life to time and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
For instance, children whose parents die, or who face emotional or physical abuse, or experience childhood neglect, or witness marital discord between their parents are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, lung disease, diabetes, headaches, multiple sclerosis and lupus as adults. Facing difficult circumstances in childhood increases six-fold your chances of having myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) as an adult. Kids who lose a parent have triple the risk of depression in their lifetimes. Children whose parents divorce are twice as likely to suffer a stroke later down the line....The adversity a child faces doesn’t have to be severe abuse in order to create deep biophysical changes that can lead to chronic health conditions in adulthood.
Chronic parental discord; enduring low-dose humiliation or blame and shame; chronic teasing; the quiet divorce between two secretly seething parents; a parent’s premature exit from a child’s life; the emotional scars of growing up with a hypercritical, unsteady, narcissistic, bipolar, alcoholic, addicted or depressed parent; physical or emotional abuse or neglect: these happen in all too many families. Although the details of individual adverse experiences differ from one home to another and from one neighbourhood to another, they are all precursors to the same organic chemical changes deep in the gray matter of the developing brain.
However, now that we have scientific evidence that the brain is genetically modified by childhood experience, we can no longer draw that line in the sand. With hundreds of studies showing that childhood adversity hurts our mental and physical health, putting us at greater risk for learning disorders, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, depression, obesity, suicide, substance abuse, failed relationships, violence, poor parenting and early death, we just can’t afford to make such distinctions.
Even if we have been set on high-reactive mode for decades or a lifetime, we can still dial it down. We can respond to life’s inevitable stressors more appropriately and shift away from an overactive inflammatory response. We can become neurobiologically resilient. We can turn bad epigenetics into good epigenetics and rescue ourselves. We have the capacity, within ourselves, to create better health. We might call this brave undertaking ‘the neurobiology of awakening’.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness
Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal’ (Atria), by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Copyright © Donna Jackson Nakazawa, 2015.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
These archetypal structures are part of our common biological, cultural and personal heritages. They are rooted in matter as much as in spirit. They are, if you like, divine. In any case, they are potent and given, and they transcend the ego. Further, these structures are autonomous and independent of our moral systems, both personal and social. They are no more purely good nor purely evil than is the force of gravity. Therefore, it behooves us, personally and collectively, to become aware of these forces so that we are not driven blindly by them (Fortuna dragging us by the forelock). Instead, we can work in conscious consonance with them (in dialogue with Providence). -Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice.
“Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own gr-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call'. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- my very own, giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonmnet, and a variety of other human concerns. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We can construe our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious, personally acquired contents which constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation it to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform as awareness transforms, appearing in various forms as consciousness shifts.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child as a symbol of moving from duality to union, self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with attendant metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the 'dreamtime' and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in therapy, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
“Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines.. Naturally, the royal lines are simply the most well-documented, while more common lines were not, but are genetically or ancestrally actually a bigger portion of our allotment.
The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation or self-delusion, and shadow effects.
“Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.” ― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness.
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life to time and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
For instance, children whose parents die, or who face emotional or physical abuse, or experience childhood neglect, or witness marital discord between their parents are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, lung disease, diabetes, headaches, multiple sclerosis and lupus as adults. Facing difficult circumstances in childhood increases six-fold your chances of having myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) as an adult. Kids who lose a parent have triple the risk of depression in their lifetimes. Children whose parents divorce are twice as likely to suffer a stroke later down the line....The adversity a child faces doesn’t have to be severe abuse in order to create deep biophysical changes that can lead to chronic health conditions in adulthood.
Chronic parental discord; enduring low-dose humiliation or blame and shame; chronic teasing; the quiet divorce between two secretly seething parents; a parent’s premature exit from a child’s life; the emotional scars of growing up with a hypercritical, unsteady, narcissistic, bipolar, alcoholic, addicted or depressed parent; physical or emotional abuse or neglect: these happen in all too many families. Although the details of individual adverse experiences differ from one home to another and from one neighbourhood to another, they are all precursors to the same organic chemical changes deep in the gray matter of the developing brain.
However, now that we have scientific evidence that the brain is genetically modified by childhood experience, we can no longer draw that line in the sand. With hundreds of studies showing that childhood adversity hurts our mental and physical health, putting us at greater risk for learning disorders, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, depression, obesity, suicide, substance abuse, failed relationships, violence, poor parenting and early death, we just can’t afford to make such distinctions.
Even if we have been set on high-reactive mode for decades or a lifetime, we can still dial it down. We can respond to life’s inevitable stressors more appropriately and shift away from an overactive inflammatory response. We can become neurobiologically resilient. We can turn bad epigenetics into good epigenetics and rescue ourselves. We have the capacity, within ourselves, to create better health. We might call this brave undertaking ‘the neurobiology of awakening’.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness
Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal’ (Atria), by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. Copyright © Donna Jackson Nakazawa, 2015.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
“Millennia Gaia” by Oberon Zell“
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the oroboros serpent biting its own tail. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious.
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Narration is a root metaphor. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration. It is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves.
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do with, primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, it is the opening of the heart.(Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development of intergenerational life-themes. Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we seek order for security, but some of it is inherent. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests." We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity. This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." That redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity. Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of the First Family of history. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. We participate more knowingly in the the process of personal growth. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms.
“Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament
and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
Therefore, by denying the dead we are denying ourselves.
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, even if you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - innumerable clerical errors and lapses of focus, to
say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
The patterning or configuration of experience, intent, and behavior form a "tendency to isomorphism". The therapist sees in the clinical material through perceptual process recurrent, identifiable forms. Any small piece of clinical material may contain the total configuration, both past and future. It is the resonance or expansion and reexpansion of this awareness over time that leads to change rather than particularized insight itself. Insight does not result from learning but results from a subsequent phenomenological shift in the holographic template called insight. Insight results from expansion and overload rather than from a specific, focused understanding.
Within the process model, the total patterns of experiencing within the organismic whole which have remained unattended became the holographic blur. In other words, this part of the unconscious is not regarded as a preexisting form. Drive manifestations in thought, repressed memories, archetypal themes, and so on are particularized meanings, cognitively derived from the holographic "frequency domain"--the stage of transforming sensory data across the entire brain.
Because the frequency domain deals with the density of events, time and space are collapsed in it. Not until these mathematical transforms are reversed does the object or image reappear as concrete, three-dimensional reality "out there." In the frequency domain itself there is no out there (Pribram, 1982). Pribram's "frequency domain" is Bohm's "implicate order" while the image domain is "explicate order." The transformative process may be holographic. The manner by which old and new identities are assimilated, by which affects are released, are potentially deepened by therapeutic trance, especially process-oriented trance--absorption in the dynamic flow of psychic imagery.
Sometimes the client's mental representations are dominated by form, especially that initiated by past experiences. Other times, consciousness is dominated more by formlessness, uncommitted attention, receptivity to new ideas. Between frames, or states of consciousness are transitive or "empty" moments in which vague, unformulated experience occurs. These states make it possible to assimilate those "contents" of conscious and unconscious into the self--providing a sense of space for play and experimentation. (Miller, Multimind)
The patterning or configuration of experience, intent, and behavior form a "tendency to isomorphism". The therapist sees in the clinical material through perceptual process recurrent, identifiable forms. Any small piece of clinical material may contain the total configuration, both past and future. It is the resonance or expansion and reexpansion of this awareness over time that leads to change rather than particularized insight itself. Insight does not result from learning but results from a subsequent phenomenological shift in the holographic template called insight. Insight results from expansion and overload rather than from a specific, focused understanding.
Within the process model, the total patterns of experiencing within the organismic whole which have remained unattended became the holographic blur. In other words, this part of the unconscious is not regarded as a preexisting form. Drive manifestations in thought, repressed memories, archetypal themes, and so on are particularized meanings, cognitively derived from the holographic "frequency domain"--the stage of transforming sensory data across the entire brain.
Because the frequency domain deals with the density of events, time and space are collapsed in it. Not until these mathematical transforms are reversed does the object or image reappear as concrete, three-dimensional reality "out there." In the frequency domain itself there is no out there (Pribram, 1982). Pribram's "frequency domain" is Bohm's "implicate order" while the image domain is "explicate order." The transformative process may be holographic. The manner by which old and new identities are assimilated, by which affects are released, are potentially deepened by therapeutic trance, especially process-oriented trance--absorption in the dynamic flow of psychic imagery.
Sometimes the client's mental representations are dominated by form, especially that initiated by past experiences. Other times, consciousness is dominated more by formlessness, uncommitted attention, receptivity to new ideas. Between frames, or states of consciousness are transitive or "empty" moments in which vague, unformulated experience occurs. These states make it possible to assimilate those "contents" of conscious and unconscious into the self--providing a sense of space for play and experimentation.
VORTICES OF THOUGHT
Why are structures formed? Why do repetitive patterns occur? Using David Bohm's concept of implicate and explicate ordering, Shainberg (1987) suggests that the explicate order is what we see as form. He asserts that human consciousness and language are relatively autonomous subtotalities, but they also create fixed points in this universal forming which block further transformations with inner conflict or interpersonal problems. He uses the same analogy Graywolf developed independently in CCP: these points become like rocks around which the stream of life moves.
By definition these fixations are part of the explicate as well as the implicate order. Form is not an isolated definitive outlined thing which relates to other objects. Its structure is the active process, a structuating event, that is making a relationship to all other active processes. When we experience our own relative consistency within the formative process, we assume that we are a continuous being with a capacity to respond, which we think of as our 'self,' in connection with other continuous forms.
According to Shainberg, this self-simulation becomes fixed on ideas or images of good (or bad) situations that have occurred in its experiences. It then attempts to replay them in the present because they worked (gave pleasure) in the past. When consciousness meets new situations and checks with memory for help in defining the nature of the new situation, it often depends more on memory for determining what is in front of it than it does on the perception of reality, or raw experience.
This tendency to live in terms of memory is most serious in those whose life since childhood has been tense and conflicted, and who have been able to integrate the uncertainties of their reality. While thoughts, images and feelings are processes which connect "things" in the movement of relationship, they can also fix the relationships into specific old forms. The fixation into repetitive behavior that is characteristic of human beings is part of what we might think of as the "form of repetition" in nature.
We observe the repetition of forms in consciousness when it consistently meets the present with the past. Whether it is in the form of repeating an old relationship or attempting to obtain the goal of a particular desire, consciousness uses the same mechanism to engage the present. And that mechanism is itself a repetition of a past event. So, at many levels, and among them human consciousness, nature is expressing the form of repetition.
The explicate form--the memory image--becomes a nodal point which demands that a new situation becomes like an old one. When a particular thought or focus in consciousness dominates a a person's behavior, this flow in human relationship is inhibited. Such foci force relating processes into a vortex by insisting that the movement of relationship stay in its orbit. Such vortices lead to separation, conflict, emptiness.
The matrix of thoughts creates a focus around which there are relationships that form a vortex and make up a fragmented subsystem, a 'relatively autonomous subtotality' which, in contrast to other subtotalities, brings about conflict with the larger whole. The vortex fragments off from the movement that is occurring in the other aspects of the universe. It is not receptive to information from those aspects.
The fixed ideas organize the relationships in the present and bring about a system of relationships that keep the vortex operating in a way which, to some extent, separates the system from the larger whole. This response repeatedly unfolds a form which restricts the movement in the implicate, but we don't seem to respond to any feedback we notice about that restriction.
Despite psychological conflicts or psychosomatic illnesses the security in the repetition is read as preferable to any change. We might guess that if this form were connected with the flow of the implicate its characteristics would be transformed by the integration with that flow and the block would be released and more open relationships would unfold. But, unfacilitated, this doesn't happen with much regularity.
Without process work, such as CCP, the form maintains itself and there is no action by the brain to create a more harmonious relationship with reality. Apparently the agreement brought about by this subsystem has provided pleasure and security which is communicated to the brain as more satisfactory than the alternatives memory promises beyond the repetition of these safety measures. As children, we naturally form a center, a 'self' to focus our relationships. But that focus naturally dissolves when each ordered condition opens new relationships to other foci around us. That changing moving process of relating is after all the essential insecurity of human existence.
THE SELF THEN IS A RELATIVELY AUTONOMOUS SUBTOTALITY THAT UNFOLDS IN THE IMPLICATE AND IS DISPLAYED IN THE EXPLICATE, ONLY TO BE DISSOLVED AGAIN INTO THE IMPLICATE. Our brains are another subtotality and the responses that flow through them are part of the explicate order as well. The thoughts and images construct the self but that flow of responses in the brain includes the seductive offering which comes with the promises of security in the repetitions of memory and mother's support for identifying with some fixed ways of living.
The propaganda of consciousness seems to be that if we choose one identity, one self, one set of plans for how to be in the world, we might find security and pleasure. But dedication to the realization of that image fixes a person's relationship in the explicate order and in some sense curtails flow in the implicate order.
When fixation occurs in the natural world, for example in the unfolding of genetic programming, its purpose is to maintain a balance with the whole movement of the implicate order and its connection. The curtailment of flow insinuates pathology. The life process of people caught in such an image is a circular form that operates inside its own criteria and does not connect with the elements of the reality outside of its defined fragment. What is most astounding in this image process is the way the individual commits himself completely to the virtues of the state through thought and internal dialogue.
THE REPETITIVE USE OF THOUGHT ACTS LIKE A ROCK IN A STREAM.
The vortex is formed as a result of forces exercised by the form of repetition in consciousness. The pull to repeat the desirable memories draws all other relating processes of the implicate order into the orbit of the explicate focus. The person who is absorbed by the fixation of this self-image responds to those aspects of reality which enable execution of that image. But individuals who are caught in the repetitive process that makes a vortex do occasionally become aware of their fragmented condition and their inadequate relationship to the greater whole of the implicate order. Moving into realms not controlled by thought, their fixation dissolves when their behavior opens into relationships of a more formless nature.
A vortex is formed based on the premise that the image provides certainty and security. The contradiction to realize the fixed image of what life should be and the movement of the implicate order creates a deep strain at the core of being. Repeating the same behavior again and again narrows the frame of mind. The fixation is dissolved through transformation by something larger than the self-simulation. There are many different ways in which we sense the limitations of our thought and manage to find connections to the implicate order beyond. The therapeutic dialogue brings release from the trap of self-orientation. Being with another whose worldview is more expansive is part of it. So is immersion in the flow of creative process.
The narration of the therapeutic process goes back and forth among the participants creating a dialog which is the matrix of a mutual virtual reality. When the dialogue partners see that thought gets into a frozen state, or that the same images are appearing chronically in different form, the process dissolves the state, and the oscillation around the vortex stops. Discussion after the session and follow up lead to a new story about what constitutes self. Shainberg concludes that, "points of order or centers of organization are inherent to the implicate order as it unfolds into the explicate. These points always create something of a vortex around them as they provide for interactions and further relationships in that flow."
Thus the new primal self-image is better adapted, stabilizing. Fixed images in consciousness are only relatively fixed points as there are numerous relationships intertwining and unfolding from them, even if they do form a vortex. We are left with the image of psyche as vortices within vortices within vortices. This image is precisely that of a "strange attractor" in chaos theory. Edward Lorenz defined it as consisting not "of a simple point, curve, or higher-dimensional manifold, but [it] contains an infinite complex of manifolds..."
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Studies of dissociative states in Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) disclose that simple confabulation is not an adequate model for the syndrome. Conscious role-playing could not duplicate certain abilities. We can consider a possible role for state-dependent learning in the phenomenology of MPD (Silberman, et al, 1985). Patients may experience themselves as several discrete alter personalities who do not share consciousness or memories with one another. Disparate personality states compartmen-talize information and learning.
Both drugs and mood states have been shown to induce state-specific encoding operations and retrieval strategies, and provide specific cues for accessing previous experience. Information acquired in a given state remains available in memory, but inaccessible when remembering takes place under different retrieval (state) conditions. MPD patients may provide more powerful markers and contexts for encoding and retrieving previous experience than does the conscious role playing of personality states by controls.
MPD cannot be "faked," because dissociation creates super-normal phenomena in memory, cognition, learning, and psychosomatic manifestations. In contrast to classical state-dependent learning phenomena, however, which are generally more robust under free recall conditions, the partial dissociation of MPDs tended to be more pronounced under recognition. Highly dissociative MPDs may have allergies or other specific illnesses in some alters and not others.
Tart (1990) offers a model for MPD based on the World Simulation Process approach. He roots its purpose in survival and adaptability by construction of rapidly functioning internal models of the real world. "Simulation" of the self, providing a sense of continuity of identity, is part of its purpose, also. It includes psychophysical coherence between self image and external reality, but usually includes a sense of an internal psychological self beyond bodily compo-nents.
A core psychological pattern tends to control other aspects of the World Simulation Process, automatically organizing the rest of experience around itself in a way that further supports the basic pattern. These patterns/systems try to stabilize themselves, preserve themselves, maintain identity. For example, anger or any other core pattern can become the dominant core of the World Simulation Process, which automatically (mis)interprets sensory patterns of the world and self in a way consonant with core pattern.
Since the virtual reality created by the WSP is "reality" for the time being, it is very difficult not to completely identify with the virtual reality as experienced and accept it as "real" reality. He notes that "while we ordinarily completely and automatically identify with the self that is produced by the World Simulation Process, we do not have to...There is a great freedom available, a kind of enlightenment, when you realize that the world and self you take for granted because they are an immediate perception are actually, in a vitally important way, an interpretation, a simulation, not final reality."
When the WSP gives us virtual realities that differ from the real world in significant ways, we begin to behave maladaptively, creating both real world consequences and/or psychological suffering in ourselves and others. Deciding what is "real" in the world is heavily influenced by the virtual realities already created by our WSP. Tart defines a person with MPD as "someone who has two or more well developed core patterns, constellation patterns that can take over his or her World Simulation Process such that the person temporarily lives in a virtual reality that constitutes an identity, a personality, a state of consciousness...that is experientially perfectly real."
He considers a "normal" person to have only one well developed pattern, yet with considerable degrees of multiplicity. The "neurotic's" WSP differs in areas of suffering and maladaptive functioning. The "psychotic" lives in a virtual reality so obviously different from the virtual reality range of "normals" that it is obviously different, perhaps constituting a threat to themselves and others.
POLYTHEISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The "multiple" model of human nature suggested by MPD research invites comparison with the work of such theorists as psychologist James Hillman, and other archetypal and imaginal psychologists, such as Bolen, Miller, and Woolger. In the conventional model of psyche proposed by modern psychology and medicine, human nature is described largely in terms of an all-important central ego. All other facets of psychic experience are considered subordinate and relative to it.
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
RADICAL PLURALISM
The Creative Consciousness Process recognizes all these varieties of pluralism, but suggests an even more iconoclastic view--radical pluralism. CCP is not based in dialogue with any inner figures, but in "becoming" whatever image the psyche suggests within the process of flow. Thus, it moves beyond identification, beyond alters, beyond personification, beyond archetypes as godforms, even beyond humanism, into the psychoid realm of nature. The radical deconstructionalist stance promotes the direct experience of pluralistic consciousness in whatever form it appears, and fosters movement toward formlessness--destructuralization.
Thus one may begin a consciousness journey as the "dream self", dream figure, or even background, but move quickly through these symbolic "doorways" to less structured forms or patterns. Rather than engaging any aspect or presentation of self in dialogue, the movement is toward one of immersion in the free flow of consciousness wherever that leads.
One may become an object, a force of nature, a tiny mote, a color, a spiral, even empty space. The dialogue, or narrative, comes not from engaging imaginal figures but within the co-conscious exchange of subject and guide, a dynamic, emergent story which deepens and "carries" the process forward. The direct experience of "de-personification" of psychic elements points to the "psychoid" nature of the psyche, and fosters the realization of connection to the greater whole. One comes to perceive directly and experientially that one is potentially all of it.
Consciousness seeks to take on imaginal and physical form, and we partake of that experience at any level of existence within the "virtual space" of the therapeutic context. Much like the Buddhist concept of anatman--no self or no soul--we can experience directly what it means to be pure consciousness incarnating through a multitude of forms, culminating in the impressionistic experience of formlessness. As all things, we are neither this nor that--no thing.
As pure potential, all possibilities exist for re-structuring prior to the return to ordinary consciousness. We can experience directly that we are not a "self" or even "selves" moving through a concrete reality. We are consciousness in search of itself, experiencing the panoply of multitudinous, dynamic, energetic forms. The entity we are has no "stable" center in the classical sense, only an apparently contiguous memory of self and world simulation. This sense of a confined self can be radically destructured through consciousness journeys, which facilitate the perception of the flow of events.
No two journeys are ever the same, though certain patterns and forms tend to persist and recur. You can never step into the same river twice. CCP helps us move deeper into the psyche, past "thinking-feeling-believing" levels of the psyche, below mythic patterning, even below primal existential patterning. Below any hierarchical systems is a state of pure being. This process of "diving deep" through the layers of acquired constructs "destratifies" perceptual consciousness leaving its pure state undiluted by interpretive overlays.
The dialectical paradigm, even though it is a dynamic model, is always stuck in the narrative of "what it is like" to be actively involved in a certain condition, event, or entity. This metaphorical perception of reality is always a step removed from direct, unconditioned experience, which can only be non-reflective. That is why, in terms of Buddhist mystical states of consciousness (jhanas), in this absorption there is no-perceiver and no-perceived. It is even beyond awareness of no-thing-ness, beyond infinite consciousness. The four formless states include contemplation of infinite space, infinite consciousness, the realm of no-thing-ness, and the realm of neither perception-nor-nonperception.
Daniel Goleman describes the "formless jhanas" as follows:
The next level is attained by achieving the consciousness of infinite space, and then turning attention to the element of infinite awareness. Thus the thought of infinite space is abandoned, while objectless infinite consciousness remains. This marks the sixth jhana. Having mastered the sixth, the meditator attains the seventh jhana by first entering the sixth and then turning contemplation to the nonexistence of infinite conscious-ness. The seventh jhana is thus absorption with no-thing-ness, or the void, as its object. That is, consciousness has as its object the awareness of absence of any object. Mastering this jhana, the meditator then reviews it and finds any perception at all a disadvantage, its absence being more sublime. So motivated, the meditator can attain the eigth jhana by first entering the seventh, and then turning attention to the aspect of peacefulness, and away from perception of the void. The delicacy of this operation is suggested by the stipulation that there must be no hint of desire to attain this peacefulness, nor to avoid perception of no-thing-ness. Attending to the peacefulness, he reaches the ultrasubtle state where there are only residual mental formations. There is no gross perception here at all: thus "no perception"; there is ultrasubtle perception: thus "not-nonpercep-tion." This eigth jhana is called the sphere of "neither-perception-nor-nonperception." The same degree of subtlety of existence is here true of all concomitants of consciousness. NO MENTAL STATES ARE DECISIVELY PRESENT, yet residuals remain in a degree of near-absence.
This beingness beyond all states is so subtle we can't say whether it is or is not. It is the ultimate limit of perception--the virtual reality beyond the dialogical self. CCP never strives to recreate any of these states during the journey, but time after time the flow of consciousness leads to reports which match these descriptions. Consciousness journeys function like a guided tour of potential states, potentiating them, and initiating their unfolding into the explicate as emergent and stabilizing resources. The dissolution into formlessness happens at the "edge of chaos." In this condition we speculate that free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization. The implied "self" in this case is pure consciousness in dynamic evolution through multiple forms in multiple universes.
http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/multimind.html
Why are structures formed? Why do repetitive patterns occur? Using David Bohm's concept of implicate and explicate ordering, Shainberg (1987) suggests that the explicate order is what we see as form. He asserts that human consciousness and language are relatively autonomous subtotalities, but they also create fixed points in this universal forming which block further transformations with inner conflict or interpersonal problems. He uses the same analogy Graywolf developed independently in CCP: these points become like rocks around which the stream of life moves.
By definition these fixations are part of the explicate as well as the implicate order. Form is not an isolated definitive outlined thing which relates to other objects. Its structure is the active process, a structuating event, that is making a relationship to all other active processes. When we experience our own relative consistency within the formative process, we assume that we are a continuous being with a capacity to respond, which we think of as our 'self,' in connection with other continuous forms.
According to Shainberg, this self-simulation becomes fixed on ideas or images of good (or bad) situations that have occurred in its experiences. It then attempts to replay them in the present because they worked (gave pleasure) in the past. When consciousness meets new situations and checks with memory for help in defining the nature of the new situation, it often depends more on memory for determining what is in front of it than it does on the perception of reality, or raw experience.
This tendency to live in terms of memory is most serious in those whose life since childhood has been tense and conflicted, and who have been able to integrate the uncertainties of their reality. While thoughts, images and feelings are processes which connect "things" in the movement of relationship, they can also fix the relationships into specific old forms. The fixation into repetitive behavior that is characteristic of human beings is part of what we might think of as the "form of repetition" in nature.
We observe the repetition of forms in consciousness when it consistently meets the present with the past. Whether it is in the form of repeating an old relationship or attempting to obtain the goal of a particular desire, consciousness uses the same mechanism to engage the present. And that mechanism is itself a repetition of a past event. So, at many levels, and among them human consciousness, nature is expressing the form of repetition.
The explicate form--the memory image--becomes a nodal point which demands that a new situation becomes like an old one. When a particular thought or focus in consciousness dominates a a person's behavior, this flow in human relationship is inhibited. Such foci force relating processes into a vortex by insisting that the movement of relationship stay in its orbit. Such vortices lead to separation, conflict, emptiness.
The matrix of thoughts creates a focus around which there are relationships that form a vortex and make up a fragmented subsystem, a 'relatively autonomous subtotality' which, in contrast to other subtotalities, brings about conflict with the larger whole. The vortex fragments off from the movement that is occurring in the other aspects of the universe. It is not receptive to information from those aspects.
The fixed ideas organize the relationships in the present and bring about a system of relationships that keep the vortex operating in a way which, to some extent, separates the system from the larger whole. This response repeatedly unfolds a form which restricts the movement in the implicate, but we don't seem to respond to any feedback we notice about that restriction.
Despite psychological conflicts or psychosomatic illnesses the security in the repetition is read as preferable to any change. We might guess that if this form were connected with the flow of the implicate its characteristics would be transformed by the integration with that flow and the block would be released and more open relationships would unfold. But, unfacilitated, this doesn't happen with much regularity.
Without process work, such as CCP, the form maintains itself and there is no action by the brain to create a more harmonious relationship with reality. Apparently the agreement brought about by this subsystem has provided pleasure and security which is communicated to the brain as more satisfactory than the alternatives memory promises beyond the repetition of these safety measures. As children, we naturally form a center, a 'self' to focus our relationships. But that focus naturally dissolves when each ordered condition opens new relationships to other foci around us. That changing moving process of relating is after all the essential insecurity of human existence.
THE SELF THEN IS A RELATIVELY AUTONOMOUS SUBTOTALITY THAT UNFOLDS IN THE IMPLICATE AND IS DISPLAYED IN THE EXPLICATE, ONLY TO BE DISSOLVED AGAIN INTO THE IMPLICATE. Our brains are another subtotality and the responses that flow through them are part of the explicate order as well. The thoughts and images construct the self but that flow of responses in the brain includes the seductive offering which comes with the promises of security in the repetitions of memory and mother's support for identifying with some fixed ways of living.
The propaganda of consciousness seems to be that if we choose one identity, one self, one set of plans for how to be in the world, we might find security and pleasure. But dedication to the realization of that image fixes a person's relationship in the explicate order and in some sense curtails flow in the implicate order.
When fixation occurs in the natural world, for example in the unfolding of genetic programming, its purpose is to maintain a balance with the whole movement of the implicate order and its connection. The curtailment of flow insinuates pathology. The life process of people caught in such an image is a circular form that operates inside its own criteria and does not connect with the elements of the reality outside of its defined fragment. What is most astounding in this image process is the way the individual commits himself completely to the virtues of the state through thought and internal dialogue.
THE REPETITIVE USE OF THOUGHT ACTS LIKE A ROCK IN A STREAM.
The vortex is formed as a result of forces exercised by the form of repetition in consciousness. The pull to repeat the desirable memories draws all other relating processes of the implicate order into the orbit of the explicate focus. The person who is absorbed by the fixation of this self-image responds to those aspects of reality which enable execution of that image. But individuals who are caught in the repetitive process that makes a vortex do occasionally become aware of their fragmented condition and their inadequate relationship to the greater whole of the implicate order. Moving into realms not controlled by thought, their fixation dissolves when their behavior opens into relationships of a more formless nature.
A vortex is formed based on the premise that the image provides certainty and security. The contradiction to realize the fixed image of what life should be and the movement of the implicate order creates a deep strain at the core of being. Repeating the same behavior again and again narrows the frame of mind. The fixation is dissolved through transformation by something larger than the self-simulation. There are many different ways in which we sense the limitations of our thought and manage to find connections to the implicate order beyond. The therapeutic dialogue brings release from the trap of self-orientation. Being with another whose worldview is more expansive is part of it. So is immersion in the flow of creative process.
The narration of the therapeutic process goes back and forth among the participants creating a dialog which is the matrix of a mutual virtual reality. When the dialogue partners see that thought gets into a frozen state, or that the same images are appearing chronically in different form, the process dissolves the state, and the oscillation around the vortex stops. Discussion after the session and follow up lead to a new story about what constitutes self. Shainberg concludes that, "points of order or centers of organization are inherent to the implicate order as it unfolds into the explicate. These points always create something of a vortex around them as they provide for interactions and further relationships in that flow."
Thus the new primal self-image is better adapted, stabilizing. Fixed images in consciousness are only relatively fixed points as there are numerous relationships intertwining and unfolding from them, even if they do form a vortex. We are left with the image of psyche as vortices within vortices within vortices. This image is precisely that of a "strange attractor" in chaos theory. Edward Lorenz defined it as consisting not "of a simple point, curve, or higher-dimensional manifold, but [it] contains an infinite complex of manifolds..."
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Studies of dissociative states in Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) disclose that simple confabulation is not an adequate model for the syndrome. Conscious role-playing could not duplicate certain abilities. We can consider a possible role for state-dependent learning in the phenomenology of MPD (Silberman, et al, 1985). Patients may experience themselves as several discrete alter personalities who do not share consciousness or memories with one another. Disparate personality states compartmen-talize information and learning.
Both drugs and mood states have been shown to induce state-specific encoding operations and retrieval strategies, and provide specific cues for accessing previous experience. Information acquired in a given state remains available in memory, but inaccessible when remembering takes place under different retrieval (state) conditions. MPD patients may provide more powerful markers and contexts for encoding and retrieving previous experience than does the conscious role playing of personality states by controls.
MPD cannot be "faked," because dissociation creates super-normal phenomena in memory, cognition, learning, and psychosomatic manifestations. In contrast to classical state-dependent learning phenomena, however, which are generally more robust under free recall conditions, the partial dissociation of MPDs tended to be more pronounced under recognition. Highly dissociative MPDs may have allergies or other specific illnesses in some alters and not others.
Tart (1990) offers a model for MPD based on the World Simulation Process approach. He roots its purpose in survival and adaptability by construction of rapidly functioning internal models of the real world. "Simulation" of the self, providing a sense of continuity of identity, is part of its purpose, also. It includes psychophysical coherence between self image and external reality, but usually includes a sense of an internal psychological self beyond bodily compo-nents.
A core psychological pattern tends to control other aspects of the World Simulation Process, automatically organizing the rest of experience around itself in a way that further supports the basic pattern. These patterns/systems try to stabilize themselves, preserve themselves, maintain identity. For example, anger or any other core pattern can become the dominant core of the World Simulation Process, which automatically (mis)interprets sensory patterns of the world and self in a way consonant with core pattern.
Since the virtual reality created by the WSP is "reality" for the time being, it is very difficult not to completely identify with the virtual reality as experienced and accept it as "real" reality. He notes that "while we ordinarily completely and automatically identify with the self that is produced by the World Simulation Process, we do not have to...There is a great freedom available, a kind of enlightenment, when you realize that the world and self you take for granted because they are an immediate perception are actually, in a vitally important way, an interpretation, a simulation, not final reality."
When the WSP gives us virtual realities that differ from the real world in significant ways, we begin to behave maladaptively, creating both real world consequences and/or psychological suffering in ourselves and others. Deciding what is "real" in the world is heavily influenced by the virtual realities already created by our WSP. Tart defines a person with MPD as "someone who has two or more well developed core patterns, constellation patterns that can take over his or her World Simulation Process such that the person temporarily lives in a virtual reality that constitutes an identity, a personality, a state of consciousness...that is experientially perfectly real."
He considers a "normal" person to have only one well developed pattern, yet with considerable degrees of multiplicity. The "neurotic's" WSP differs in areas of suffering and maladaptive functioning. The "psychotic" lives in a virtual reality so obviously different from the virtual reality range of "normals" that it is obviously different, perhaps constituting a threat to themselves and others.
POLYTHEISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The "multiple" model of human nature suggested by MPD research invites comparison with the work of such theorists as psychologist James Hillman, and other archetypal and imaginal psychologists, such as Bolen, Miller, and Woolger. In the conventional model of psyche proposed by modern psychology and medicine, human nature is described largely in terms of an all-important central ego. All other facets of psychic experience are considered subordinate and relative to it.
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
RADICAL PLURALISM
The Creative Consciousness Process recognizes all these varieties of pluralism, but suggests an even more iconoclastic view--radical pluralism. CCP is not based in dialogue with any inner figures, but in "becoming" whatever image the psyche suggests within the process of flow. Thus, it moves beyond identification, beyond alters, beyond personification, beyond archetypes as godforms, even beyond humanism, into the psychoid realm of nature. The radical deconstructionalist stance promotes the direct experience of pluralistic consciousness in whatever form it appears, and fosters movement toward formlessness--destructuralization.
Thus one may begin a consciousness journey as the "dream self", dream figure, or even background, but move quickly through these symbolic "doorways" to less structured forms or patterns. Rather than engaging any aspect or presentation of self in dialogue, the movement is toward one of immersion in the free flow of consciousness wherever that leads.
One may become an object, a force of nature, a tiny mote, a color, a spiral, even empty space. The dialogue, or narrative, comes not from engaging imaginal figures but within the co-conscious exchange of subject and guide, a dynamic, emergent story which deepens and "carries" the process forward. The direct experience of "de-personification" of psychic elements points to the "psychoid" nature of the psyche, and fosters the realization of connection to the greater whole. One comes to perceive directly and experientially that one is potentially all of it.
Consciousness seeks to take on imaginal and physical form, and we partake of that experience at any level of existence within the "virtual space" of the therapeutic context. Much like the Buddhist concept of anatman--no self or no soul--we can experience directly what it means to be pure consciousness incarnating through a multitude of forms, culminating in the impressionistic experience of formlessness. As all things, we are neither this nor that--no thing.
As pure potential, all possibilities exist for re-structuring prior to the return to ordinary consciousness. We can experience directly that we are not a "self" or even "selves" moving through a concrete reality. We are consciousness in search of itself, experiencing the panoply of multitudinous, dynamic, energetic forms. The entity we are has no "stable" center in the classical sense, only an apparently contiguous memory of self and world simulation. This sense of a confined self can be radically destructured through consciousness journeys, which facilitate the perception of the flow of events.
No two journeys are ever the same, though certain patterns and forms tend to persist and recur. You can never step into the same river twice. CCP helps us move deeper into the psyche, past "thinking-feeling-believing" levels of the psyche, below mythic patterning, even below primal existential patterning. Below any hierarchical systems is a state of pure being. This process of "diving deep" through the layers of acquired constructs "destratifies" perceptual consciousness leaving its pure state undiluted by interpretive overlays.
The dialectical paradigm, even though it is a dynamic model, is always stuck in the narrative of "what it is like" to be actively involved in a certain condition, event, or entity. This metaphorical perception of reality is always a step removed from direct, unconditioned experience, which can only be non-reflective. That is why, in terms of Buddhist mystical states of consciousness (jhanas), in this absorption there is no-perceiver and no-perceived. It is even beyond awareness of no-thing-ness, beyond infinite consciousness. The four formless states include contemplation of infinite space, infinite consciousness, the realm of no-thing-ness, and the realm of neither perception-nor-nonperception.
Daniel Goleman describes the "formless jhanas" as follows:
The next level is attained by achieving the consciousness of infinite space, and then turning attention to the element of infinite awareness. Thus the thought of infinite space is abandoned, while objectless infinite consciousness remains. This marks the sixth jhana. Having mastered the sixth, the meditator attains the seventh jhana by first entering the sixth and then turning contemplation to the nonexistence of infinite conscious-ness. The seventh jhana is thus absorption with no-thing-ness, or the void, as its object. That is, consciousness has as its object the awareness of absence of any object. Mastering this jhana, the meditator then reviews it and finds any perception at all a disadvantage, its absence being more sublime. So motivated, the meditator can attain the eigth jhana by first entering the seventh, and then turning attention to the aspect of peacefulness, and away from perception of the void. The delicacy of this operation is suggested by the stipulation that there must be no hint of desire to attain this peacefulness, nor to avoid perception of no-thing-ness. Attending to the peacefulness, he reaches the ultrasubtle state where there are only residual mental formations. There is no gross perception here at all: thus "no perception"; there is ultrasubtle perception: thus "not-nonpercep-tion." This eigth jhana is called the sphere of "neither-perception-nor-nonperception." The same degree of subtlety of existence is here true of all concomitants of consciousness. NO MENTAL STATES ARE DECISIVELY PRESENT, yet residuals remain in a degree of near-absence.
This beingness beyond all states is so subtle we can't say whether it is or is not. It is the ultimate limit of perception--the virtual reality beyond the dialogical self. CCP never strives to recreate any of these states during the journey, but time after time the flow of consciousness leads to reports which match these descriptions. Consciousness journeys function like a guided tour of potential states, potentiating them, and initiating their unfolding into the explicate as emergent and stabilizing resources. The dissolution into formlessness happens at the "edge of chaos." In this condition we speculate that free-flowing matter and energy are capable of self-organization. The implied "self" in this case is pure consciousness in dynamic evolution through multiple forms in multiple universes.
http://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/multimind.html
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
Arc of Ages
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the oroboros serpent biting its own tail. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning to navigate through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious. This arc carries both divine seed and divine knowledge.
The genealogy is the map, but the ancestral field is the territory. The integral function is inherent if we can mobilize it. We may in some sense feel that we are 'born to do this,' but there may still be a gulf between our intention and its tangible effects. In this gap, like the space between breaths, we find transcendence.
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Narration is a root metaphor. We habitually tell people 'who we are' in terms of our short- and long-term past and presumed achievements and experiences. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
Narration is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves, 'growing' one another. There may be a reason we favor 'exemplary' ancestors who were wise while alive and remain so in the invisible world. Being dead does not necessarily make ancestors 'smarter.'
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, is the opening of the heart. (Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development and uncovering of intergenerational life-themes. The multigenerational approach has it own coherence and milestones.
Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we instinctively seek order for security. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements. But tidy metaphors don't always work; some of them can be very messy and inconsistent, much like the edge of chaos from which order emerges in chaos theory. The missing information may be already within us as insight, though it has not emerged or unfolded.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
One Blood; One Field
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests."
Conversation is one of our main ways of inner and outer thinking and expression. Dialogue bridges conscious and unconscious and activates the transcendent function. It doesn't matter if we do it intentionally or it happens to us spontaneously. Jung says "In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself." (ModPsy, ETH Lectures, p.53).
We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known but not literalized. The dialogical self describes our ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue -- finding a voice for emerging meaning.
Psyche is a semantic, symbolic and noetic field. Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. The language of symbols is older than the Ouroboros, Vortex, Yin-Yang, Ankh, Pentagram, Solar Cross, Circumpunct, Vesica Piscis, or Flower of Life.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe - how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility.
The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior, Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity. This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential or phenomenological experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." If we deny the dead, we deny ourselves. Their redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity.
Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of ancient bloodlines. In Greek, drakon (dragon), as in edrakon (edrakon), is poast tense for derkesthai, meaning 'to see clearly'. A dragon was one who saw clearly, and clarity of vision engendered. Dragons are classically associated with wisdom, which produces the creative power of intuition, prediction, and synthesis. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. Clarity comes from clarifying the family tree. We participate more knowingly in the the process of multigenerational integration. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. They affect us by influence, impact, making a difference. Such impressions touch us by moving our feelings emotionally, even tugging our heartstrings.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example, when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, though you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - innumerable clerical errors, transmission gaps, and lapses of focus, to say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.