DREAMING OF THE BONES
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
HERE IS WHERE I AM
Dreaming of the Bones
ANCESTRAL BRANCHES
Entangled Roots & Branches of the Family Tree
"You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul.
Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words.
The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world.
You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." --Jung, Red Book, Page 298.
THE GREENING OF THE TREE
Your Ancestors Make It Matter
The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE. It greens by heaping up growing living matter.
Good and evil unite in the growth of the tree. In their divinity life and love stand opposed. ~Diahmon, Liber Novus, Page 351.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious -- the Land of the Dead. The Red Thread, the thread of destiny, connects to the Source. It shows us the way, igniting imagination with the alchemy of 'seeing', awakening the soul. The red threads of your blood link you and your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology. The bloodline is also called the "underground stream," a transmission of cultural influences of ancestors. Knowing who our ancestors were is fundamental to our sense of who we are.
Genealogical Embeddedness
We often feel nostalgic about the long-lost time “when place, identity, culture and ancestry coincided.” "Standing on the land that ancestors knew” can thus produce a sense of genealogical connection that is sometimes explained as an inexpressible sense of spiritual affinity, and often experienced bodily in “shivers down the spine” and “goosebumps.” It is easy to imagine a shared physical experience that links ancestors to their descendants across time.
Soul of Evolution
Charles Darwin first realized the entire natural system is actually “founded on descent” and is thereby “genealogical in its arrangement.” Genealogical connectedness is, in fact, “the linchpin of evolution,” which is “first and foremost
a genealogical process” that awakens latent potentials.
Genealogies are more than mere reflections of nature or mere records of history. Rather than simply passively documenting who our ancestors were, they are the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/why_do_we_care_about_our_ancestors/
https://books.google.com/books?id=tVjuzNPfLcgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Rethinking Our Ancestry
Are we really alive if we remain 'dead' to the true nature of Reality? Without a deep visceral understanding of our own embodiment, kith and kin, without knowledge of our family tree, and without the personal story of who we are and where we come from, we remain rootless without a living connection.
Every single one of our ancestors is indispensable to our existence. Without genealogical context within which to “make sense of themselves” identity problems can arise in those who experience such a “genealogical void,” or existential vacuum, feeling cut off from the life giving forces of nature. Nature itself is sacred and holds the promise of eternal life.
Dreaming of the Bones
Psychic dissociation is desacralization -- loss of soul. Psychological integrity is linked to genealogical roots. You have to bring your experience to the process to make that connection with a new perspective and a new way to hear old wisdom. But, we are connected to the ancestors like long forgotten dreams, even when they remain unconscious. Like an artist, we simply need to engage. The unconscious runs through everything. Phenomena simply show themselves to us as revelations of psyche's nature.
Thierry Gaillard frames it succinctly: "At birth, we unconsciously inherit unfinished stories of our parents, our ancestors and our society. Like open circuits, the charges of this heritage influence our lives for we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots without losing an essential part of ourselves. These histories replay themselves in some of the difficulties we encounter in our own lives, often programming the same outcomes again and again."
Petrified Wood
Generally, we only remember our ancestors for a few generations unless there is a historical reason for records and stories to be preserved. But the cultural practice and rituals of genealogy have served individuals, tribes and nations throughout the history of mankind. The ancestors are like 'living fossils' in our our psyche, which we can differentiate out from the pointless forest of an undelineated Tree. We may descend from several undelineated families.
Bare Bones
From Europe to Asia, genealogy is a “blueprint for action.” Historically genealogical records have been lost and recreated many times, and there have been several periods of genealogical reconstruction and confabulation with legends and myth, produced as politically compelling narratives of descent and right to rulership. Also, historically, writing genealogies only vaguely depends on records.
From Belle Epoch America to modern China, if they don’t have the records, they just make it up. It may be a fraudulent genealogist, social climbers, or an inexperienced family member copying from inaccurate trees. Even with accurate records, some try to embellish their family history, making it grander than it really was.
Those writing a new genealogy can easily borrow pieces of any story from extant records and claim it. It’s easy to claim that your ancestors have an important name, or were important officials. But, to knowingly do so would indicate some kind of shadow problem, and persona issues -- blocks to true meaning, which can be as disabling as inflations from pure fantasies or superstitions about noble lines.
Branching Out
Genealogical narrative has its own power. Most people know it has its own fictional conventions. The fictions of our family are a source of metaphors delineating relationships in familial terms. It opens ground into the further unknown. In a group of their contemporaries and peers an individual loses uniqueness. But that same person, as the latest member of a lineage of forebears, automatically assumes a certain status.
The narration of a genealogy inevitably highlights the last member. Not only do the achievements of the ancestors accrue to the most recent descendant, but the ancestors themselves appear to be more forerunners pointing to what is yet to come. Arguably, length of genealogy confers prestige on an individual; likewise, length of history confers prestige on a nation.
Ritual, a way to perform genealogies, invokes the 'spirits' -- ordered relationships between human beings in the here-and-now and non-immediate sources of power, authority, and value. The fundamental efficacy of ritual lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in the larger order of things.
Generational analysis is one such ritual. But even more than trying to make the unconscious conscious, genealogy is about looking for routes into the unconscious areas. As genealogists, we know this is where we will find the gods at the roots of our longest lines -- the god inside each of us.
Ancestral Linkage
We can build our Family Tree as an aspirational framework with genealogy and psychogenealogy, and our paths through the Tree of Life. Heraclitus observed that we can never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths we travel, because of its profound nature.
"Walking the path" of our various branches step-by-step, we discover precisely which ancestors connect us and how to older common ancestors. This is the first step in revealing hidden truth and differentiating ourselves from our unconscious collective - the prima materia or massa confusa.
Jung thought, "A tree is not a bad analogy, because we do not understand how a tree functions either, how it raises up to its crown the huge volume of water that circulates in its system, for example, yet the tree is an indisputable fact, a natural process." Jung thought individuation was such a natural process, like an oak growing from an acorn.
Ancestors are 'Made', not Born
'Raising to consciousness' formerly unknown ancestors is a metaphorical 'resurrection,' that increases our self-knowledge and leads toward assimilation or transgenerational integration. Consciousness can also block individuation through resistance by not allowing what is in the unconscious to develop.
Complexes may be related to environmental traumatic experience, or internal conflicts. The core of any complex is a universal pattern of experience, or archetype. Complexes originate in the archetypal depths of the psyche -- deep structures, patterns and ways of living that represent an inherited memory of the history of human culture. The primordial psyche is magical and archaic, and may be a source for much of what is interpreted as past lives, which might be 'passed' lives.
Ghost Sickness
Complexes and repetition compulsions can be associated with unconscious ancestral effects. Important groups of unconscious associations, conflicting beliefs that stand on their own like a splinter identity, or a strong unconscious impulse can be embodied as ancestors. We encounter them embodied as images that self-present themselves in their own imaginal, precise detail. Hillman claimed that imagination itself provides grounding and body.
Healing Momentum
We raise patterns and images to consciousness from the psychoid depths, finding our purpose in the universe and give expression to what we realize. Such gnosis and healing potential is derived from knowledge of the unconscious -- represented unconscious contents. Patterns of unfolding consciousness reveal archetypal structure, promoting wholeness and balance between wholesale identification with myth and outright rejection of it, restoring the free flow of consciousness.
We share unconscious contents through participation mystique - a symbiosis where contents of one's personal unconscious are experienced in another or through another person. Jung claimed, "The participation mystique by which society contains the individual may be understood as a statement of the fact that individuals are still undifferentiated from each other, that is to say, they have not yet been self-consciously broken up into individual personalities." (C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters).
Projection and archaic identification are often mythological motifs surrounding situations and objects, including other persons, dead or alive. In an unconscious process we 'meet our projections' rather than make them. Ancestors are 'hooks' for projecting our unconscious qualities. We can learn something about ourselves withdrawing or dissolving projections.
"We tend to identify our chthonic nature with evil and our spiritual nature with good. We must accept the dark forces and stop projecting them." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
"This union, which should not come about, is the union of the pairs of opposites in ourselves. This is what the devil wants to prevent at any cost." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142)
Genealogical Imagination
Genealogy is a sequence of corporeal births, but also psychic events. 'Walking a path' is much like 'walking a labyrinth. We begin with our self and proceed back to the progenitor of each direct ancestor, both male and female. "Walking the path" means you must visit every profile in both paths, no shortcuts. Jung called the sequence of psychic events a connection, a solid sequence, that either begins with a prime cause or follows a final cause.
Beyond causal qualities, obvious connections are demonstrated by the sequence of events, but our family tree also expresses nonlocal qualities, beyond mind, body, space and time. In everyday life, distance and location are mundane absolutes. Yet physics now suggests that at the most fundamental level, the universe is nonlocal—there is no such thing as place or distance.
Nonlocal Ancestors
Ancestral line, bloodline, line of descent, line of succession, and line of inheritance are all linear descriptors -- chains with causal implications. But not all ancestral effects, like vicarious participation and the genealogical experience of history, are causal.
Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems.
Two classically identical expressions for mutual information generally differ when the quantum systems are involved. This difference defines the quantum discord. It can be used as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. In quantum information theory, quantum discord is processing quantum mutual information.
It is a measure of nonclassical correlations between two subsystems of a quantum system. It includes correlations that are due to quantum physical effects but do not necessarily involve quantum entanglement. Encoded information that can only be accessed by coherent quantum interactions. So a system can have no entanglement but consuming quantum discord.
Panpsychism, essentially the alchemical view, is a doctrine (belief) that everything material (including the atoms and the galaxies) has an element of individual consciousness. But, is it correct to equate the concept of psyche and the concept of consciousness? Panpsychism suggests that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious in certain configurations. Panprotopsychism postulates that fundamental physical entities are proto-conscious.
Is the universe made of matter/consciousness? How does consciousness arise from seemingly inanimate matter? The nondual approach says everything is mind and matter is its manifestation. Consciousness does not emerge from the brain but is conditioned by it. The entire Universe of mind and matter arises from a fundamental non-dual reality.
Panprotopsychism and Panexperientialism describe emergence of primal non-conscious processes. Panprotopsyhism suggests proto-consciousness may exist in the universe as a “fundamental property” without depending at all on anything physical.
By focusing on experience rather than mentality panexperientialism avoids some of the traditional objections to panpsychism. Absolute space is the noumenal source of phenomenal consciousness, a fundamental quality, and Mind is a higher order hyperspace field outside brain's EM field. Fundamental proto-consciousness finds more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way.
There are reports of non-ordinary experiences during pregnancy, for example, where obscure episodes from the lives of parents and unknowable details of ancestors, minute physiological characteristics of various animal and plant species, and arcane details of world mythologies of which the person clearly had no prior knowledge. The imaginal world is neither literal nor abstract.
Nonlocality operates beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment. Coherence or resonance may be expressed as compassion, empathy, love, unity, oneness, and connectedness. Consciousness affects or informs human and nonhuman or inanimate forms alike.
Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all. Still none of us has any idea how anything material could be conscious, so we must simply stand in that Mystery. We share its essential nature; it is the cosmos within us. We are that.
Nonlocal events, like synchronicity are apparently 1) unmediated, requiring no go-between signal; 2) unmitigated, with no diminishing of effect with distance; 3) immediate, apparently outside of time and space as we commonly understand them. In this acausal process, consciousness is fundamental, not derivative and unexplainable in terms of anything more basic.
Jung advised, “This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!”
Recent experiments (2016) have suggested that no such hidden or nonlocal reality exists. But the theory of connectivity still holds in other models. They have only ruled out a specific class of theories in which the hidden reality of any particle is local, and not influenced by something far away.
Bohm’s ideas involve non-local hidden reality, in which everything depends on everything. Everything happening in a distant galaxy is influencing you right now and vice versa, however minor the effect. Bohm’s theory says that and electron is both a wave and particle: an electron is a particle with a definite trajectory, but this path is governed by a wave upon which the electron rides. The wave can also be influenced by other particles, which in turn changes the trajectory of the electron.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078251-quantum-weirdness-may-hide-an-orderly-reality-after-all/
Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees. The more a quantum state is entangled with its partner, the better the states will perform in quantum information applications.
The paths of our descent remain correlated, entangled forever. Each time we retrace our roots we are commemorating and reenacting the glorious time of the beginnings. The contrast image of ascent and descent on the Tree of Life is the primary metaphor, unlocking a treasure of family knowledge and self-knowledge, and a new sense of presence.
We have another life than the life we consciously intend to have. Alchemy stresses redemption of the physical body, or matter, while actively striving toward creation of a subtle, immortal body, which has no apparent physical basis. Matter is the raw unconscious. We enter that unconsciousness for the purpose of raising it to consciousness, to raise up the treasure -- the precious heritage of the ancestors.
“The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree… the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven -- the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible.” (Jung, CW 9i, para. 198)
World Soul; World Tree
The world-tree is an expression of anima-mundi or world-soul. It is the axis that aligns us with the cosmos, but more tangibly, it is the shared ancestral tree, rather than a stand-alone tree. Alchemy requires resurrection of the soul of body. The challenge we encounter in developing and "owning" this fresh worldview is to "see through" to a unified vision of mundane physical processes with spiritual values and vision.
In shamanism, the ancestors were venerated as the effect was a preventive therapy that maintained those vital connections with the past. While the World Tree meant one thing in shamanic culture today it refers to the definitive family tree for the entire world, a collaboration on shared ancestry by constantly expanding and improving the tree. The World Family Tree currently has more than 100 million profiles.
The World Family Tree is like having millions of people solving the same jigsaw puzzle together instead of each of us solving a separate, tiny puzzle. Traditionally, people have embarked on individual studies of their family history in the hope of preserving it for future generations. However, this isolated approach results in the same research being repeated over and over again. By combining all research into a single, collaborative tree, users can focus on verifying existing information and pursue new leads rather than wasting time repeating what others have already found.
With the World Family Tree you will be delighted to constantly discover new information about your family because so many other users are constantly working to improve it with new findings. Sources and citations are included so the work of others can be checked and enhanced.
If mistakes are found, you can fix them quickly on the World Family Tree, which is not possible with standalone trees that are controlled by someone else. Thus, errors gradually disappear instead of perpetuating, growing worse, and achieving the false notion of accuracy simply by being repeated by others.
The World Family Tree allows identical profiles to be merged into one, reducing duplication and collecting the best information for all to share. Profiles support multiple languages so you can easily document names and biographies separately in different languages. The World Family Tree is also curated by a large team of expert volunteer Curators.
Entangled Particles
We can develop awareness of the psychophysical ordering processes inherent in matter -- in our matter. The physical body is a living metaphor -- a metaphorm -- for psychic transformation. Life begets life in creative manifestation.
According to Jung, psyche is not different from matter. At the psychoid or psychophysical ground level, they are different perspectives on the phenomenal world. Psyche is the womb of manifestation. The collective unconscious is also projected into the inner aspect of our own bodies. The substance of our mind is deeply connected somehow to the physical world.
In Psychology of Religion, Jung said, Jung, “We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images.” And, Jung comments, “In reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same.” (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 1, p. 396.)
The psychoid nature of archetypes extends beyond a neurophysiological basis into the general dynamical patterns of all matter and energy -- the unconscious properties of the physiological world. Both psyche and matter are in a constant process of redefinition.
In pilot-wave theory, if space and time behave like a superfluid, or a fluid that experiences no dissipation at all, then 'path memory' could conceivably give rise to the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement. When two particles become entangled, a measurement of the state of one instantly affects that of the other, even at vast distances. The superfluid/quantum correlation mirrors the collective unconscious field as a vast ocean of potential.
In standard quantum mechanics, the effect is rationalized as the instantaneous collapse of the particles’ joint probability wave. But in the pilot-wave version of events, an interaction between two particles in a superfluid universe sets them on paths that stay correlated forever. The interaction permanently affects the contours of the superfluid, accounting for nonlocal correlations.”
Entangled Lives
Jung referred to unitary reality consisting of both psyche and matter as transcendental -- an unextended energetic intensity, or potential. He argued, "...Psyche cannot be totally different from matter for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible."
We are each a personal part of the world's impersonal fabric, so psyche and soma interpentrate. Waves in this potential spacetime mysteriously “collapse” into particles in actual spacetime. They collapse from their ghostly state into definite quantum particles.
This idea shares much with a holistic or integral perspective, an approach which we can extend to our family tree. In psychosomatics, psyche carries the potential, while soma is the actuality. In the absence of a voice, the body can articulate complex affective and relational losses.
Paleopoetics
We can engage the somatic unconscious as an experiential space of relations and imagination of the heart. The three instincts are self-preservation, sexual, and social. How did humans, given their non-symbolic mammalian heritage, come to represent their knowledge in symbolic form?
All non-verbal communication is mimetic (rehearsal loop), a self-started representational act -- the ability to alternate between various self-perspectives and other-perspectives. The archaic basis of episode recognition patterns is different from generalized, procedural memory. We learned to represent a situation and reflect on it (metacognition, orientation, time, space, date, specific place).
Jung suggested we cannot stand to live a meaningless life. but individuation means to find one's own meaning and connection to universal meaning. The collective unconscious doesn't express personal wishes and intentions as it is an absolutely transpersonal, neutral, psychic 'entity,' which, like nature, is an emanative form of appearance.
Cultural Networks
Humans are linked from birth to a vast cultural storehouse of knowledge and skill accumulated as cultural memory over aeons. We are sensitive to understanding the significance of environmental effects and mimesis (motor skill and imagination) allows us to invent intentional representations.
Culture is mimetic framework. Mirror neurons allow us to love, to socialize, and to empathize with the experience of others through collective shaping of network architecture. In the genealogical context, we are more than a fixed point in a particular cultural network. The genealogy symbolizes the angular momentum of descent. Our responsibility is to make that path easier. Such is the way of nature. Psychogenealogy modulates consciousness in a marked and novel way.
Episodic memories are locked in details of specific experiences such as the death of a loved one. Mythical culture institutionalized meaning by codifying significant contents of individual experience. Internal memory became external culture. We developed theories to predict and explain through symbolic culture. We are still rooted in episodic experience, as well as being mythic, symbolic, and theoretical. Theoretical development strips away previous mythic meanings, demystifying them.
Metaphysics of Presence
The psychoid level of archetypes correlates with wave/particle duality and the heritable DNA biohologram. Expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics, heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. Cells, tissues and organs differentiate when different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, and to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. The body is inescapably a relational body with the potential for overcoming the boundaries of flesh to perpetuate relationality, received wisdom (lucidity), and power-knowledge even in the absence of material embodiment.
Quantum entanglement and nonlocality are models or metaphors for how we may actually remain connected. Our entangled pairs close the locality loophole. David Bohm suggested we have an almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamical interconnectedness of things. This is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and culture -- and in our relations with our own ancestors.
Unexamined Ground
Genealogy can help bridge that interconnectedness gap -- the unconscious, unexamined ground. Genealogy is a differential element of values. It is a field in which relationships operate -- a realm of conscious and unconscious cooperation represented by point to point networks of individuals, dead and alive. The sociality is not merely objective, because of our deep psychophysical involvement. Theory describes "Soul as Intersubjective Reality and Spirit as Interobjective Reality."
Genealogy is complex and requires a broad context -- an open value network with communication, non-control, open-access and value creation. It has its own space-time relationality. As relational selves we stand in intricate and intimate webs of connection with all we contact—whether human or animal, animate or inanimate. 'Path memory' stimulates the right probabilities.
Agents, relationships, and the field of relationality in which relationships occur close the objective-subjective loop with assertion and intentionality. Atomistic individualism is rejected for a relational self, a balance between individual agency and collective communion.
Genealogy can energize the relationships that mobilize action across different interwoven dimensions of relationality. It helps us organize ancestral incoherence and multiplicity. Our pathways of descent or family branches are like converging or parallel realities.
Embodied Relationality
Relationality considers relationships the foundation of subjectivity, including the tangible and intangible beyond the boundaries of life/death in the absence of the corporeal or embodied other. Separation of families occurs by disappearance, miscarriage, migration, displacement, divorce, war, and death.
Archetypal ideas can be correlated with fundamental physiological processes. For example, the union of opposites can be linked to the sympathetic and parasympathic systems - ergotrophic and trophotropic systems of arousal. The 'rein' effect is the emotional alchemy of our ecstatic and transcendent nature. One system, ergotrophic, energizes us; the other, trophotropic, tranquilizes us. The E-system is Yang, while the T-system is Yin. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html
Family members who have died are only 'relatively disembodied.' Bonds are not severed by death but continue in an interactive psychophysical relationship. Even after death attachments and continuing bonds remain apparent. Bereavement, depression, and symptoms are some examples.
Metaphorically, at least, quantum entanglement (relational entanglement) is mirrored in the twisted limbs of our ancestral branches, particularly the first 5-6 generations that connect us with the more widely shared World Tree. Actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances.
Psychophysical Relativity
Despite our inherent relationality, a “crisis of nonrelation” often marks our psychic entanglements. What gets in the way and leaves us facing pathological alternatives instead? What is it about our relationality that tempts us to disavow the very thing that makes us who we are?
Why do we tend to avoid our relationality pursuing narcissistic solace and solitary self-enclosure? Ancestral connection, attachment, and intersubjectivity is one way to overcome such tendencies with the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect. Relationality is shaped across global and local contexts by gender and generation, including aspects of emotions and embodiment.
Collective Individuation
Such radical decentering establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think in categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on. Breaking with both subject-centerdness and the individual as model or starting point is an epistemological shift. We can be part of an undivided whole and still possess our own unique qualities.
Singularity, rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality enables us to think of the self — other, human—animal, nature— culture and human — world in terms of complex becoming. Intersubjectivity and interbeing incorporate a sense of the dynamic web of relationships that are constitutive for our being at a given moment.
Personal & Universal
The co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world. Grounding in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being is our existential condition and circumscribes our relation to the other. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/16/1/129.abstract
Western societies presume death signifies an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body. But we can recognize that embodied relational experience can continue after death, encompassing a ‘me’, a ‘you’ and an ‘us’. After death ‘me’ and ‘us’ remain (though changed) while crucial dimensions of ‘you’ persist too. Caring for the dead involves including them in the family, remembering them, and acting in ways they would approve. Imaginal dialogue provides comfort and guidance.
Relational Identity
The binary divide between living and dead bodies mirrors other related dichotomies of mind/body, self/other, internal/external, and nature/social. Empirical and anecdotal research suggests that embodied relationality expresses how connectedness is lived out after death and/or disruptive transitions in material practices and felt experiences.
Research continues to imply that we are not just ontologically bounded units or entities. We don't just participate in relationships, but are constituted by them, especially those directly related to us. Embodied relationality includes caring after death.
Family descent and history is one key dimension of categories of identity. Social membership and 'belonging' is another. Genealogy is framed by waves of mobility and intercultural history.
Ancestral home and place of origin is another dimension. The material landscapes of certain prehistoric lands are part of our heritage because our ancestors were there when it was being shaped. This is native belonging. Alternatives are settler presence, or collective displacement, shaped by long histories of migrations.
Spirits of the Ancestors
Entanglement is an instantaneous nonlocal connection at the quantal and subquantal level. Two or more objects or subjects can only be described in relation to one another even when widely separated. In quantum entanglement two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space or time. This supermemory is a bizarre intersection of entanglement, information and time.
Family Matters
A change induced in one affects the other; unity of mind is achieved by quantum entanglement. Entanglement remains as long as neither has any significant interactions with other objects to break the entanglement. Particles of energy/matter can become correlated to predictably interact with each other. No signal is sent, no influence transmitted. But the fate of one embodies and reveals the fate of the other.
Unconscious images, beliefs, compulsions and physical symptoms can be the result of being entangled with family and ancestors. Unconscious entanglements with family members or ancestors play a significant role in our emotional conflicts, physical illnesses and spiritual distress. These entanglements also influence the way we cope with the challenges of growing up in our families.
Causal Ambiguity
Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links -- not space-time -- constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. What happens now can be correlated with what happens later, in ways that elude a simple mechanistic explanation. In effect, you can have spooky action at a delay.
These strong temporal correlations between time and space are seriously counterintuitive. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier to the later one, two events can become correlated so that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later. Each of these events is the cause of the other, as if each were the first to occur.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/
Once Connected Matter
It is a physical fact we contain our ancestral genetics and epigenetics and it remains a psychological fact, too. Further, Scientific American reports that "It is remarkable that it is so common for cells from one individual to integrate into the tissues of another distinct person."
We now know that cells from a developing fetus cross the placenta, allowing the baby’s DNA to become part of the mother’s body. These fetal cells persist in a woman’s body into her old age. If she has been pregnant with a male child it’s likely she’ll have some Y-chromosomes drifting around for a few decades too, even if the baby she carried didn’t live to be born. The cells of that child stay with her, resonating in ways that mothers have known intuitively throughout time. Male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades.
Fetal cells you contributed to your own mother may be found in her blood, bone marrow, skin, kidney, and liver. These fetal cells appear to “treat” her when she is ill or injured.
In one case, a woman stopped treatment against medical advice. A liver biopsy showed “thousands of male cells” determined to be from a pregnancy terminated nearly 20 years earlier. These cells helped her body recover just as fetal cells you gave your mother rush to help repair her from within when she’s unwell.
Any woman who has ever been pregnant, even if she miscarried so early she never knew she was with child, is likely to be a microchimera (a person who carries the cells of another person). Fetal cells have the imprint of her child’s father and his ancestry.
Fetal cells can be shared from one pregnancy to another, meaning the cells of older siblings may float within younger siblings. The presence of fetal cells in a woman’s body is associated with substantially improved longevity, with an overall mortality rate 60 percent lower than women whose bodies don’t contain such cells. According to such findings, we heal our mothers and our children heal us. http://lauragraceweldon.com/2012/06/12/mother-child-are-linked-at-the-cellular-level/
We imagine ourselves as singular autonomous individuals, but these foreign cells suggest that most people carry remnants of other individuals, including absorbed twins.
If the fetus is absorbed completely, there are usually no further complications to the pregnancy, other than first trimester vaginal bleeding. This occurs when a twin or multiple disappears in the uterus during pregnancy as a result of a miscarriage of one twin or multiple. The fetal tissue is absorbed by the survivor.
Men have failed paternity tests because of this phenomena. A man's DNA may not match because the man's unborn twin is technically the genetic father of their son.
An intriguing new study suggests children may resemble a mother’s previous sexual partner. The effect may be due to molecules in the semen of the first mate being absorbed by the female's immature eggs where they influence future offspring.
The quantum level of interconnectedness between once-connected matter could explain the frequent stories of mothers knowing when something has gone wrong at a distance for their spouses, children. or siblings, and vice versa. If we can 'talk' to the cells of our bodies to good healing effect and immune stimulation, we might reasonably also speak with and mobilize the cells of others circulating in our system.
Politics of Belonging
Jung asks, not what childhood trauma creates a fixation, but what obstacle in the life path are we unable to overcome, and what is the cause of the regression? Our lives remain literally entangled with our immediate family and the souls, spirits, and issues of our ancestors. Our branches criss-cross continents, oceans, and culture wars. The lost or forgotten knowledge and secrets of our ancient ancestors, shapes the creative and moral future reality.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently. Instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.
In a similar way we are entangled with the fate of our ancestors and carry their burdens. When the root of the problem is brought to light, we don't have to repeat the fate of our ancestors with whom we were entangled. Only when these indeterminate causal relations between events are pruned away — so that nature realizes only some of the possibilities available to it — do space and time become meaningful. Quantum correlations come first, space-time later.
Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc., performed on entangled particles are found to be appropriately correlated. Schrödinger said, "I would not call [entanglement] one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."
Ancestor Syndrome
The psychological term for negative entanglement is enmeshment. Our ancestors reflect our dissociated and unintegrated personality facets. Its most positive expression is the unus mundus, the essential heart of the World Soul.
Family Constellations (a subset application of Systemic Constellations) is an experiential process of releasing and resolving profound tensions within and between people. The process diverges from conventional forms of cognitive, behavior and psychodynamic psychotherapy in several key respects.
Family Constellations attempt to reveal a previously unrecognized systemic dynamic that spans multiple generations in a given family. We can resolve the harmful effects of that dynamic by encouraging acceptance of the factual reality of the past, psychophysical transformation, and transcendence.
Dreaming of the Bones
ANCESTRAL BRANCHES
Entangled Roots & Branches of the Family Tree
"You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul.
Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words.
The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world.
You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." --Jung, Red Book, Page 298.
THE GREENING OF THE TREE
Your Ancestors Make It Matter
The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE. It greens by heaping up growing living matter.
Good and evil unite in the growth of the tree. In their divinity life and love stand opposed. ~Diahmon, Liber Novus, Page 351.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious -- the Land of the Dead. The Red Thread, the thread of destiny, connects to the Source. It shows us the way, igniting imagination with the alchemy of 'seeing', awakening the soul. The red threads of your blood link you and your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology. The bloodline is also called the "underground stream," a transmission of cultural influences of ancestors. Knowing who our ancestors were is fundamental to our sense of who we are.
Genealogical Embeddedness
We often feel nostalgic about the long-lost time “when place, identity, culture and ancestry coincided.” "Standing on the land that ancestors knew” can thus produce a sense of genealogical connection that is sometimes explained as an inexpressible sense of spiritual affinity, and often experienced bodily in “shivers down the spine” and “goosebumps.” It is easy to imagine a shared physical experience that links ancestors to their descendants across time.
Soul of Evolution
Charles Darwin first realized the entire natural system is actually “founded on descent” and is thereby “genealogical in its arrangement.” Genealogical connectedness is, in fact, “the linchpin of evolution,” which is “first and foremost
a genealogical process” that awakens latent potentials.
Genealogies are more than mere reflections of nature or mere records of history. Rather than simply passively documenting who our ancestors were, they are the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/why_do_we_care_about_our_ancestors/
https://books.google.com/books?id=tVjuzNPfLcgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Rethinking Our Ancestry
Are we really alive if we remain 'dead' to the true nature of Reality? Without a deep visceral understanding of our own embodiment, kith and kin, without knowledge of our family tree, and without the personal story of who we are and where we come from, we remain rootless without a living connection.
Every single one of our ancestors is indispensable to our existence. Without genealogical context within which to “make sense of themselves” identity problems can arise in those who experience such a “genealogical void,” or existential vacuum, feeling cut off from the life giving forces of nature. Nature itself is sacred and holds the promise of eternal life.
Dreaming of the Bones
Psychic dissociation is desacralization -- loss of soul. Psychological integrity is linked to genealogical roots. You have to bring your experience to the process to make that connection with a new perspective and a new way to hear old wisdom. But, we are connected to the ancestors like long forgotten dreams, even when they remain unconscious. Like an artist, we simply need to engage. The unconscious runs through everything. Phenomena simply show themselves to us as revelations of psyche's nature.
Thierry Gaillard frames it succinctly: "At birth, we unconsciously inherit unfinished stories of our parents, our ancestors and our society. Like open circuits, the charges of this heritage influence our lives for we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots without losing an essential part of ourselves. These histories replay themselves in some of the difficulties we encounter in our own lives, often programming the same outcomes again and again."
Petrified Wood
Generally, we only remember our ancestors for a few generations unless there is a historical reason for records and stories to be preserved. But the cultural practice and rituals of genealogy have served individuals, tribes and nations throughout the history of mankind. The ancestors are like 'living fossils' in our our psyche, which we can differentiate out from the pointless forest of an undelineated Tree. We may descend from several undelineated families.
Bare Bones
From Europe to Asia, genealogy is a “blueprint for action.” Historically genealogical records have been lost and recreated many times, and there have been several periods of genealogical reconstruction and confabulation with legends and myth, produced as politically compelling narratives of descent and right to rulership. Also, historically, writing genealogies only vaguely depends on records.
From Belle Epoch America to modern China, if they don’t have the records, they just make it up. It may be a fraudulent genealogist, social climbers, or an inexperienced family member copying from inaccurate trees. Even with accurate records, some try to embellish their family history, making it grander than it really was.
Those writing a new genealogy can easily borrow pieces of any story from extant records and claim it. It’s easy to claim that your ancestors have an important name, or were important officials. But, to knowingly do so would indicate some kind of shadow problem, and persona issues -- blocks to true meaning, which can be as disabling as inflations from pure fantasies or superstitions about noble lines.
Branching Out
Genealogical narrative has its own power. Most people know it has its own fictional conventions. The fictions of our family are a source of metaphors delineating relationships in familial terms. It opens ground into the further unknown. In a group of their contemporaries and peers an individual loses uniqueness. But that same person, as the latest member of a lineage of forebears, automatically assumes a certain status.
The narration of a genealogy inevitably highlights the last member. Not only do the achievements of the ancestors accrue to the most recent descendant, but the ancestors themselves appear to be more forerunners pointing to what is yet to come. Arguably, length of genealogy confers prestige on an individual; likewise, length of history confers prestige on a nation.
Ritual, a way to perform genealogies, invokes the 'spirits' -- ordered relationships between human beings in the here-and-now and non-immediate sources of power, authority, and value. The fundamental efficacy of ritual lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in the larger order of things.
Generational analysis is one such ritual. But even more than trying to make the unconscious conscious, genealogy is about looking for routes into the unconscious areas. As genealogists, we know this is where we will find the gods at the roots of our longest lines -- the god inside each of us.
Ancestral Linkage
We can build our Family Tree as an aspirational framework with genealogy and psychogenealogy, and our paths through the Tree of Life. Heraclitus observed that we can never discover the extent of the soul, no matter how many paths we travel, because of its profound nature.
"Walking the path" of our various branches step-by-step, we discover precisely which ancestors connect us and how to older common ancestors. This is the first step in revealing hidden truth and differentiating ourselves from our unconscious collective - the prima materia or massa confusa.
Jung thought, "A tree is not a bad analogy, because we do not understand how a tree functions either, how it raises up to its crown the huge volume of water that circulates in its system, for example, yet the tree is an indisputable fact, a natural process." Jung thought individuation was such a natural process, like an oak growing from an acorn.
Ancestors are 'Made', not Born
'Raising to consciousness' formerly unknown ancestors is a metaphorical 'resurrection,' that increases our self-knowledge and leads toward assimilation or transgenerational integration. Consciousness can also block individuation through resistance by not allowing what is in the unconscious to develop.
Complexes may be related to environmental traumatic experience, or internal conflicts. The core of any complex is a universal pattern of experience, or archetype. Complexes originate in the archetypal depths of the psyche -- deep structures, patterns and ways of living that represent an inherited memory of the history of human culture. The primordial psyche is magical and archaic, and may be a source for much of what is interpreted as past lives, which might be 'passed' lives.
Ghost Sickness
Complexes and repetition compulsions can be associated with unconscious ancestral effects. Important groups of unconscious associations, conflicting beliefs that stand on their own like a splinter identity, or a strong unconscious impulse can be embodied as ancestors. We encounter them embodied as images that self-present themselves in their own imaginal, precise detail. Hillman claimed that imagination itself provides grounding and body.
Healing Momentum
We raise patterns and images to consciousness from the psychoid depths, finding our purpose in the universe and give expression to what we realize. Such gnosis and healing potential is derived from knowledge of the unconscious -- represented unconscious contents. Patterns of unfolding consciousness reveal archetypal structure, promoting wholeness and balance between wholesale identification with myth and outright rejection of it, restoring the free flow of consciousness.
We share unconscious contents through participation mystique - a symbiosis where contents of one's personal unconscious are experienced in another or through another person. Jung claimed, "The participation mystique by which society contains the individual may be understood as a statement of the fact that individuals are still undifferentiated from each other, that is to say, they have not yet been self-consciously broken up into individual personalities." (C.G. Jung Speaking; Interviews and Encounters).
Projection and archaic identification are often mythological motifs surrounding situations and objects, including other persons, dead or alive. In an unconscious process we 'meet our projections' rather than make them. Ancestors are 'hooks' for projecting our unconscious qualities. We can learn something about ourselves withdrawing or dissolving projections.
"We tend to identify our chthonic nature with evil and our spiritual nature with good. We must accept the dark forces and stop projecting them." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
"This union, which should not come about, is the union of the pairs of opposites in ourselves. This is what the devil wants to prevent at any cost." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Pages 131-142)
Genealogical Imagination
Genealogy is a sequence of corporeal births, but also psychic events. 'Walking a path' is much like 'walking a labyrinth. We begin with our self and proceed back to the progenitor of each direct ancestor, both male and female. "Walking the path" means you must visit every profile in both paths, no shortcuts. Jung called the sequence of psychic events a connection, a solid sequence, that either begins with a prime cause or follows a final cause.
Beyond causal qualities, obvious connections are demonstrated by the sequence of events, but our family tree also expresses nonlocal qualities, beyond mind, body, space and time. In everyday life, distance and location are mundane absolutes. Yet physics now suggests that at the most fundamental level, the universe is nonlocal—there is no such thing as place or distance.
Nonlocal Ancestors
Ancestral line, bloodline, line of descent, line of succession, and line of inheritance are all linear descriptors -- chains with causal implications. But not all ancestral effects, like vicarious participation and the genealogical experience of history, are causal.
Nonlocal consciousness is not confined to specific points in space, including brains or bodies, nor to the present moment. It is an ordering principle that can inject information into disorganized or random systems.
Two classically identical expressions for mutual information generally differ when the quantum systems are involved. This difference defines the quantum discord. It can be used as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. In quantum information theory, quantum discord is processing quantum mutual information.
It is a measure of nonclassical correlations between two subsystems of a quantum system. It includes correlations that are due to quantum physical effects but do not necessarily involve quantum entanglement. Encoded information that can only be accessed by coherent quantum interactions. So a system can have no entanglement but consuming quantum discord.
Panpsychism, essentially the alchemical view, is a doctrine (belief) that everything material (including the atoms and the galaxies) has an element of individual consciousness. But, is it correct to equate the concept of psyche and the concept of consciousness? Panpsychism suggests that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious in certain configurations. Panprotopsychism postulates that fundamental physical entities are proto-conscious.
Is the universe made of matter/consciousness? How does consciousness arise from seemingly inanimate matter? The nondual approach says everything is mind and matter is its manifestation. Consciousness does not emerge from the brain but is conditioned by it. The entire Universe of mind and matter arises from a fundamental non-dual reality.
Panprotopsychism and Panexperientialism describe emergence of primal non-conscious processes. Panprotopsyhism suggests proto-consciousness may exist in the universe as a “fundamental property” without depending at all on anything physical.
By focusing on experience rather than mentality panexperientialism avoids some of the traditional objections to panpsychism. Absolute space is the noumenal source of phenomenal consciousness, a fundamental quality, and Mind is a higher order hyperspace field outside brain's EM field. Fundamental proto-consciousness finds more particular expression when matter comes together in a certain way.
There are reports of non-ordinary experiences during pregnancy, for example, where obscure episodes from the lives of parents and unknowable details of ancestors, minute physiological characteristics of various animal and plant species, and arcane details of world mythologies of which the person clearly had no prior knowledge. The imaginal world is neither literal nor abstract.
Nonlocality operates beyond mere awareness, unconsciously, drawing on individual and collective consciousness, as well as the world or environment. Coherence or resonance may be expressed as compassion, empathy, love, unity, oneness, and connectedness. Consciousness affects or informs human and nonhuman or inanimate forms alike.
Consciousness is present everywhere in spacetime, so has no need to “go” or “be sent” via a medium or carrier. Synchronous events, including intentional or directed healing, may work via coherence, an entanglement or resonance effect, but we should be careful not to mistake this field effect for the mind itself, which permeates and undergirds all. Still none of us has any idea how anything material could be conscious, so we must simply stand in that Mystery. We share its essential nature; it is the cosmos within us. We are that.
Nonlocal events, like synchronicity are apparently 1) unmediated, requiring no go-between signal; 2) unmitigated, with no diminishing of effect with distance; 3) immediate, apparently outside of time and space as we commonly understand them. In this acausal process, consciousness is fundamental, not derivative and unexplainable in terms of anything more basic.
Jung advised, “This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!”
Recent experiments (2016) have suggested that no such hidden or nonlocal reality exists. But the theory of connectivity still holds in other models. They have only ruled out a specific class of theories in which the hidden reality of any particle is local, and not influenced by something far away.
Bohm’s ideas involve non-local hidden reality, in which everything depends on everything. Everything happening in a distant galaxy is influencing you right now and vice versa, however minor the effect. Bohm’s theory says that and electron is both a wave and particle: an electron is a particle with a definite trajectory, but this path is governed by a wave upon which the electron rides. The wave can also be influenced by other particles, which in turn changes the trajectory of the electron.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078251-quantum-weirdness-may-hide-an-orderly-reality-after-all/
Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees. The more a quantum state is entangled with its partner, the better the states will perform in quantum information applications.
The paths of our descent remain correlated, entangled forever. Each time we retrace our roots we are commemorating and reenacting the glorious time of the beginnings. The contrast image of ascent and descent on the Tree of Life is the primary metaphor, unlocking a treasure of family knowledge and self-knowledge, and a new sense of presence.
We have another life than the life we consciously intend to have. Alchemy stresses redemption of the physical body, or matter, while actively striving toward creation of a subtle, immortal body, which has no apparent physical basis. Matter is the raw unconscious. We enter that unconsciousness for the purpose of raising it to consciousness, to raise up the treasure -- the precious heritage of the ancestors.
“The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree… the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven -- the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible.” (Jung, CW 9i, para. 198)
World Soul; World Tree
The world-tree is an expression of anima-mundi or world-soul. It is the axis that aligns us with the cosmos, but more tangibly, it is the shared ancestral tree, rather than a stand-alone tree. Alchemy requires resurrection of the soul of body. The challenge we encounter in developing and "owning" this fresh worldview is to "see through" to a unified vision of mundane physical processes with spiritual values and vision.
In shamanism, the ancestors were venerated as the effect was a preventive therapy that maintained those vital connections with the past. While the World Tree meant one thing in shamanic culture today it refers to the definitive family tree for the entire world, a collaboration on shared ancestry by constantly expanding and improving the tree. The World Family Tree currently has more than 100 million profiles.
The World Family Tree is like having millions of people solving the same jigsaw puzzle together instead of each of us solving a separate, tiny puzzle. Traditionally, people have embarked on individual studies of their family history in the hope of preserving it for future generations. However, this isolated approach results in the same research being repeated over and over again. By combining all research into a single, collaborative tree, users can focus on verifying existing information and pursue new leads rather than wasting time repeating what others have already found.
With the World Family Tree you will be delighted to constantly discover new information about your family because so many other users are constantly working to improve it with new findings. Sources and citations are included so the work of others can be checked and enhanced.
If mistakes are found, you can fix them quickly on the World Family Tree, which is not possible with standalone trees that are controlled by someone else. Thus, errors gradually disappear instead of perpetuating, growing worse, and achieving the false notion of accuracy simply by being repeated by others.
The World Family Tree allows identical profiles to be merged into one, reducing duplication and collecting the best information for all to share. Profiles support multiple languages so you can easily document names and biographies separately in different languages. The World Family Tree is also curated by a large team of expert volunteer Curators.
Entangled Particles
We can develop awareness of the psychophysical ordering processes inherent in matter -- in our matter. The physical body is a living metaphor -- a metaphorm -- for psychic transformation. Life begets life in creative manifestation.
According to Jung, psyche is not different from matter. At the psychoid or psychophysical ground level, they are different perspectives on the phenomenal world. Psyche is the womb of manifestation. The collective unconscious is also projected into the inner aspect of our own bodies. The substance of our mind is deeply connected somehow to the physical world.
In Psychology of Religion, Jung said, Jung, “We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images.” And, Jung comments, “In reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact, and psyche is as much a living body as body is living psyche: it is just the same.” (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 1, p. 396.)
The psychoid nature of archetypes extends beyond a neurophysiological basis into the general dynamical patterns of all matter and energy -- the unconscious properties of the physiological world. Both psyche and matter are in a constant process of redefinition.
In pilot-wave theory, if space and time behave like a superfluid, or a fluid that experiences no dissipation at all, then 'path memory' could conceivably give rise to the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement. When two particles become entangled, a measurement of the state of one instantly affects that of the other, even at vast distances. The superfluid/quantum correlation mirrors the collective unconscious field as a vast ocean of potential.
In standard quantum mechanics, the effect is rationalized as the instantaneous collapse of the particles’ joint probability wave. But in the pilot-wave version of events, an interaction between two particles in a superfluid universe sets them on paths that stay correlated forever. The interaction permanently affects the contours of the superfluid, accounting for nonlocal correlations.”
Entangled Lives
Jung referred to unitary reality consisting of both psyche and matter as transcendental -- an unextended energetic intensity, or potential. He argued, "...Psyche cannot be totally different from matter for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible."
We are each a personal part of the world's impersonal fabric, so psyche and soma interpentrate. Waves in this potential spacetime mysteriously “collapse” into particles in actual spacetime. They collapse from their ghostly state into definite quantum particles.
This idea shares much with a holistic or integral perspective, an approach which we can extend to our family tree. In psychosomatics, psyche carries the potential, while soma is the actuality. In the absence of a voice, the body can articulate complex affective and relational losses.
Paleopoetics
We can engage the somatic unconscious as an experiential space of relations and imagination of the heart. The three instincts are self-preservation, sexual, and social. How did humans, given their non-symbolic mammalian heritage, come to represent their knowledge in symbolic form?
All non-verbal communication is mimetic (rehearsal loop), a self-started representational act -- the ability to alternate between various self-perspectives and other-perspectives. The archaic basis of episode recognition patterns is different from generalized, procedural memory. We learned to represent a situation and reflect on it (metacognition, orientation, time, space, date, specific place).
Jung suggested we cannot stand to live a meaningless life. but individuation means to find one's own meaning and connection to universal meaning. The collective unconscious doesn't express personal wishes and intentions as it is an absolutely transpersonal, neutral, psychic 'entity,' which, like nature, is an emanative form of appearance.
Cultural Networks
Humans are linked from birth to a vast cultural storehouse of knowledge and skill accumulated as cultural memory over aeons. We are sensitive to understanding the significance of environmental effects and mimesis (motor skill and imagination) allows us to invent intentional representations.
Culture is mimetic framework. Mirror neurons allow us to love, to socialize, and to empathize with the experience of others through collective shaping of network architecture. In the genealogical context, we are more than a fixed point in a particular cultural network. The genealogy symbolizes the angular momentum of descent. Our responsibility is to make that path easier. Such is the way of nature. Psychogenealogy modulates consciousness in a marked and novel way.
Episodic memories are locked in details of specific experiences such as the death of a loved one. Mythical culture institutionalized meaning by codifying significant contents of individual experience. Internal memory became external culture. We developed theories to predict and explain through symbolic culture. We are still rooted in episodic experience, as well as being mythic, symbolic, and theoretical. Theoretical development strips away previous mythic meanings, demystifying them.
Metaphysics of Presence
The psychoid level of archetypes correlates with wave/particle duality and the heritable DNA biohologram. Expressive nature can be likened to epigenetics, heritable changes in gene expression that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Every cell in the body has the same genetic information. Cells, tissues and organs differentiate when different sets of genes are turned on or expressed.
We exist in relation to ourselves, to others, to myths, to images, and to archetypes. Their expression is the essence of our being. The body is inescapably a relational body with the potential for overcoming the boundaries of flesh to perpetuate relationality, received wisdom (lucidity), and power-knowledge even in the absence of material embodiment.
Quantum entanglement and nonlocality are models or metaphors for how we may actually remain connected. Our entangled pairs close the locality loophole. David Bohm suggested we have an almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamical interconnectedness of things. This is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and culture -- and in our relations with our own ancestors.
Unexamined Ground
Genealogy can help bridge that interconnectedness gap -- the unconscious, unexamined ground. Genealogy is a differential element of values. It is a field in which relationships operate -- a realm of conscious and unconscious cooperation represented by point to point networks of individuals, dead and alive. The sociality is not merely objective, because of our deep psychophysical involvement. Theory describes "Soul as Intersubjective Reality and Spirit as Interobjective Reality."
Genealogy is complex and requires a broad context -- an open value network with communication, non-control, open-access and value creation. It has its own space-time relationality. As relational selves we stand in intricate and intimate webs of connection with all we contact—whether human or animal, animate or inanimate. 'Path memory' stimulates the right probabilities.
Agents, relationships, and the field of relationality in which relationships occur close the objective-subjective loop with assertion and intentionality. Atomistic individualism is rejected for a relational self, a balance between individual agency and collective communion.
Genealogy can energize the relationships that mobilize action across different interwoven dimensions of relationality. It helps us organize ancestral incoherence and multiplicity. Our pathways of descent or family branches are like converging or parallel realities.
Embodied Relationality
Relationality considers relationships the foundation of subjectivity, including the tangible and intangible beyond the boundaries of life/death in the absence of the corporeal or embodied other. Separation of families occurs by disappearance, miscarriage, migration, displacement, divorce, war, and death.
Archetypal ideas can be correlated with fundamental physiological processes. For example, the union of opposites can be linked to the sympathetic and parasympathic systems - ergotrophic and trophotropic systems of arousal. The 'rein' effect is the emotional alchemy of our ecstatic and transcendent nature. One system, ergotrophic, energizes us; the other, trophotropic, tranquilizes us. The E-system is Yang, while the T-system is Yin. http://ionamiller.weebly.com/emotional-alchemy.html
Family members who have died are only 'relatively disembodied.' Bonds are not severed by death but continue in an interactive psychophysical relationship. Even after death attachments and continuing bonds remain apparent. Bereavement, depression, and symptoms are some examples.
Metaphorically, at least, quantum entanglement (relational entanglement) is mirrored in the twisted limbs of our ancestral branches, particularly the first 5-6 generations that connect us with the more widely shared World Tree. Actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances.
Psychophysical Relativity
Despite our inherent relationality, a “crisis of nonrelation” often marks our psychic entanglements. What gets in the way and leaves us facing pathological alternatives instead? What is it about our relationality that tempts us to disavow the very thing that makes us who we are?
Why do we tend to avoid our relationality pursuing narcissistic solace and solitary self-enclosure? Ancestral connection, attachment, and intersubjectivity is one way to overcome such tendencies with the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect. Relationality is shaped across global and local contexts by gender and generation, including aspects of emotions and embodiment.
Collective Individuation
Such radical decentering establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think in categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on. Breaking with both subject-centerdness and the individual as model or starting point is an epistemological shift. We can be part of an undivided whole and still possess our own unique qualities.
Singularity, rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality enables us to think of the self — other, human—animal, nature— culture and human — world in terms of complex becoming. Intersubjectivity and interbeing incorporate a sense of the dynamic web of relationships that are constitutive for our being at a given moment.
Personal & Universal
The co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world. Grounding in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being is our existential condition and circumscribes our relation to the other. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/16/1/129.abstract
Western societies presume death signifies an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body. But we can recognize that embodied relational experience can continue after death, encompassing a ‘me’, a ‘you’ and an ‘us’. After death ‘me’ and ‘us’ remain (though changed) while crucial dimensions of ‘you’ persist too. Caring for the dead involves including them in the family, remembering them, and acting in ways they would approve. Imaginal dialogue provides comfort and guidance.
Relational Identity
The binary divide between living and dead bodies mirrors other related dichotomies of mind/body, self/other, internal/external, and nature/social. Empirical and anecdotal research suggests that embodied relationality expresses how connectedness is lived out after death and/or disruptive transitions in material practices and felt experiences.
Research continues to imply that we are not just ontologically bounded units or entities. We don't just participate in relationships, but are constituted by them, especially those directly related to us. Embodied relationality includes caring after death.
Family descent and history is one key dimension of categories of identity. Social membership and 'belonging' is another. Genealogy is framed by waves of mobility and intercultural history.
Ancestral home and place of origin is another dimension. The material landscapes of certain prehistoric lands are part of our heritage because our ancestors were there when it was being shaped. This is native belonging. Alternatives are settler presence, or collective displacement, shaped by long histories of migrations.
Spirits of the Ancestors
Entanglement is an instantaneous nonlocal connection at the quantal and subquantal level. Two or more objects or subjects can only be described in relation to one another even when widely separated. In quantum entanglement two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space or time. This supermemory is a bizarre intersection of entanglement, information and time.
Family Matters
A change induced in one affects the other; unity of mind is achieved by quantum entanglement. Entanglement remains as long as neither has any significant interactions with other objects to break the entanglement. Particles of energy/matter can become correlated to predictably interact with each other. No signal is sent, no influence transmitted. But the fate of one embodies and reveals the fate of the other.
Unconscious images, beliefs, compulsions and physical symptoms can be the result of being entangled with family and ancestors. Unconscious entanglements with family members or ancestors play a significant role in our emotional conflicts, physical illnesses and spiritual distress. These entanglements also influence the way we cope with the challenges of growing up in our families.
Causal Ambiguity
Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links -- not space-time -- constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. What happens now can be correlated with what happens later, in ways that elude a simple mechanistic explanation. In effect, you can have spooky action at a delay.
These strong temporal correlations between time and space are seriously counterintuitive. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier to the later one, two events can become correlated so that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later. Each of these events is the cause of the other, as if each were the first to occur.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/
Once Connected Matter
It is a physical fact we contain our ancestral genetics and epigenetics and it remains a psychological fact, too. Further, Scientific American reports that "It is remarkable that it is so common for cells from one individual to integrate into the tissues of another distinct person."
We now know that cells from a developing fetus cross the placenta, allowing the baby’s DNA to become part of the mother’s body. These fetal cells persist in a woman’s body into her old age. If she has been pregnant with a male child it’s likely she’ll have some Y-chromosomes drifting around for a few decades too, even if the baby she carried didn’t live to be born. The cells of that child stay with her, resonating in ways that mothers have known intuitively throughout time. Male cells were found in the brains of women and had been living there, in some cases, for several decades.
Fetal cells you contributed to your own mother may be found in her blood, bone marrow, skin, kidney, and liver. These fetal cells appear to “treat” her when she is ill or injured.
In one case, a woman stopped treatment against medical advice. A liver biopsy showed “thousands of male cells” determined to be from a pregnancy terminated nearly 20 years earlier. These cells helped her body recover just as fetal cells you gave your mother rush to help repair her from within when she’s unwell.
Any woman who has ever been pregnant, even if she miscarried so early she never knew she was with child, is likely to be a microchimera (a person who carries the cells of another person). Fetal cells have the imprint of her child’s father and his ancestry.
Fetal cells can be shared from one pregnancy to another, meaning the cells of older siblings may float within younger siblings. The presence of fetal cells in a woman’s body is associated with substantially improved longevity, with an overall mortality rate 60 percent lower than women whose bodies don’t contain such cells. According to such findings, we heal our mothers and our children heal us. http://lauragraceweldon.com/2012/06/12/mother-child-are-linked-at-the-cellular-level/
We imagine ourselves as singular autonomous individuals, but these foreign cells suggest that most people carry remnants of other individuals, including absorbed twins.
If the fetus is absorbed completely, there are usually no further complications to the pregnancy, other than first trimester vaginal bleeding. This occurs when a twin or multiple disappears in the uterus during pregnancy as a result of a miscarriage of one twin or multiple. The fetal tissue is absorbed by the survivor.
Men have failed paternity tests because of this phenomena. A man's DNA may not match because the man's unborn twin is technically the genetic father of their son.
An intriguing new study suggests children may resemble a mother’s previous sexual partner. The effect may be due to molecules in the semen of the first mate being absorbed by the female's immature eggs where they influence future offspring.
The quantum level of interconnectedness between once-connected matter could explain the frequent stories of mothers knowing when something has gone wrong at a distance for their spouses, children. or siblings, and vice versa. If we can 'talk' to the cells of our bodies to good healing effect and immune stimulation, we might reasonably also speak with and mobilize the cells of others circulating in our system.
Politics of Belonging
Jung asks, not what childhood trauma creates a fixation, but what obstacle in the life path are we unable to overcome, and what is the cause of the regression? Our lives remain literally entangled with our immediate family and the souls, spirits, and issues of our ancestors. Our branches criss-cross continents, oceans, and culture wars. The lost or forgotten knowledge and secrets of our ancient ancestors, shapes the creative and moral future reality.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently. Instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.
In a similar way we are entangled with the fate of our ancestors and carry their burdens. When the root of the problem is brought to light, we don't have to repeat the fate of our ancestors with whom we were entangled. Only when these indeterminate causal relations between events are pruned away — so that nature realizes only some of the possibilities available to it — do space and time become meaningful. Quantum correlations come first, space-time later.
Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc., performed on entangled particles are found to be appropriately correlated. Schrödinger said, "I would not call [entanglement] one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."
Ancestor Syndrome
The psychological term for negative entanglement is enmeshment. Our ancestors reflect our dissociated and unintegrated personality facets. Its most positive expression is the unus mundus, the essential heart of the World Soul.
Family Constellations (a subset application of Systemic Constellations) is an experiential process of releasing and resolving profound tensions within and between people. The process diverges from conventional forms of cognitive, behavior and psychodynamic psychotherapy in several key respects.
Family Constellations attempt to reveal a previously unrecognized systemic dynamic that spans multiple generations in a given family. We can resolve the harmful effects of that dynamic by encouraging acceptance of the factual reality of the past, psychophysical transformation, and transcendence.
SOUL DREAMS ITS WAY HOME
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
--Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893)
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it,
and it is simply inconceivable without them.
--Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222
The process of individuation, of becoming whole, includes by definition the totality of the phenomenon Man and the totality of the riddle of Nature, whose division into physical and spiritual aspects is merely an act of discrimination in the interests of human cognition.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620
Since man is relatively free to choose the way he will go, he is also free to go the wrong way and, instead of coming to grips with the reality of his unconscious, to speculate about it and cut himself off from the truth of nature. --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620
We must give time to nature so that she may be a mother to us.
I have found the way to live here as part of nature, to live in my own time.
People in the modern world are always living so that something better is to happen tomorrow, always in the future, so they don't think to live their lives.
They are up in the head. When a man begins to know himself, to discover the roots of his past in himself, it is a new way of life.
--Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163
"The ancients knew the beneficial and therapeutic potential links between generations that we rediscover today with generational analysis. The recognition of what is transmitted across generations refreshes a consciousness that existed at the time of the first shamanic communities . the revival of a long-forgotten knowledge explains the simultaneous emergence of "transgenerational" in many areas;. depth psychology, transgenerational psychoanalysis, family therapy, psycho, sociology, anthropology, epigenetics, literature and Culture This unique book shows how the study of the links between generations can connect contemporary therapeutic approaches to ancestral and shamanic wisdom. in a spirit of openness and research specialists from different backgrounds contribute to dialogue and reconciliation of knowledge " --Thierry Gaillard
ECODITION: http://www.ecodition.net/en/thierry-gaillard/
"Everywhere geneticists look, they see populations more different than any living people, mixing with each other in small fractions. It is no evolutionary tree. Our evolutionary history is like a braided stream."
"...the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man." --C.G. Jung
We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors. --Jack Horner
THE LONG DEAD
"Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure… follow their wise counsel."
-- "The Book of Kheti," The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
In the Beginning
The majority of the human race is descended, according to
the Human Genome project, from about 3,000 people. The evidence from the Toba supereruption, 71,000 years ago, indicates that the world's population of Modern Humans was reduced to a bottleneck total of around 2,000-10,000 adults.
Early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction. Genetic tests of ancient DNA suggests that the population of early human species was 55,500 individuals, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens. After much research, estimates of Homo sapiens coalescence all fall around 200,000 years ago (mtDNA), a little earlier (nuclear DNA), or a little later (Y chromosome), with a range of 270,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Researchers estimate that the effective population size of human ancestors living before 1.2 million years ago was 18,500 - 26,000. Genome regions that contain
mobile element insertion events provide unique information about ancient population history because of their deep genealogies. Genetic diversity is greatest in sub-Saharan Africa, also supporting a single origin place.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/2147.full.pdf
Misconceptions include the idea that all modern humans can be traced back to one female, "mitochondrial Eve." The mitochondrial ancestor was not the only female living, or the only one who passed on mtDNA, but part of a population. Low levels of mtDNA diversity may indicate a population bottleneck, when as few as 1500 female humans lived, perhaps due to environmental conditions, or our population size may always have been small.
Somehow our ancestors escaped such local and global near-extinction events, when the earth became a wasteland from volcanoes, climate change, or space debris. Population bottlenecks accelerated the differentiation of isolated human populations and encouraged increased cooperation within tribal groups for survival.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-might-have-faced-extinction/
Carnal, Carnation & Incarnation
Carnal is a related term of carnation. As adjectives the difference between carnal and carnation is that carnal is relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites -- the material, or natural body; connected by birth -- while carnation is of a rosy pink or red color, like human flesh. As nouns the difference between incarnation and rebirth is that incarnation is an incarnate being or form while rebirth is reincarnation; new birth subsequent to one's first.
DEARLY DEPARTED
In The Soul's Code James Hillman explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul;'s own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it."
An ancestor is a person from whom you have directly descended. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An 'ancestor chart'
shows a person and all of their ancestors in a graphical format.
Family is viewed as a closely united group of living and dead relatives. The ancestors are not limited to our blood and family lineages, but biological ancestors are most influential and important to engage for personal and family healing. To 'be' is to perceive and be perceived.
Shaman and traditional cultures emphasize active relations between generations. The ancestors weld the community to its origins or roots, assuring a certain individual and collective balance. Today this healing potential has been rediscovered and applied in "Transgenerational Integration."
Ancestral connections correlate with well-being. Even while we 'grow up,' we simultaneously grow down into our roots, where we are entangled with our ancestral 'invisibles.'
The Ancients managed their ancestral inheritance in many ways, including connections to Earth and Sky, and applied artistic intelligence -- signs of a symbolic psyche and self-awareness. Evidence of tools and art as old as 40,000 years, from South Africa to Siberia, have been discovered, and the date keeps getting pushed backwards.
"The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.)
Ancestor veneration preserved memories and living family histories. Such rites celebrate the ancestors and moderate intergenerational issues that could affect descendants. Descendants affected can heal through deepening their ancestral connections.
The progenitor is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group. In genealogy or family history a progenitor is the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants. Traditionally, progenitors are patrilineal. In a patrilineal dynasty, each such dynasty has only one progenitor. There is a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation, so the genetic root may or may not be transmitted downline.
No Man's Land is All Sacred
In medieval times it was said that 'the King is the land'. One is the other; the King and the land are one -- our transpersonal state of health. In the Arthurian mythos, Arthur falls into despair, so the kingdom falls prey to blight.
Only when the connection is made can the cure -- the Quest for the Holy Grail, the journey of psychological transformation -- begin. Arthur is King by divine right, so more than just a ruler: the King is the land at a deep spiritual level. In psychological terms this represents the union of the conscious self with the unconscious.
But he is not the only one tied to the land. The 'land' is our psychophysical basis. We are all the land in this sense. The transpersonal is immanent to our physical being. Metaphorically, the king is not only tied to the land or matter, the land supports the king, as the body supports the transpersonal.
The king is primordial, neither of this world nor the next. The archetypal couple, the parent images of the unconscious (Sol and Luna), represent the spiritual and chthonic nature of the hierosgamos, the sacred union of unconscious wholeness -- the undiscovered country.
The term "no man's land" expresses a profound truth: the earth does not belong to us -- if anything, we belong to the earth and the sky. In the syzygy, the archetypal couple symbolize the moment when heaven and earth come together, creating the Holy Union. The Sacred Marriage, hierosgamos is consummated.
The Navajo say, "the earth is my mother, and the sky is my father." There is always a mythology behind our personal psychogenealogy. The myth needs to earth to reincarnate, to make our personal mythology alive and real, inviting us to take care of that image and that earth with an ecological preservation.
RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS
Genealogy is a retrospective analysis of our ancestors and inherited genetic lines. People love finding out that they have a famous relative, or they’re descended from royalty. Thanks to genetic testing it’s easy to get a rundown of your potentially regal DNA. But being related to long-ago kings doesn’t make us special—it just makes us human.
Interregnum
Geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that family trees grow backwards exponentially, so the amount of ancestors people should have from the ninth century is larger than the amount of people who were alive during the ninth century. That means anyone with European ancestry is related to King Charlemagne.
Tangled Trees
“Everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne,” Rutherford writes, explaining that Europeans alive today are probably related to the long-dead Holy Roman Emperor even if their DNA test doesn’t show it. The new DNA tests make it possible to determine kinship up to 5-7 generations back.
Because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.
As fun as it is to find out you’re the direct descendant of an old royal line, it’s pretty meaningless. Often genetic ancestry relies on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only via the paternal line, or mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on from mothers. These make for persuasive – but often simplistic – analyses of ancestry. These two chunks of DNA make up 2% of your genome. But the other 98% has to come from somewhere too, and that is a pick-and-mix from all the rest of your ancestors. And you have numerous ancestors from whom you have no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline.
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living." - T. S. Eliot
"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
--Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893)
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it,
and it is simply inconceivable without them.
--Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222
The process of individuation, of becoming whole, includes by definition the totality of the phenomenon Man and the totality of the riddle of Nature, whose division into physical and spiritual aspects is merely an act of discrimination in the interests of human cognition.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620
Since man is relatively free to choose the way he will go, he is also free to go the wrong way and, instead of coming to grips with the reality of his unconscious, to speculate about it and cut himself off from the truth of nature. --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 617-620
We must give time to nature so that she may be a mother to us.
I have found the way to live here as part of nature, to live in my own time.
People in the modern world are always living so that something better is to happen tomorrow, always in the future, so they don't think to live their lives.
They are up in the head. When a man begins to know himself, to discover the roots of his past in himself, it is a new way of life.
--Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 156-163
"The ancients knew the beneficial and therapeutic potential links between generations that we rediscover today with generational analysis. The recognition of what is transmitted across generations refreshes a consciousness that existed at the time of the first shamanic communities . the revival of a long-forgotten knowledge explains the simultaneous emergence of "transgenerational" in many areas;. depth psychology, transgenerational psychoanalysis, family therapy, psycho, sociology, anthropology, epigenetics, literature and Culture This unique book shows how the study of the links between generations can connect contemporary therapeutic approaches to ancestral and shamanic wisdom. in a spirit of openness and research specialists from different backgrounds contribute to dialogue and reconciliation of knowledge " --Thierry Gaillard
ECODITION: http://www.ecodition.net/en/thierry-gaillard/
"Everywhere geneticists look, they see populations more different than any living people, mixing with each other in small fractions. It is no evolutionary tree. Our evolutionary history is like a braided stream."
"...the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man." --C.G. Jung
We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors. --Jack Horner
THE LONG DEAD
"Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure… follow their wise counsel."
-- "The Book of Kheti," The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
In the Beginning
The majority of the human race is descended, according to
the Human Genome project, from about 3,000 people. The evidence from the Toba supereruption, 71,000 years ago, indicates that the world's population of Modern Humans was reduced to a bottleneck total of around 2,000-10,000 adults.
Early humans living about one million years ago were extremely close to extinction. Genetic tests of ancient DNA suggests that the population of early human species was 55,500 individuals, including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens. After much research, estimates of Homo sapiens coalescence all fall around 200,000 years ago (mtDNA), a little earlier (nuclear DNA), or a little later (Y chromosome), with a range of 270,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Researchers estimate that the effective population size of human ancestors living before 1.2 million years ago was 18,500 - 26,000. Genome regions that contain
mobile element insertion events provide unique information about ancient population history because of their deep genealogies. Genetic diversity is greatest in sub-Saharan Africa, also supporting a single origin place.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/2147.full.pdf
Misconceptions include the idea that all modern humans can be traced back to one female, "mitochondrial Eve." The mitochondrial ancestor was not the only female living, or the only one who passed on mtDNA, but part of a population. Low levels of mtDNA diversity may indicate a population bottleneck, when as few as 1500 female humans lived, perhaps due to environmental conditions, or our population size may always have been small.
Somehow our ancestors escaped such local and global near-extinction events, when the earth became a wasteland from volcanoes, climate change, or space debris. Population bottlenecks accelerated the differentiation of isolated human populations and encouraged increased cooperation within tribal groups for survival.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-might-have-faced-extinction/
Carnal, Carnation & Incarnation
Carnal is a related term of carnation. As adjectives the difference between carnal and carnation is that carnal is relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites -- the material, or natural body; connected by birth -- while carnation is of a rosy pink or red color, like human flesh. As nouns the difference between incarnation and rebirth is that incarnation is an incarnate being or form while rebirth is reincarnation; new birth subsequent to one's first.
DEARLY DEPARTED
In The Soul's Code James Hillman explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul;'s own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it."
An ancestor is a person from whom you have directly descended. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An 'ancestor chart'
shows a person and all of their ancestors in a graphical format.
Family is viewed as a closely united group of living and dead relatives. The ancestors are not limited to our blood and family lineages, but biological ancestors are most influential and important to engage for personal and family healing. To 'be' is to perceive and be perceived.
Shaman and traditional cultures emphasize active relations between generations. The ancestors weld the community to its origins or roots, assuring a certain individual and collective balance. Today this healing potential has been rediscovered and applied in "Transgenerational Integration."
Ancestral connections correlate with well-being. Even while we 'grow up,' we simultaneously grow down into our roots, where we are entangled with our ancestral 'invisibles.'
The Ancients managed their ancestral inheritance in many ways, including connections to Earth and Sky, and applied artistic intelligence -- signs of a symbolic psyche and self-awareness. Evidence of tools and art as old as 40,000 years, from South Africa to Siberia, have been discovered, and the date keeps getting pushed backwards.
"The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 238.)
Ancestor veneration preserved memories and living family histories. Such rites celebrate the ancestors and moderate intergenerational issues that could affect descendants. Descendants affected can heal through deepening their ancestral connections.
The progenitor is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group. In genealogy or family history a progenitor is the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants. Traditionally, progenitors are patrilineal. In a patrilineal dynasty, each such dynasty has only one progenitor. There is a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation, so the genetic root may or may not be transmitted downline.
No Man's Land is All Sacred
In medieval times it was said that 'the King is the land'. One is the other; the King and the land are one -- our transpersonal state of health. In the Arthurian mythos, Arthur falls into despair, so the kingdom falls prey to blight.
Only when the connection is made can the cure -- the Quest for the Holy Grail, the journey of psychological transformation -- begin. Arthur is King by divine right, so more than just a ruler: the King is the land at a deep spiritual level. In psychological terms this represents the union of the conscious self with the unconscious.
But he is not the only one tied to the land. The 'land' is our psychophysical basis. We are all the land in this sense. The transpersonal is immanent to our physical being. Metaphorically, the king is not only tied to the land or matter, the land supports the king, as the body supports the transpersonal.
The king is primordial, neither of this world nor the next. The archetypal couple, the parent images of the unconscious (Sol and Luna), represent the spiritual and chthonic nature of the hierosgamos, the sacred union of unconscious wholeness -- the undiscovered country.
The term "no man's land" expresses a profound truth: the earth does not belong to us -- if anything, we belong to the earth and the sky. In the syzygy, the archetypal couple symbolize the moment when heaven and earth come together, creating the Holy Union. The Sacred Marriage, hierosgamos is consummated.
The Navajo say, "the earth is my mother, and the sky is my father." There is always a mythology behind our personal psychogenealogy. The myth needs to earth to reincarnate, to make our personal mythology alive and real, inviting us to take care of that image and that earth with an ecological preservation.
RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS
Genealogy is a retrospective analysis of our ancestors and inherited genetic lines. People love finding out that they have a famous relative, or they’re descended from royalty. Thanks to genetic testing it’s easy to get a rundown of your potentially regal DNA. But being related to long-ago kings doesn’t make us special—it just makes us human.
Interregnum
Geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that family trees grow backwards exponentially, so the amount of ancestors people should have from the ninth century is larger than the amount of people who were alive during the ninth century. That means anyone with European ancestry is related to King Charlemagne.
Tangled Trees
“Everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne,” Rutherford writes, explaining that Europeans alive today are probably related to the long-dead Holy Roman Emperor even if their DNA test doesn’t show it. The new DNA tests make it possible to determine kinship up to 5-7 generations back.
Because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.
As fun as it is to find out you’re the direct descendant of an old royal line, it’s pretty meaningless. Often genetic ancestry relies on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only via the paternal line, or mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on from mothers. These make for persuasive – but often simplistic – analyses of ancestry. These two chunks of DNA make up 2% of your genome. But the other 98% has to come from somewhere too, and that is a pick-and-mix from all the rest of your ancestors. And you have numerous ancestors from whom you have no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline.
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living." - T. S. Eliot
"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."
--Thich Nhat Hanh