ARC OF AGES
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
Arc of Ages
Ancestral Field, Dream Field, Dialogical Field
Return to Origins
Genealogy is the archaeology of the psyche and way to confront the unconscious. The family tree is the epic narrative arc of origins. Genealogy encapsulates the myth of our lives: the question of inheritance, our relationship to the past, and its relevance to the present.
We need metaphor and mythos to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not fantastic elaborations but are fundamental and essential to our emergent process. Jung considered myth the authentic and primordial voice of the collective unconscious.
We don't have the option not to choose one, so the myth we 'choose' is important to our 'frame' or intuitive understanding of the world. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.
In this sense, both myth and genealogy are conceptual frameworks. In fact, myth is present in all conceptual frameworks, though perhaps not so obvious. Myth and genealogy are embroiled through out history. This is the condition presented to us in our family tree.
We don't introduce mythic figures into genealogy. They are already there for us to contend with. We don't enter genealogy intending to root ourselves in myth, but discover it there already. The family tree is an image of the mythic descending into the socio-cultural-historical dimension. Beginning our project with genesis, we certainly expect some revelations.
We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86
Jung suggested that we can only find our myth if we are together with our dead. We have to answer the call of our own dead. For Jung finding his myth could only take place in conjunction with his dead. Genealogy brings us into conjunction and alignment with our dead.
Cycles of Life
Each of us emerges from the dark light of the soul -- the divine Void, the boundless expanse, pre-differentiated universal ground. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the ouroboros serpent biting its own tail, in an archaeological self-examination of the unconscious horizons of human experience.
Lifeforce pervades the whole body as the basis of consciousness and the flow of energy. The Tibetans suggest that light-bearing cells of the “mother seed essence” and the “father seed essence” retain their identities as the essence of the egg and sperm and separate out in magnetic polar connection, forming the basis of the central energy channel. Biologically, a radial line defines itself from the center of the embryonic disc. The neural groove puckers up and curves over to form a tube. The tube is actually entrapping electromagnetic field lines of force.
Narrative therapies like genealogy help us find innovative moments, unique outcomes, and to change and expand our life story. We remember their stories when we have deep feelings or hear something that reminds us of them. They remind us of stories behind our feelings - the world of personal meaning.
The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of continuous renewal -- duality of creation and destruction and thus the birth of life through opposites. Life changes form and condition, dies and is reborn.
Genealogy helps us stabilize and reconceptualize our life life story from a multi-vocal meta-perspective. Constraints of our problem-saturated stories and plot give way to the Big Picture of unfolding life.
Consanguinity distinguished archaic communities and clans from one another. In the precultural world a mother could be sure of her offspring. The terror of the primitive imagination was filial and mystical. Voices emerge from the dominant narrative plot. Rigid narratives give way to ancestral conversations. We assimilate them as unpredicted meaning bridges that tie our experience together.
Genealogy starts off like humanity did -- by hunting and gathering. We want to be explorers, not just knowers, but seekers. Nietzsche claims, "We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for good reason: How can we ever find what we have never looked for? The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself will hold for us for all eternity. Of ourselves we are “not knowers.”(1887/1956, p. 149)
We hunger for the unknown. The famous T.S. Elliot lines apply to self-knowledge: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Our hunter and gatherer instincts define our research style. It takes hunting to dig up new material, break brick walls, and discover secrets. We may find fossil-traumas in the family record. New stories are therapeutic opportunities we may ignore or trivialize when obsessed with our problematical story. Small but significant changes, emergent properties, mark narrative development.
Genealogy leads from the concrete and known toward the legendary and mythic -- unknown and beyond comprehension -- secrets beyond secrets with no resolution in sight. The ancestors bring a new movement and dynamic to the landscapes of action and consciousness. Time, action, and consciousness converge in transformation of emotions, values, and thoughts. With meta-reflection we can describe that transformation, understanding how and why we've changed.
Gathering quantities of data helps us make broad connections and find patterns and universal life-themes. People and places initially excite our imaginations through their incomprehensible mystery. Gradually, with challenging struggle, purposive suffering, and creative endeavors, we learn to 'cultivate' that mystery and to 'cook' it with integrative work, engaging the opposites and our projective tendencies.
Union of Souls
What can be known is the discernable tree, though much remains occluded. As Jung noted, "...there is a field of the unconscious both above and below us" -- the light and dark, the male and female, spiritual and chthonic/instinctual, legality and maternity, etc. Each ancestor, as with each god, is a way we are shadowed. Indestructible life is simultaneously the the god of death and the dead.
More than a trope of the tree and the blood, or a modular assemblage, the pedigree is established only by valid evidence. Genealogy without proof is mythology. Intelligence emerges with symbolic language. Symbols can be both literal and metaphorical. Alternate stories rich in metaphorical resonance come out of the shadows.
Content, Context, & Reflexivity
The real and symbolic facts of who we are and where we come from, and our ancestors, are fundamental. Reflexivity as interpretation and reflexivity as genealogical identifies unmarked intentionalities in research. In narrative, psychosensory experiences are described from the inside outward, from resonance with one's own body, using meditation and sensory awareness to deepen experience.
Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. Community context or proximity implies a relationship of some kind.
Digital retrieves the medieval information we can use to build context among our many ancestors of that era. The lived psychophysical experience with the nuances of the body can be embodied in writing. Telling such stories honors the ancestors. Narrative patterns include:
People come to genealogy from several motivations: when loved ones die or are born, the desire to carve out a family place in the larger historical picture, to find lost roots or unknown family history, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, to join heritage or communitarian societies, to recognize or embellish descent, to find kin, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.
But self-knowledge is primary, as are symptoms, healing, and synchronicities. Naturally, the web has led to an explosion of interest, research, and communication. Anyone captured by family stories can check them out in a number of ways. The structure of the family tree helps us value our underpinnings, to carry an emotional-cognitive structure across time -- identifying, recognizing, and connecting things, events, places, and people. This is memory, which guarantees continuity to life.
The pedigree is a physical and cognitive instrument of navigation. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning to navigate through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious -- living one's life as a voyage for its own sake.
"The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." (Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol).
As Proust says, "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." We can deepen our consciousness as we adapt to our current situation. This arc carries both divine seed and divine knowledge -- a way for us to circle around and find our ancestral alignment within the precessional ages we can never know.
Being & Not-Being
The genealogy is the map, but the ancestral field is the territory. Once we cross the threshold our genealogical journey begins. In this sense, we are The Fool, like Parcival in the Grail Quest, abandoned to the unknown, entering uncharted areas -- the soul venturing into itself and crossing the threshold to new dimensions. This is the field of interrupted communications between members of different generations. The pedigree and Grail mirror one another as containers for the royal bloodlines.
A true and authentic life resonates over time. Our approach will varying depending on well-being, anxieties, woundedness, optimism, and confidence. This is revealed in the psychological family tree of hidden issues, rather than the simple physical imprint. Genealogy is no longer androlineal. Data bases help us find female ancestors and lines of descent in which women are preferentially included. Paternal primacy is a genealogical relic.
Archaeology of the Soul
We may find Gateway ancestors, each of which has proven lineage back to royal lines. This vastly expands our ancestral horizons. Our notion of what it means to write the family history expands. This is a psychological, not secular or religious approach, describing psychic phenomena (psychic facts, images, human phenomena) not metaphysical assertions. The narrative carries the chronology along, but once in a while you stop and paint a picture.
'Bringing in the sheaves' of numerous groups of ancestors, we reap the abundant harvest of their lives. Each generation doubles their numbers. Though taken by The Reaper, we reap them back and craft them into the Bread of Life, the family story. "He that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." (Amer. King James Bible, Psalms 126:6)
In Asia, the archetype is played out -- sheaves are brought in as effigies of rice ancestors. Some people make pilgrimages to the effigies of their ancestors in cathedrals and country churches, gazing at the blank stares but seeing through to the person. Once we harvest the sheaves of generations they are dried and threshed. After the first collection, we are left with the gleanings, the details we can gather that were lost or first overlooked.
Ideally, like therapy, the genealogical process can release "an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients" as Jung describes it in Seminar 1925 (pg. 111) -- a sort of personal Annunciation of our own connectivity with life. As Giordano Bruno suggests, "there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence."
Rituals of Recognition
Our frame for this genealogical approach is 'this is ritual' -- and a complex one, at that. Ritual is a meta-communication. It tells us this highly-contextualized activity is different, deliberate, and significant, so pay attention. Sometimes trauma-based coping behaviors, repetition, or dysfunctional rituals can become addictive. Compulsions may also lead to purposeful results.
It is a rite -- a series of sequential acts -- because it is a social, religious, cultural procedure that symbolically conveys meaning about events to participants. Like other ritual behaviors it is first experienced in the family. Certain emotions are produced and expressed spontaneously. The ritual evokes, allows, and contains strong emotions, accessing mind-body states.
Genealogical rituals of recognition deepen and rewrite our perception of reality with rituals of induction, remembrance, and modulation of emotion. The integral function in this process is inherent if we can mobilize it. We may in some sense feel that we are 'born to do this,' but there may still be a gulf between our intention and its tangible effects.
In this gap, like the space between breaths, we find transcendence. Genealogy becomes an art when it grips us. Jung also cautions a "new idea always has to fight for its life against these ancestral predispositions."
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
Spirit descends to lower regions from mythic roots. Sometimes we can't perceive things until we have the right metaphor to bridge the gap between matter and spirit.
Metaphor is one of the favorite allegories of ancient and modern poets and philosophers for the process of human transformation. We liken one experience to another as if it were that experience.
As a metaphor, the Grail is always relevant and means many things to many people. It is an undying symbol of the archetypal quest of human life -- a search for accomplishment and meaning. The Grail has been secularized as metaphor, and re-sacralized in Grail scholarship and fiction. It also remains the potential for healing psychic wounds. The question is who can grow this potential into something more.
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Voices of the Past
Jung reminds, "After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control." (1925 Seminar, Page 83)
Hillman sees metaphor as an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itself is a myth -- an expression of creative mythopoesis.
Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82)
Narration is a root metaphor. Self-narrative is an identity construction. We habitually tell people 'who we are' in terms of our short- and long-term past and presumed achievements and experiences. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
Narration is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves, 'growing' one another. There may be a reason we favor 'exemplary' ancestors who were wise while alive and remain so in the invisible world. Being dead does not necessarily make ancestors 'smarter.' Hillman suggests we aspire to be exemplary ancestors ourselves.
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, is the opening of the heart. (Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development and uncovering of intergenerational life-themes. The multigenerational approach has it own coherence and milestones of discovery and exploration.
Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we instinctively seek order for security. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements. But tidy metaphors don't always work; some of them can be very messy and inconsistent, much like the edge of chaos from which order emerges in chaos theory. The missing information may be already within us as insight, though it has not emerged or unfolded.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature." (Campbell)
One Blood; One Field
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests."
Conversation is one of our main ways of inner and outer thinking and expression. Dialogue bridges conscious and unconscious and activates the transcendent function. It doesn't matter if we do it intentionally or it happens to us spontaneously. Jung says "In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself." (ModPsy, ETH Lectures, p.53).
We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known but not literalized. The dialogical self describes our ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue -- finding a voice for emerging meaning.
Psyche is a semantic, symbolic and noetic field. Duality between consciousness and nonconsciousness is the contrast between our everyday experience (individual consciousness) and all nonconscious processes.
This duality is fundamental; we literally cannot ever know what it is like to be our nonconscious processes. We can only know what it’s like to be our conscious awareness. Yet, all the mind-body processes of which we are unaware are at least as aware if not more aware than our individual conscious awareness, and elements of who we are. Thus, they are related to our ancestry.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. The language of symbols is oldest.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe - how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility.
The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior. Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity.
This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential or phenomenological experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." If we deny the dead, we deny ourselves. Their redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity.
Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of ancient bloodlines. In Greek, drakon (dragon), as in edrakon, is past tense for derkesthai, meaning 'to see clearly.' A dragon was one who saw clearly, and clarity of vision engendered wisdom, which produces the creative power of intuition, prediction, and synthesis. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, then record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. Clarity comes from clarifying the family tree. We participate more knowingly in the process of multigenerational integration. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
Renewing the Mystery
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. They affect us by influence, impact, making a difference. Such impressions touch us by moving our feelings emotionally, even tugging our heartstrings.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The sensory apparatus of our body is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
History, the narrative of our personal, familial,and collective pasts, shapes and informs our identity. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example, when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, though you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
Collateral Grafting & Consanguinity
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - legitimate filiation, dynastic supremacy, elder and younger (cadet) branches, forced coexistence, innumerable clerical errors, transmission gaps, and lapses of focus, to say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. The tree-like structure can conceal exclusion, discrimination, and abusive graftings, even amputations.
The discourse of lineage and descent can be subverted for familial legitimation. For most of history, paternity was a legal fiction. Primogeniture was tied to succession and common-law inheritance. Androlineal genealogy was the necessary instrument of social origins and legal deeds.
Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
The Gift of Life
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Original Awareness
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
As ancient hominids we may have left the trees and our arboreal life but we never entirely abandoned them. When we descended from the canopy, we acquired another sort of tree that went with us -- the family tree and relations of our clan.
In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald (1993) concludes that the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-moment mentality.
Mimesis is the easiest way to learn. The first transition was to a "mimetic'' culture of making sense: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other prelinguistic traditions.
Eric McLcLuhan (2015) says, "Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming,intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer, that is, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence." (p. 27, infra.) He calls mimesis a tangible affective vortex of real power.
The evolution to mythic cultures followed: the result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. The third transition carried oral speech to reading, writing, and an extended external memory-store seen today in cloud technology. Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period.
Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, according to McLuhan who argues that the “mythic or iconic mode of awareness” substitutes a “multi-faceted” perspective for a single, fixed point of view. Mythic environments live beyond time and space, generating little radical social change.
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. ... without any verbalization at all. (McLuhan, Playboy Interview). He claims the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day-world.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/06/this-archaeological-discovery-throws-story-of-human-evolution-into-disarray/
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. The archai are the deepest forms of psychic functioning. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.'
Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice. Hillman describes how soulmaking is revealed in psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way.
He considers death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “The death experience brings down the old order and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous break down’ (synthesizing too, as it goes along), analysis means dying.”
Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul. Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data. But Hillman favored the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. The speech of the soul is always riddled with images and fantasies, which cannot and should not be taken literally or concretely. He points out, the alternative to such literalism is mystery.
Imaginal Understanding
Restoring psyche, we see soul at work, in fantasy, imagination, myth, and metaphor. But, as in metaphor, things can be 'like that,' but not that. Neti neti; neither this nor that. Literalism dominates everyday discourse and is probably the biggest pitfall on the genealogical path. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Such fundamentalism can be a regressive, displaced tendency.
For example, while the heroic notion has served ego psychology for millennia, we can see beyond the urge of the conquering hero to deeper wisdom and insight beyond the manic ego-driven modality which has had its day. The perspective of the human ego certainly isn't superior.
Literalism has more to do with beliefs, religiosity, cult behavior, and esoteric metaphysics than it does with a balanced psychological approach. Psychopathology is also part and parcel of the same process and the source of illusion and delusions about self, others, and world.
Real meaning is beyond the literal and naturalistic fallacies. The poetic approach means exploring images, rather than explaining them. In this sense our ancestors are not allegories but modes of reflection. We cannot 'use' our ancestors, individually or collectively, as some people 'use' dreams in a mundane, prescriptive way.
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Beyond the trendy 'power of Now' lies the power of 'now and again.'
Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us in more ways than one. Perhaps someone else in the family collated the genealogy of their day. The transgenerational challenges will have been passed on and remain, as well as any family aspirational drives.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Each ancestor is the gateway to another timeline back to the past. First they diverge; then they converge. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own great-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. The notion of 'descent' is somehow related to the archaic descent into the cave or tomb of the ancestors.
Descent seems to be very steep & dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well-trodden path. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface; one finds pars of wrecked cars, trousers, shoes & skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 94)
We pay attention to a history created by own ancestors. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call' from the depths of our hearts. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge but in a soulful rather than utilitarian way. The archetypes fill the gaps to compensate our spiritual deficiencies.
The archetype does not become meaningful until it goes out into the world and takes part in life according to its nature and
according to the time in history in which it occurs. The
facts of the specific cultural and personal existence
provide the actual clothing of the archetype. In other words
the archetype is only an inherited mode of expression.
Jung noted, "Besides the obvious personal sources, creative fantasy also draws upon the forgotten and long buried primitive mind with its host of images, which are to be found in the mythologies of all ages and all peoples. The sum of these images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual."
Carl Jung, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, Pages xviii - xvix
Genealogy Beyond the Grave
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- 'my very own', giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Some say, "it does seem I fall into a type of revelatory trance where aspects of these people’s lives are made clear." Or, "downloads as I call them for lack of a better word sometimes come out of the blue, when I am meditating, or even studying the past, mysticism, etc."
Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonment, and a variety of other human concerns and events. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We regard our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators. How do we come to know the sea's dark secrets? As Kabir says, "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."
Navigating the psyche -- the ocean with many shores -- is no easy task. We are all subject to self-delusion, misguided inner authority, the host of psychological illusion from follies to participation mystique, to projective errors, confabulations, and metaphysical beliefs. The imaginal gloss, right or wrong operates throughout the whole process of seeking clarity.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious. Personally acquired contents constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation is to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, life and death, light and dark, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform with awareness, appearing in many forms as consciousness shifts.
To illustrate the multiple personifications of psyche Hillman made reference to gods, goddesses, demigods and other imaginal figures which he referred to as sounding boards "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life" although he insisted that these figures should not be used as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child symbolizing duality merging into union and self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with its metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
The psychological umbilical cord of our genealogy connects us not only to the divine source (realm of the Gods) but also to the vaults of the unconscious (Underworld). We embark on a quest to search for the World-Tree at the center of the Universe. This is a metaphor for our genealogical quest for psychological realignment with our own inner center and spiritual source. The tree is a symbol of the self and model of the psyche, with roots stretching back into our earliest symbolic imaginations.
We sublimate the cosmic energy that enters our being through realignment with the 'axis mundi'. The cosmic axis connects our mundane material realm to the higher realm of sacred power. The journey is perilous because a quest of transformation requires sacrifice of the ego. The World-Tree is also a symbol of initiation and transcendence. At the center of the Universe, we arrive at the sacred center of our own being.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the dreamtime and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in dreamwork, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. Sometimes we can cultivate that information or intuition into evidence. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different natures from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution. Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness. Kabir says, "“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
"Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life, to time, and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Nature & Nurture
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, outrageous calamities somewhere between coincidence and fate, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father that can be the key to healing.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
Ancestral Field, Dream Field, Dialogical Field
Return to Origins
Genealogy is the archaeology of the psyche and way to confront the unconscious. The family tree is the epic narrative arc of origins. Genealogy encapsulates the myth of our lives: the question of inheritance, our relationship to the past, and its relevance to the present.
We need metaphor and mythos to understand the world. Such myths or metaphors are not fantastic elaborations but are fundamental and essential to our emergent process. Jung considered myth the authentic and primordial voice of the collective unconscious.
We don't have the option not to choose one, so the myth we 'choose' is important to our 'frame' or intuitive understanding of the world. Truth discovered through mythos is more subjective, based on individual feelings and experiences.
In this sense, both myth and genealogy are conceptual frameworks. In fact, myth is present in all conceptual frameworks, though perhaps not so obvious. Myth and genealogy are embroiled through out history. This is the condition presented to us in our family tree.
We don't introduce mythic figures into genealogy. They are already there for us to contend with. We don't enter genealogy intending to root ourselves in myth, but discover it there already. The family tree is an image of the mythic descending into the socio-cultural-historical dimension. Beginning our project with genesis, we certainly expect some revelations.
We have to learn with effort the negations of our positions, and to grasp the fact that life is a process that takes place between two poles, being only complete when surrounded by death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 86
Jung suggested that we can only find our myth if we are together with our dead. We have to answer the call of our own dead. For Jung finding his myth could only take place in conjunction with his dead. Genealogy brings us into conjunction and alignment with our dead.
Cycles of Life
Each of us emerges from the dark light of the soul -- the divine Void, the boundless expanse, pre-differentiated universal ground. We recursively turn back to our origins in a poetic pilgrimage like the ouroboros serpent biting its own tail, in an archaeological self-examination of the unconscious horizons of human experience.
Lifeforce pervades the whole body as the basis of consciousness and the flow of energy. The Tibetans suggest that light-bearing cells of the “mother seed essence” and the “father seed essence” retain their identities as the essence of the egg and sperm and separate out in magnetic polar connection, forming the basis of the central energy channel. Biologically, a radial line defines itself from the center of the embryonic disc. The neural groove puckers up and curves over to form a tube. The tube is actually entrapping electromagnetic field lines of force.
Narrative therapies like genealogy help us find innovative moments, unique outcomes, and to change and expand our life story. We remember their stories when we have deep feelings or hear something that reminds us of them. They remind us of stories behind our feelings - the world of personal meaning.
The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of continuous renewal -- duality of creation and destruction and thus the birth of life through opposites. Life changes form and condition, dies and is reborn.
Genealogy helps us stabilize and reconceptualize our life life story from a multi-vocal meta-perspective. Constraints of our problem-saturated stories and plot give way to the Big Picture of unfolding life.
Consanguinity distinguished archaic communities and clans from one another. In the precultural world a mother could be sure of her offspring. The terror of the primitive imagination was filial and mystical. Voices emerge from the dominant narrative plot. Rigid narratives give way to ancestral conversations. We assimilate them as unpredicted meaning bridges that tie our experience together.
Genealogy starts off like humanity did -- by hunting and gathering. We want to be explorers, not just knowers, but seekers. Nietzsche claims, "We knowers are unknown to ourselves, and for good reason: How can we ever find what we have never looked for? The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself will hold for us for all eternity. Of ourselves we are “not knowers.”(1887/1956, p. 149)
We hunger for the unknown. The famous T.S. Elliot lines apply to self-knowledge: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Our hunter and gatherer instincts define our research style. It takes hunting to dig up new material, break brick walls, and discover secrets. We may find fossil-traumas in the family record. New stories are therapeutic opportunities we may ignore or trivialize when obsessed with our problematical story. Small but significant changes, emergent properties, mark narrative development.
Genealogy leads from the concrete and known toward the legendary and mythic -- unknown and beyond comprehension -- secrets beyond secrets with no resolution in sight. The ancestors bring a new movement and dynamic to the landscapes of action and consciousness. Time, action, and consciousness converge in transformation of emotions, values, and thoughts. With meta-reflection we can describe that transformation, understanding how and why we've changed.
Gathering quantities of data helps us make broad connections and find patterns and universal life-themes. People and places initially excite our imaginations through their incomprehensible mystery. Gradually, with challenging struggle, purposive suffering, and creative endeavors, we learn to 'cultivate' that mystery and to 'cook' it with integrative work, engaging the opposites and our projective tendencies.
Union of Souls
What can be known is the discernable tree, though much remains occluded. As Jung noted, "...there is a field of the unconscious both above and below us" -- the light and dark, the male and female, spiritual and chthonic/instinctual, legality and maternity, etc. Each ancestor, as with each god, is a way we are shadowed. Indestructible life is simultaneously the the god of death and the dead.
More than a trope of the tree and the blood, or a modular assemblage, the pedigree is established only by valid evidence. Genealogy without proof is mythology. Intelligence emerges with symbolic language. Symbols can be both literal and metaphorical. Alternate stories rich in metaphorical resonance come out of the shadows.
Content, Context, & Reflexivity
The real and symbolic facts of who we are and where we come from, and our ancestors, are fundamental. Reflexivity as interpretation and reflexivity as genealogical identifies unmarked intentionalities in research. In narrative, psychosensory experiences are described from the inside outward, from resonance with one's own body, using meditation and sensory awareness to deepen experience.
Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. Community context or proximity implies a relationship of some kind.
Digital retrieves the medieval information we can use to build context among our many ancestors of that era. The lived psychophysical experience with the nuances of the body can be embodied in writing. Telling such stories honors the ancestors. Narrative patterns include:
- Striving toward a goal
- Overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal
- Solving a mystery
- Resolving a problem
- Bringing order to chaos (return to equilibrium)
- The journey
- Flight and pursuit
- Coming of age (from innocence to experience)
- Personal growth
People come to genealogy from several motivations: when loved ones die or are born, the desire to carve out a family place in the larger historical picture, to find lost roots or unknown family history, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, to join heritage or communitarian societies, to recognize or embellish descent, to find kin, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.
But self-knowledge is primary, as are symptoms, healing, and synchronicities. Naturally, the web has led to an explosion of interest, research, and communication. Anyone captured by family stories can check them out in a number of ways. The structure of the family tree helps us value our underpinnings, to carry an emotional-cognitive structure across time -- identifying, recognizing, and connecting things, events, places, and people. This is memory, which guarantees continuity to life.
The pedigree is a physical and cognitive instrument of navigation. Some liken it to a voyage of initiation and learning to navigate through the fathomless ocean of the collective unconscious -- living one's life as a voyage for its own sake.
"The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives." (Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol).
As Proust says, "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." We can deepen our consciousness as we adapt to our current situation. This arc carries both divine seed and divine knowledge -- a way for us to circle around and find our ancestral alignment within the precessional ages we can never know.
Being & Not-Being
The genealogy is the map, but the ancestral field is the territory. Once we cross the threshold our genealogical journey begins. In this sense, we are The Fool, like Parcival in the Grail Quest, abandoned to the unknown, entering uncharted areas -- the soul venturing into itself and crossing the threshold to new dimensions. This is the field of interrupted communications between members of different generations. The pedigree and Grail mirror one another as containers for the royal bloodlines.
A true and authentic life resonates over time. Our approach will varying depending on well-being, anxieties, woundedness, optimism, and confidence. This is revealed in the psychological family tree of hidden issues, rather than the simple physical imprint. Genealogy is no longer androlineal. Data bases help us find female ancestors and lines of descent in which women are preferentially included. Paternal primacy is a genealogical relic.
Archaeology of the Soul
We may find Gateway ancestors, each of which has proven lineage back to royal lines. This vastly expands our ancestral horizons. Our notion of what it means to write the family history expands. This is a psychological, not secular or religious approach, describing psychic phenomena (psychic facts, images, human phenomena) not metaphysical assertions. The narrative carries the chronology along, but once in a while you stop and paint a picture.
'Bringing in the sheaves' of numerous groups of ancestors, we reap the abundant harvest of their lives. Each generation doubles their numbers. Though taken by The Reaper, we reap them back and craft them into the Bread of Life, the family story. "He that goes forth and weeps, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." (Amer. King James Bible, Psalms 126:6)
In Asia, the archetype is played out -- sheaves are brought in as effigies of rice ancestors. Some people make pilgrimages to the effigies of their ancestors in cathedrals and country churches, gazing at the blank stares but seeing through to the person. Once we harvest the sheaves of generations they are dried and threshed. After the first collection, we are left with the gleanings, the details we can gather that were lost or first overlooked.
Ideally, like therapy, the genealogical process can release "an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients" as Jung describes it in Seminar 1925 (pg. 111) -- a sort of personal Annunciation of our own connectivity with life. As Giordano Bruno suggests, "there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence."
Rituals of Recognition
Our frame for this genealogical approach is 'this is ritual' -- and a complex one, at that. Ritual is a meta-communication. It tells us this highly-contextualized activity is different, deliberate, and significant, so pay attention. Sometimes trauma-based coping behaviors, repetition, or dysfunctional rituals can become addictive. Compulsions may also lead to purposeful results.
It is a rite -- a series of sequential acts -- because it is a social, religious, cultural procedure that symbolically conveys meaning about events to participants. Like other ritual behaviors it is first experienced in the family. Certain emotions are produced and expressed spontaneously. The ritual evokes, allows, and contains strong emotions, accessing mind-body states.
Genealogical rituals of recognition deepen and rewrite our perception of reality with rituals of induction, remembrance, and modulation of emotion. The integral function in this process is inherent if we can mobilize it. We may in some sense feel that we are 'born to do this,' but there may still be a gulf between our intention and its tangible effects.
In this gap, like the space between breaths, we find transcendence. Genealogy becomes an art when it grips us. Jung also cautions a "new idea always has to fight for its life against these ancestral predispositions."
Our pedigree is our Book of Remembrance.
This is our Quest; this is our Grail:
Spirit descends to lower regions from mythic roots. Sometimes we can't perceive things until we have the right metaphor to bridge the gap between matter and spirit.
Metaphor is one of the favorite allegories of ancient and modern poets and philosophers for the process of human transformation. We liken one experience to another as if it were that experience.
As a metaphor, the Grail is always relevant and means many things to many people. It is an undying symbol of the archetypal quest of human life -- a search for accomplishment and meaning. The Grail has been secularized as metaphor, and re-sacralized in Grail scholarship and fiction. It also remains the potential for healing psychic wounds. The question is who can grow this potential into something more.
"The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about." (Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth)
Voices of the Past
Jung reminds, "After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control." (1925 Seminar, Page 83)
Hillman sees metaphor as an “as-if fiction,” both a form of being and a style of consciousness, a way for the psyche to see through itself. The metaphor itself is a myth -- an expression of creative mythopoesis.
Of course it is quite useful to us to have the idea that our thoughts are free expressions of our intentional thinking, otherwise we would never be free from the magic circle of nature. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 82)
Narration is a root metaphor. Self-narrative is an identity construction. We habitually tell people 'who we are' in terms of our short- and long-term past and presumed achievements and experiences. These stories help order world and self. It is a concept of self that takes the role of the body, or embodied nature of the self into consideration.
Narration is rooted in the notion that story telling is cross-cultural. The dialogical realm creates a mind-space with multiple positions possible for multiple selves, 'growing' one another. There may be a reason we favor 'exemplary' ancestors who were wise while alive and remain so in the invisible world. Being dead does not necessarily make ancestors 'smarter.' Hillman suggests we aspire to be exemplary ancestors ourselves.
20/20 Hindsight
Genealogy helps us reclaim the self. You rewrite and integrate the story of your life -- a personal path worthy of the soul and a way of life that includes the paradox of begetting and death. There is a physical, emotional, and intentional arc to our epic tale. You are the intentional arc -- what interests you, how you interpret what you find, and what and who you love.
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do primarily with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, is the opening of the heart. (Campbell)
In "Masks of Eternity", Campbell tells us that looking back over our lives, in retrospect it seems the plot of our life-narrative has a coherence we could not recognize along our journey. What he says can be applied also to our genealogical narrative arc, to the dreamfield of characters we interact with there and to the development and uncovering of intergenerational life-themes. The multigenerational approach has it own coherence and milestones of discovery and exploration.
Pattern-recognition is part of our human wiring; we instinctively seek order for security. Stories help us order world and self. Like myth our concepts are fashioned by empirical elements. But tidy metaphors don't always work; some of them can be very messy and inconsistent, much like the edge of chaos from which order emerges in chaos theory. The missing information may be already within us as insight, though it has not emerged or unfolded.
"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature." (Campbell)
One Blood; One Field
The 'dreamfield' is also a dialogical field potential. We construct our reality with inner and outer conversation as much as by observation. All aspects of the self have their dialogical component, which allow us to amplify our direct experience, including that of our ancestors, our "invisible guests."
Conversation is one of our main ways of inner and outer thinking and expression. Dialogue bridges conscious and unconscious and activates the transcendent function. It doesn't matter if we do it intentionally or it happens to us spontaneously. Jung says "In reality we imagine nothing, it imagines itself." (ModPsy, ETH Lectures, p.53).
We can shift the point of view between the various entities imaginally engaged in the dialogue. The participant becomes the imaginal other, and speaks "as if" that other. The other is "felt" to be there, to be seen, to be known but not literalized. The dialogical self describes our ability to imagine the different positions of participants in an internal dialogue, in close connection with external dialogue -- finding a voice for emerging meaning.
Psyche is a semantic, symbolic and noetic field. Duality between consciousness and nonconsciousness is the contrast between our everyday experience (individual consciousness) and all nonconscious processes.
This duality is fundamental; we literally cannot ever know what it is like to be our nonconscious processes. We can only know what it’s like to be our conscious awareness. Yet, all the mind-body processes of which we are unaware are at least as aware if not more aware than our individual conscious awareness, and elements of who we are. Thus, they are related to our ancestry.
Fields are domains of influence. Storytelling describes a deep field of myth and archetype. Elements are woven together by narrative, metaphor and illustration. A semantic field is a set of words grouped by meaning referring to a specific subject, much like symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. The language of symbols is oldest.
Noetics, direct knowing, is the connection between mind and the physical universe - how the ‘inner cosmos’ of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) relates to the ‘outer cosmos’ of the physical world - the somatic field of our psychophysical being. All are components of the Ritual Field of mythic sensibility.
The field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it. Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life.
Components of the unconscious emerge in conscious life. Personal myth, (a biochemically-coded internal model of reality and a field of information), shapes individual behavior as cultural myths influence social behavior. Symbolic content is a mythic field. Shift the field, change the myth. Rituals shift the field.
Metaphor--what the experience is like--is the structure producing coherent, ordered experiences. The metaphors are usually those of physical experience. Creative engagement with chaos means direct experience of self as a changing, pluralistic, multi-dimensional entity.
This existential philosophy of "dynamic co-consciousness" is process-oriented, rather than "state-oriented" even though we employ the term state to imply a stable-yet-transitory condition. This is not an experience of a static "self" moving through process, but rather existential or phenomenological experience of self as process.
In Liber Novus, the portal to his unconscious encounters, Jung produced a de facto "theology of the dead." If we deny the dead, we deny ourselves. Their redemption doesn't save their souls, but suggests we take on the legacy of the dead, hear their lament, and answer their unanswered questions with our own conversations, insights and clarity.
Such clarity is a legendary hallmark of ancient bloodlines. In Greek, drakon (dragon), as in edrakon, is past tense for derkesthai, meaning 'to see clearly.' A dragon was one who saw clearly, and clarity of vision engendered wisdom, which produces the creative power of intuition, prediction, and synthesis. In Sanskrit vid means ‘to see’ or ‘to know’. In German wit means ‘to know’, and in Latin videre means ‘to see’, and video means ‘to record’.
We have to discriminate who and what is there, and among their voices, and note it, then record it -- to see clearly with wisdom -- to be a 'seer' and intuit gnosis. Clarity comes from clarifying the family tree. We participate more knowingly in the process of multigenerational integration. Ancestors can be guides who open access to spiritual understanding. As with the Grail you have to know what to look for and how to look for it, knowing it may be found within the heart.
Renewing the Mystery
That presumes we are capable of integrating the collective unconscious in the individuation process and the paradox of the death/rebirth experience. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. “Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love.” --C.G. Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XV
One of the key themes in ‘The Lament for the Dead’ is the denial of death by contemporary, secular Western culture. Our ancestors are not properly recognized and given their due weight – there is no real place for the dead in our culture. Shamdasani says on p.176:
“The first task that Jung finds himself confronted with [as I think anyone engaged in this descent is] is reanimating the dead, acknowledging that the dead are, and they have presences, they have effects. We turn our eyes away from future-oriented living and to what has gone before, in the shape of animated history, history that is not simply a record but history that is active.”
The key to personal transformation is story transformation. It is symbolic, life-changing -- a massive reorganization of attitudes, behaviors, and meaning. If symptoms are our entree to the unconscious, we can follow Hillman's prescription: "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
Our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes. What if we embrace the body as a loving partner and have faith in our experience? Can we sweet talk our ancestral spirits into sharing their secrets? We carry our ancestors and histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. They affect us by influence, impact, making a difference. Such impressions touch us by moving our feelings emotionally, even tugging our heartstrings.
Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. The sensory apparatus of our body is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us.
Begetting & Forgetting
History, the narrative of our personal, familial,and collective pasts, shapes and informs our identity. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even therapy has the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. We explain ourselves with stories and learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion.
What we think about our story and fate conditions our experience. For example, when author Dr. Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wrote on gratitude, “I have loved and been loved. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Posted on Dec 4, 2015
Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change. If the soul is beyond male/female, then it is beyond life/death, and the host of opposites. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good", if not always "happy" ending.
Metamorphosis is the classic metaphor of major life passages and restructuring. Latent potentials emerge and outworn characteristics decline. Some qualities are hidden until our true nature is revealed as a new form of life and self-identity.
Genealogy is not a group pursuit but a path of individuation. Even other family members need to find their own way through the family maze, though you share large parts of it and have similar experiences. In fact, genealogical or heritage groups can disrupt the process, imposing their own collective interpretations, ideas and beliefs, right and wrong, on individual process.
Collateral Grafting & Consanguinity
There are enough inherent problems in genealogy - legitimate filiation, dynastic supremacy, elder and younger (cadet) branches, forced coexistence, innumerable clerical errors, transmission gaps, and lapses of focus, to say nothing of successfully hidden or misattributed births. The tree-like structure can conceal exclusion, discrimination, and abusive graftings, even amputations.
The discourse of lineage and descent can be subverted for familial legitimation. For most of history, paternity was a legal fiction. Primogeniture was tied to succession and common-law inheritance. Androlineal genealogy was the necessary instrument of social origins and legal deeds.
Some family secrets are held close through "closed subject" attitudes -- silence about notorious relatives, silence about the privations and desperate acts in war and war crimes, hidden guilt of eco-cide, perhaps even up to and including such abominations as cannibalism can be found even in colonial ancestry -- the gruesome details of survival and survivor guilt.
While the regressive tribal worldview may be a valuable passage it is not the center of the process. While participants may feel 'found', they can also be derailed from their own course while seeming to fulfill it or fall prey to trickster personality cults with taboos and superstitious or doctrinaire beliefs. After all, we construct our reality from our beliefs. Much of it can be shared folly, and acceptance of the fantasies of others -- a corruption of individual emergence. Transformation is not a group process.
The Gift of Life
Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid and even bacterial species, including archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
Original Awareness
The family tree is the narrative arc of origins. Who are we? Where do we come from? And how do we know what we know when we know? Our ancient origins physical story continues to reveal surprises from the archaeological records. Humanity has been shaped by genetic admixture with other hominid species including bacterial archae.
The physics of the soul has been more difficult to unearth, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Life appears as a hyperdimensional biofield. Naturally, life itself remains a profound Mystery. We know nothing about its transcendent source, only the rapture of being alive.
But we know that the meaning of life is just that -- we exist, and that alone is tremendous. “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” (Campbell) It's not the search for meaning, but the experience of it -- casting off death and being reborn again, telling a story, and living on. The meaning of meaning is relationship.
Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter, or the breath of our first cry. Breath can lead us back home through the labyrinths of mind, emotions and sensation. The deepest sources of the psyche permeate the body. The instinctual-archetypal unconscious reflects the lost and potential life of the body.
Unconditioned consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). The unconscious is the "emotional" memory (sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and physical sensations linked to positive (happy, pleasing) situations or negative situations like the experience of loss, pain, despair, or danger.
Conscious and unconscious memory systems need to pool their information and work together for our well being. The "unconscious" is a magical powerhouse that speaks in symbols and through symptoms. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
Tracing Our Lineage
As ancient hominids we may have left the trees and our arboreal life but we never entirely abandoned them. When we descended from the canopy, we acquired another sort of tree that went with us -- the family tree and relations of our clan.
In Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald (1993) concludes that the australopithecines were limited to concrete/episodic minds: bipedal creatures able to benefit from pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, etc., but essentially of a seize-the-moment mentality.
Mimesis is the easiest way to learn. The first transition was to a "mimetic'' culture of making sense: the era of Homo erectus in which mankind absorbed and refashioned events to create rituals, crafts, rhythms, dance, and other prelinguistic traditions.
Eric McLcLuhan (2015) says, "Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming,intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer, that is, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence." (p. 27, infra.) He calls mimesis a tangible affective vortex of real power.
The evolution to mythic cultures followed: the result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. The third transition carried oral speech to reading, writing, and an extended external memory-store seen today in cloud technology. Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period.
Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, according to McLuhan who argues that the “mythic or iconic mode of awareness” substitutes a “multi-faceted” perspective for a single, fixed point of view. Mythic environments live beyond time and space, generating little radical social change.
Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. ... without any verbalization at all. (McLuhan, Playboy Interview). He claims the electric puts the mythic or collective dimension of human experience fully into the conscious wake-a-day-world.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Until recently such traces of by-gone eras were indetectable. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/06/this-archaeological-discovery-throws-story-of-human-evolution-into-disarray/
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. The archai are the deepest forms of psychic functioning. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. The primary tale is from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship -- the arboreal mythology of the family tree.
Issues include ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.'
Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth. We can enter our story more deeply, make it bigger, by including our ancestors and archetypes in our practice. Hillman describes how soulmaking is revealed in psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way.
He considers death as a permanent resident of the psyche, and Thanatos as a mode of soul-making: “The death experience brings down the old order and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous break down’ (synthesizing too, as it goes along), analysis means dying.”
Indeed, the act of being drawn to and looking deeper at the images presented creates meaning – that is, soul. Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data. But Hillman favored the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. The speech of the soul is always riddled with images and fantasies, which cannot and should not be taken literally or concretely. He points out, the alternative to such literalism is mystery.
Imaginal Understanding
Restoring psyche, we see soul at work, in fantasy, imagination, myth, and metaphor. But, as in metaphor, things can be 'like that,' but not that. Neti neti; neither this nor that. Literalism dominates everyday discourse and is probably the biggest pitfall on the genealogical path. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct level. Such fundamentalism can be a regressive, displaced tendency.
For example, while the heroic notion has served ego psychology for millennia, we can see beyond the urge of the conquering hero to deeper wisdom and insight beyond the manic ego-driven modality which has had its day. The perspective of the human ego certainly isn't superior.
Literalism has more to do with beliefs, religiosity, cult behavior, and esoteric metaphysics than it does with a balanced psychological approach. Psychopathology is also part and parcel of the same process and the source of illusion and delusions about self, others, and world.
Real meaning is beyond the literal and naturalistic fallacies. The poetic approach means exploring images, rather than explaining them. In this sense our ancestors are not allegories but modes of reflection. We cannot 'use' our ancestors, individually or collectively, as some people 'use' dreams in a mundane, prescriptive way.
The Great Work
This is our spiritual path that reaches back into the mists before time. This is our mythic journey of self-discovery. This is our quest for a world beyond our senses and the hidden mysteries of humanity. Beyond the trendy 'power of Now' lies the power of 'now and again.'
Genealogy is a foundational metaphor, generating long chains of simple structured connections, but it is more than a metaphor. We actually continue the undertaking of those who have gone before us in more ways than one. Perhaps someone else in the family collated the genealogy of their day. The transgenerational challenges will have been passed on and remain, as well as any family aspirational drives.
Genealogy is a big project but opens a sacred dimension. Each ancestor is the gateway to another timeline back to the past. First they diverge; then they converge. Our lines of descent connect us to the mythic realm as our own great-grandparents, making that relationship more personal, truly familial. The notion of 'descent' is somehow related to the archaic descent into the cave or tomb of the ancestors.
Descent seems to be very steep & dangerous. The ascent is always laborious, yet it is a well-trodden path. But the downward path is new.
Many have gone down, but they usually slipped, so it has a slippery surface; one finds pars of wrecked cars, trousers, shoes & skeletons, perhaps of people who gone to smash on that path. This is the path of danger. (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 94)
We pay attention to a history created by own ancestors. This is the realm of cultural heroes and royal founders. Early on genealogy became a method of explaining history and finding origins. It articulates the relationship of the body and history. The family tree and the knowledge tree are one.
Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being. Genealogy can be our retreat, our sanctuary, a form of pilgrimage -- if we but answer 'the call' from the depths of our hearts. We can 'mine' our lines of descent much like we 'mine' myth for meaning. Myths like ancient theories fill in the gaps in our knowledge but in a soulful rather than utilitarian way. The archetypes fill the gaps to compensate our spiritual deficiencies.
The archetype does not become meaningful until it goes out into the world and takes part in life according to its nature and
according to the time in history in which it occurs. The
facts of the specific cultural and personal existence
provide the actual clothing of the archetype. In other words
the archetype is only an inherited mode of expression.
Jung noted, "Besides the obvious personal sources, creative fantasy also draws upon the forgotten and long buried primitive mind with its host of images, which are to be found in the mythologies of all ages and all peoples. The sum of these images constitutes the collective unconscious, a heritage which is potentially present in every individual."
Carl Jung, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, Pages xviii - xvix
Genealogy Beyond the Grave
We see directly that all these ancestors are 'mine' -- 'my very own', giving new meaning to both myth and history. This is our Way, this is our path. The mythic perspective gives us access to unseen realms. Some say, "it does seem I fall into a type of revelatory trance where aspects of these people’s lives are made clear." Or, "downloads as I call them for lack of a better word sometimes come out of the blue, when I am meditating, or even studying the past, mysticism, etc."
Through the ancestors we can explore the meaning of power, surrender, commitment, betrayal, abandonment, and a variety of other human concerns and events. As Joseph Campbell said, to find your own way is to follow your bliss -- the transcendent wisdom of the divine that connects us to source and joy.
Remembrance is important to us as a species. Living with the dead brings us as a species from nature into culture. Medieval history emerged from genealogical tales. We regard our dead as social beings, easing out of this world, settling safely into the next and into memory.
When we begin our Great Work, we are met with a profusion of genealogical and geographical materials. We must learn how to navigate the depths of our unconscious ocean, steering our way through currents, maelstroms, tidal waves, and becalmed waters as navigators. How do we come to know the sea's dark secrets? As Kabir says, "All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."
Navigating the psyche -- the ocean with many shores -- is no easy task. We are all subject to self-delusion, misguided inner authority, the host of psychological illusion from follies to participation mystique, to projective errors, confabulations, and metaphysical beliefs. The imaginal gloss, right or wrong operates throughout the whole process of seeking clarity.
Doing our genealogy amplifies our personal story tremendously, providing facts, anecdotes, history, and migration patterns. Genealogy arouses our unconscious with the emotional dynamics revealed in the polarity process -- primal coupling. Confrontation with the unconscious begins in the personal unconscious. Personally acquired contents constitute the shadow.
Confrontation leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious. The aim of the confrontation is to abolish the dissociation. The opposites dance, braiding chains of transformations: the eternal and temporal, the infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, life and death, light and dark, ignorance and self-arising wisdom or self-knowledge.
Psyche exists as a source of knowledge. "…[N]ature exists without human aid, can deal with her processes herself, has everything in herself to bring about transformations, to move from the depths to the heights and down into the depths again. (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 42).
Archetypes give us some categories that help us relate to and understand all types of ancestors. They are not static forms but dynamics expressing transformations in consciousness. Archetypal images transform with awareness, appearing in many forms as consciousness shifts.
To illustrate the multiple personifications of psyche Hillman made reference to gods, goddesses, demigods and other imaginal figures which he referred to as sounding boards "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of daily life" although he insisted that these figures should not be used as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.
In this process of integration, images appear spontaneously in dreams, imagination, art, and spiritual vision. Primal images reflect the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) poles of psychic life. These parental pairs are reflected in our genealogy with the child symbolizing duality merging into union and self-renewal.
Genealogy describes divine origins. It borrows the basic plot of Genesis with its metaphors of birth, origins, and roots. It has many naturally overlapping concepts with Jungian psychology that illuminate both to good effect. Jung speaks of the ancestral unconscious, archetypes, the Masculine and Feminine, the syzygy, the divine child, the royal marriage, the world tree.
The psychological umbilical cord of our genealogy connects us not only to the divine source (realm of the Gods) but also to the vaults of the unconscious (Underworld). We embark on a quest to search for the World-Tree at the center of the Universe. This is a metaphor for our genealogical quest for psychological realignment with our own inner center and spiritual source. The tree is a symbol of the self and model of the psyche, with roots stretching back into our earliest symbolic imaginations.
We sublimate the cosmic energy that enters our being through realignment with the 'axis mundi'. The cosmic axis connects our mundane material realm to the higher realm of sacred power. The journey is perilous because a quest of transformation requires sacrifice of the ego. The World-Tree is also a symbol of initiation and transcendence. At the center of the Universe, we arrive at the sacred center of our own being.
Processes like amplification, active imagination, and dialogue naturally lend themselves to the genealogical and therapeutic process. All this and more plays out in the panoply of our pedigree, if we can trace our family tree back far enough. We become acquainted with each connecting ancestor along the way.
Amplification
We can imagine our ancestors living in the dreamtime and treat what we find there much like we treat dream symbols. As in dreamwork, we are all parts of the dream, figure and ground. Amplification honors the precise expression of the ancestor and attempts to 'tune in,' uncover memories, feelings, insight or experience we perceive for unique ancestors or family groups.
Amplification is an attempt to expand our associations to, and familiarity with the ancestor, without subjecting them to a cut-and-dried intellectual translation. Rather than a historical perspective, we find out in a deeply personal way what this ancestor means to us personally. Another metaphor for our process comes from genetics where PCR amplification is used to harness the natural replication of DNA molecules to vastly amplify a particular DNA locus from a small amount of material.
In genealogy, we amplify the informational content by all available means. We need to identify, amplify, and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trails of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
We are seekers; we seek dead people. To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. Sometimes we can cultivate that information or intuition into evidence. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic, psychological, and mythic realities. Myth can be more important than history in some ways.
We are descendants of 'dreamtime' ancestors. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so. Though you or I can "raise Cain," Egyptian pharaohs, Sumerian kings, Greek gods, Merovingians, and Grail knights in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. The name of the Sumerian god Enki means 'archetype.' The Dragon bloodline, Grail kings, and Merovingians are of the First Family. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche.
In this sense, Cain's story teaches us the valuable first lesson that we must 'learn to deal with our temper' or create havoc within and without the family. Alas, where did Adam and Eve go wrong in failing to inculcate such values in the emotional life of their son?
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker.
Syzygy
When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different natures from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution. Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Ancestral Beings
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. The gloss of imaginal vision co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections. We may be shocked when we unearth such creatures in our own lineage.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized', marginalized, or disregarded by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies and fish-men, to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such abyssal creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse, a cycle of bondage and release -- bondage of the vehicle, not the consciousness. Kabir says, "“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”
The ancients always thought of coming events as having shadows cast in front of them. Here we have an animal killed, a mythological animal in fact—that is, instinct. When it is killed, someone will become conscious. In the story of Percival, the unconscious hero Percival becomes conscious through the shooting of the swan. . . .A bird is a mind animal, symbolically, so the unconsciousness is in the mind. One word more on the theme of immortality. It is intimately linked up with the anima question. Through the relation to the anima one obtains the chance of greater consciousness. It leads to a realization of the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious functions. This realization brings with it a recognition of the inherited plus the new units that go to make up the self. That is to say, when we once grasp the meaning of the conscious and the unconscious together, we become aware of the ancestral lives that have gone into the making of our own lives. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Pages 153-154
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, attachment disorder, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting off psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, unless contextualized as imaginal.
"Inasmuch as the serpent leads into the shadows, it has the function of the anima; it leads you into the depths, it connects the above and the below." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
"The serpent leads the psychological movement apparently astray into the kingdom of shadows, dead and wrong images, but also into the earth, into concretization." (1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Jung wrote, "Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself." (Liber Novus, Page 318). Campbell calls the old dragon the ego of need and greed (need, want, belief, restrictions) and said the serpent shedding its skin represents the power of life to throw off death and the bondage to life, to time, and the opposites.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Nature & Nurture
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, outrageous calamities somewhere between coincidence and fate, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. Myth is sacred history, though it may not be 'true.' We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father that can be the key to healing.
Time Does Not Heal; It Conceals
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. Further, on a biochemical level, stress we experience during childhood and adolescence catches up with us as adults, altering our bodies, our cells, and even our DNA.
Adverse childhood experiences, especially family trauma and abuse, change your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. Early stories script biology that scripts the way psychophysical life plays out.. The system becomes over-reactive and inflammatory chemicals set the stage for autoimmune disorders, heart disease, depression, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumors, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future.
Sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground and fuel of psychic processes.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.