REMEMBRANCE
by Iona Miller, (c)2015
by Iona Miller, (c)2015
Self-Making & Remembrance As Therapy
IMMORTALITY ON LOAN
WE ARE NOT WHO WE THINK WE ARE
So try to live as consciously, as conscientiously, and as completely as possible and learn who you are and who or what it is that ultimately decides.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
If you learn about yourself and if eventually you discover more or less who you are, you also learn about God, and who He is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
You have to live thoroughly and very consciously for many years in order to understand what your will is and what Its will is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
People who think that they know the reasons for everything are unaware of the obvious fact that the existence of the universe itself is one big unfathomable secret, and so is our human existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 252-253.
The essential dream-image: the Man, the Tree, the Stone, looks quite inaccessible, but only to our modern consciousness which is, as a rule, unconscious of its historical roots. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 325-327.
Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
~Widening Circles by Rainer Rilke.And everywhere there, the Tree of Life,
and the resurrection of flesh from the Tree. --Origen
These are our roots. A tree can only renew itself
through its roots. --M.-L. von Franz
All old truths want a new interpretation,
so that they can live on in a new form.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
SOUL GENEALOGY
A Spiritual Pilgrimage
Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago. . . . Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self. -Jung
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality.
At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71.
The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
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. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 298.
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
"But "the heart glows," and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being."
--Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
illus. Johann Daniel Mylius’ Rosarium Philosophorum, image #2
CONTENTS
"Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature,
that we are different from Nature?
No, we are Nature and think exactly like Nature." --Jung
I. Soulful Genealogy:
Approaches to Genealogy; What Psyche Knows; Worldview; The Living Past; The Naked Tree; Cognitive & Emotional Unconscious; Uprooted; Buried Secrets; Bridge of Spirits; The Call of Our Ancestors; Shamanism Meets Genealogy; Transgenerational Genealogy; Soul Into Soul; Crossing the Veil;
Jungian Genealogy; Re-member Who You Are; Passed Lives; Shades of Our Past; Climbing Your Family Tree; Songs of Our Ancestors; GenIsis; First Family; Through Ancient Eyes; Kindred Experience; Bone Collecting; Blessings & Curses; Touching the Past; We Never Forgot Who We Are; Family Reunion;
II. The Royal We:
Branching Out; Grave Digging: Digging Up Dirt on Your Ancestors; Enliven Your Tree; Those Who Lie Buried Within; Greening Your Tree; Guides From Beyond; The Snake In Our Tree; The Tree of Life; Survival of the Image; Branching Descent; Rosa Mundi; Dynastic Houses; They Ride Forever Through the Nightlands; Liminal Lineage; Hand Me Down Genes; Imminent Inheritance; It Gets Under Your Skin; Rank & File; Snakes & Ladders;
III. The Royal Art:
Vita Brevis; In the Shade of Your Family Tree, Living Roots; Kin You Imagine; Family Resemblance; Origi-Nations; The Past Remains Present; Working In the Past for the Future; Reigniting Ancestral Knowledge, Climbing for Roots; Tree of Life; Wise Blood; Chains of Generations; Where Loyalty Lies; Internal Inquiry; Full-Blooded Genealogy; Dream Genealogy; Ancestral Pilgrimage; Living In the Past; Shaping Lives & Values; Binding Family Ties; Remembrance Is Veneration;
IV. Facing Your Soul:
Who Am I? And What Does It All Mean?; Soul Guides & Ghostly Lovers;
Meta-Genesis; What Will You Preserve?; The Family Initiatory Vessel; Legends & Lineage; The Trail of the Grail; Grail-Carriers; How Did They Live?; Consanguinity;
Holy Blood, Holy Trail; Roots & Gnosis; Descent From Antiquity; Bare Bones; The Tree of Voices; Tree of Golden Light; Presence of the Past; Bones of Contention; Spiritual Genealogy; Walking Your Genealogical Labyrinth; Subjective Genealogy;
V. Collective Memory:
Ancestral Legacy; Lifespan - Wisdom Bridge; The World Tree; The Cosmic Tree; Tangled Roots; Ancestral Soul; Reciting Your Kin; Digital Ancestry; House of Our Flesh; Soul's Gold; In Their Footsteps; Who Will Remember Us?; Hearth of the Heart; Council of Ancestors; Our Nameless Ancestors; Putting It All Together;
Inherit-Ability; Drop Lines & Dreams; Soul Dust; You Speak for the Dead;
10,000 Ancestors Will Dream of Me; The Heart of the Matter; Called Home; Listening for Echoes of the Past.
Take pains to waken the dead.
Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead.
Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent.
But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
"My name is not my own, it is borrowed from my ancestors. I must return it unstained. My honor is not my own, it is borrowed from my descendants, I must give it to them unbroken. Our blood is not our own, it is a gift to generations yet unborn. We should carry it with responsibility." --Vincent Fund
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books
but lives in our very blood? --Carl Jung
The Unconscious believes in Life after Death. --Carl Jung
You may call me death-death that rose with the sun.
I come with quiet pain and long peace.
I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death.
I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease.
~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.
The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those which have inspired the basic images of ritual and mythology. These eternal ones of the dream are not to be confused with the personality modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmares or madness to the tormented individual. Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream. --Joseph Campbell
No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dream and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a different situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude; the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. --C. G. Jung
Projection is mistakenly attributing your own repressed thoughts onto someone else, including thoughts, feelings, motives, and attitudes. In this case, it includes unowned emotions, metaphysical speculations and pseudo-scientific worldviews. Such figures stand in place of one's own self-actualization.
Balancing Genealogical Projection & Critical Thinking
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence. Genalogical data can act like a blank canvas for psychological projections, both in a potentially informing way and a self-delusory way. Therefore, it is well for us to be consciously aware of such dynamics in the interpretation of our family tree. Naturally, our hermeneutics will have imaginal and poetic aspects, yet the documented historical aspects help us from abdicating psychological responsibility to ourselves and family.
Participation Mystique is another way that identification can make its way into our reactions and attitudes about our pedigree and ancestors. Some people, finding a royal line among the commoners in their lists, experience inflation, leading to the misconcept that they are somehow royal. Such "men who would be kind" are too numerous to mention. These individuals have failed to do the math of decendancy.
One major problem is to mistake a historical person for an archetypal force or wisdom figure. This is how history is transmogrified into mythology. In psychological projection our unconsciousness is attributed to others, and they carry that unconscious content until or unless we become aware of it as our own. All assertions of ascended masters, channeled gurus, and secret chiefs fall into this category of archetypal protectors, mentors or teachers. The historical figure carried many of these qualities, powerful in collective wisdom and knowledge of the beyond. But being dead does not make you smarter.
Projection is self-mystification, a self-induced trance state, whether the content is positive or negative. The ego splits off the unconscious content, either over-valuing or undervaluing it. When we reach our archetypal boundaries we begin projecting, sort of an adult form of "let's pretend."
Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally.
There is no literal explanation of such recurrent themes, only their psychological appearances arising from the needs of those who weave such notions into their personal narratives. Such figures of the unconscious are naturally represented as immortal, as they are eternal archetypes in personified dress...a sort of adult "imaginary friend." This is the source of channeled wisdom and spirit possession. During his lifetime the moral rectitude of St. Germain was questioned, but in the immortal version he becomes sanitized.
Jung elaborated on such transformative wisdom figures as the archetypes of the "mana personality" and Self: the Wise Old Man and the Wise Old Woman. They can also appear as aspects of one's anima or animus. Jung even experienced one or more such characters he personified as his soul guide Philemon, who he linked back to the historical Simon Magus. But he did not take such interaction literally but rather imaginally -- an "as if real" experience he engaged with dialogue. Such figures can offer guidance and wisdom gleaned from personal and cultural experience. They can also spew faulty logic, silly notions, inferior thinking, and pseudo-scientific ideas.
A false idea can be hyped through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm. Without critical thinking we can derail the dynamic process of self transformation, by leading us down the garden path of false beliefs. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation. Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment.
Jung's Wise Old Woman and the Wise Old Man are archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. 'The "wise old woman"...[or] helpful "old woman" is a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature'. One of her current popular incarnations is Mary Magdalene, a soul-mate, or Sophia, who has captured contemporary imaginations with ideas about the divine feminine and gnosis. The 'Wise Old Man, or some other very powerful aspect of eternal masculinity' is her male counterpart.
In Jung's thought, the individuation process was marked by a sequence of archetypes, each acquiring predominance at successive stages, and so reflecting what he termed an ascending psychic scale or 'hierarchy of the unconscious'. Thus, starting with the intermediate position of 'anima or animus...just as the latter have a higher position in the hierarchy than the shadow, so wholeness lays claim to a position and a value superior' still. The Wise Old Woman and Man, as what he termed "Mana" personalities or "supraordinate" personalities, stood for that wholeness of the self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinary personality...as the "self"'.
As von Franz cautions, 'If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem, so that he, or she, is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality. In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
The wise old man (also called senex, sage or sophos) is an archetype as described by Carl Jung, as well as a classic literary figure, and may be seen as a stock character. The wise old man can be a profound philosopher distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment but confounded with Shadow it can be a Trickster.
This type of character is typically represented as a kind and wise, older father-type figure who uses personal knowledge of people and the world to help tell stories and offer guidance that, in a mystical way, may impress upon his audience a sense of who they are and who they might become, thereby acting as a mentor. He may occasionally appear as an absent-minded professor, appearing absent-minded due to a predilection for contemplative pursuits.
The wise old man is often seen to be in some way "foreign", that is, from a different culture, nation, or occasionally, even a different time, from those he advises. In extreme cases, he may be a liminal being, such as Merlin, who was only half human.
In medieval chivalric romance and modern fantasy literature, he is often presented as a wizard. He can also or instead be featured as a hermit. This character type often explained to the knights or heroes—particularly those searching for the Holy Grail—the significance of their encounters.
In the individuation process, the archetype of the Wise old man was late to emerge, and seen as an indication of the Self. 'If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem...the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth'.
As Borges contends:
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is. Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Subconscious Supernatural
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. Some of it echoes parental authority. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE
Projection & Identification
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/participation.html
People with a narrow conscious life exteriorize their unconscious, they are continually in participation mystique with other people… if more unconscious things have become conscious to you, then you live less in participation mystique. ~Carl Jung, Visions, para 1184.
Multigenerational Epigenetics
So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet‑to‑be‑conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.
Soft evolution is like an annotated book. Those who read different annotations of the same book may end up with very different learning.
As we experience stress, love, aging, fear, pleasure, infection, pain, exercise, or hunger, various hormones adjust various physical responses within our bodies. Hormones surge through our blood; changes in cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, interleukin, leptin, insulin, oxytocin, thyroid hormone, growth hormone, and adrenaline make us behave and develop in different ways. And they signal to our epigenomes, “Time to flip some switches!”Genes get shut off or turned on as the world around us changes.
The Book of LifeSoft evolution is analogous to an annotated book. The basic text and argument of the book remain the same. But if the text is gradually surrounded by margin notes and comments, then those who read different annotations of the exact same book may end up with very different learning, depending on who annotated the particular copy they borrowed, how they treated the original text, how the reader decided to interpret the interplay between the original printed text and the annotations, and whether some of the annotations were erased or modified by other readers.
There are multiple ways to add in rapid, inherited epigenetic adaptations without any change in the core DNA code. One basic and common mechanism is DNA methylation: Enzymes in our cells attach a methyl group (CH3) to a cytosine (C) located next to a guanine (G) in our DNA, forming a methylated island. This tells the gene that follows next, “Shhh, do not express yourself.”
One of the key reasons for human diversity is that about 70 percent, or roughly 14,000, of our genes have these “on/off” switches plus random mutations among them, so there are countless combinations of ways that these switches are flipped in the human population.
Sperm and eggs get a nearly fresh start: An estimated 90 percent of the switches are erased before conception occurs, which means most epigenetic memories are lost. But there is still a lot of recent data moving from generation to generation. (Those who described sperm as simple bags of DNA with a tail could never explain why sperm had so many receptors for so many hormones not directly related to reproduction, including leptin, one of the obesity genes, as well as 19 growth factors, cytokines, and neurotransmitters.)
Epigenetic switches can be flipped on and off in sperm, eggs, or embryos, so your kids and grandkids can share your environmental experiences and knowledge, and be better prepared for the environment they will soon be entering. For instance, if you were a male smoker, and your brother was not, 28 epigenetic signals in your sperm would be different from his. Sperm are listening.
At conception, your grandchildren listen to distant tales, and sometimes pass them on.
Reprinted from Evolving Ourselves by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) Juan Enriquez and Steven Gullans, 2015.
Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes
Your ancestors' lousy childhoods or excellent adventures might change your personality, bequeathing anxiety or resilience by altering the epigenetic expressions of genes in the brain
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes#.UwOqevk7t8E
Below: Iona and her paternal Grandmother, Amy Delena and maternal Grandmother Rosa
Five Criteria to Assess Wisdom:
Multigenerational Epigenetics
In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time. It is based on the idea that common experiences of a species become incorporated into its genetic code, not by a Lamarckian process that encodes specific memories but by a much vaguer tendency to encode a readiness to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. Shares much with the modern concept of epigenetics.
Genetic memory is invoked to explain ethnic group memory postulated by Carl Jung. Jungian psychology suggests memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious". The term "epigenetic" refers to heritable traits that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. This can occur over rounds of cell division, while some epigenetic features can effect transgenerational inheritance and are inherited from one generation to the next.
Multigenerational epigenetics is today regarded as another aspect to evolution and adaptation. Culture is the most fundamental force that has shaped man's life through the aeons. Its effect is, in all likelihood, established in the genome in a few generations.The concept implies that genes have a 'memory'; what you do in your lifetime, and what you are exposed to, could in turn affect your grandchildren.
Epigenetics adds a whole new layer to genes beyond the DNA, the so called "epigenome". Among other things, it proposes a control system of 'switches' that turn genes on or off. The things that people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans. The switches themselves can also be inherited. This means that a 'memory' of an event could be passed through generations. A simple environmental effect could switch genes on or off - and this change could be inherited.
Epigenetics can impact evolution when epigenetic changes are heritable.[1] A sequestered germ line or Weismann barrier is specific to animals, and epigenetic inheritance is more common in plants and microbes. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have argued that these effects may require enhancements to the standard conceptual framework of the modern evolutionary synthesis.[97][98] Other evolutionary biologists have incorporated epigenetic inheritance into population genetics models[99] or are openly skeptical.[100]
Two important ways in which epigenetic inheritance can be different from traditional genetic inheritance, with important consequences for evolution, are that rates of epimutation can be much faster than rates of mutation[101] and the epimutations are more easily reversible.[102] In plants heritable DNA methylation mutations are 100.000 times more likely to occur compared to DNA mutations.[103] An epigenetically inherited element such as the PSI+ system can act as a "stop-gap", good enough for short-term adaptation that allows the lineage to survive for long enough for mutation and/or recombination to genetically assimilate the adaptive phenotypic change.[104] The existence of this possibility increases the evolvability of a species.
More than 100 cases of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance phenomena have been reported in a wide range of organisms, including prokaryotes, plants, and animals.[105] For instance, Mourning Cloak butterflies will change color through hormone changes in response to experimentation of varying temperatures.[106] Bacteria make widespread use of postreplicative DNA methylation for the epigenetic control of DNA-protein interactions. Bacteria make use of DNA adenine methylation (rather than DNA cytosine methylation) as an epigenetic signal. DNA adenine methylation is important in bacteria virulence in organisms such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Haemophilus, and Brucella. In Alphaproteobacteria, methylation of adenine regulates the cell cycle and couples gene transcription to DNA replication. In Gammaproteobacteria, adenine methylation provides signals for DNA replication, chromosome segregation, mismatch repair, packaging of bacteriophage, transposase activity and regulation of gene expression.[107][108]
The filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa is a prominent model system for understanding the control and function of cytosine methylation. In this organisms, DNA methylation is associated with relics of a genome defense system called RIP (repeat-induced point mutation) and silences gene expression by inhibiting transcription elongation.[109]
The yeast prion PSI is generated by a conformational change of a translation termination factor, which is then inherited by daughter cells. This can provide a survival advantage under adverse conditions. This is an example of epigenetic regulation enabling unicellular organisms to respond rapidly to environmental stress. Prions can be viewed as epigenetic agents capable of inducing a phenotypic change without modification of the genome.[108]
Direct detection of epigenetic marks in microorganisms is possible with single molecule real time sequencing, in which polymerase sensitivity allows for measuring methylation and other modifications as a DNA molecule is being sequenced.[110] Several projects have demonstrated the ability to collect genome-wide epigenetic data in bacteria.[111][112][113][114]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
CONCEPTIONS & MISCONCEPTIONS
Genealogist Mark Humphreys says, "Your ancestors were the same mix of bullies, fools, bigots, incompetents, cowards, and occasional smart and admirable people that always make up society. You exist because of many people who you would despise if you met them. Genealogy is about finding out who they were, it should have no interest in whether they were admirable or not.
Indeed, it's more fun when they murder each other, marry descendants of their ancestors' bitter enemies, conceive your ancestor as a result of sordid and regretted affairs, die before their child is born, and so on. It makes us realize how precarious our existence is, and how messy and unlikely our genetic inheritance. Anyone who believes they belong to one race, or that their ancestors were fine people, hasn't done enough genealogy."
Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty. He began to think that such descent was the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.
Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then using computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out at him.
"I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have hundreds of dimensions."
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne. English, French and other European royal families are all inter-related, and all descend ultimately from Charlemagne.
All humanity is interrelated many times over (contrary to what an endless procession of racists and tribalists throughout history have claimed or implied). For any two humans in history or today, it is not a question of do they have a common ancestor, it is only a question of when was the most recent one.
If we had full genealogical records for all of human history and pre-history, then any two living people on earth could identify their closest relationship to each other. Or indeed any two living organisms on earth, since DNA probably did not evolve twice. One could also pick any famous person, alive or dead, and show your closest relationship to them. For they are all related. See pre-historical estimates for Common ancestors of all humans.
It's true that everyone's roots go back to the same family tree, he said. But each path to our common past is different, and reconstructing that path, using whatever records are available, is its own reward. "You can ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove it? That's the game of genealogy."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal-we/302497/
Without pedigree collapse, a person's ancestor tree is a binary tree, formed by the person, the parents, grandparents, and so on. However, the number of individuals in such a tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, a single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have roughly a billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.[1]
This apparent paradox occurs because the individuals in the binary tree are not distinct: instead, a single individual may occupy multiple places in the binary tree. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are cousins (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves).[2][3] For example, the offspring of two first cousins has at most only six great-grandparents instead of the normal eight. This reduction in the number of ancestors is pedigree collapse. It collapses the binary tree into a directed acyclic graph with two different, directed paths starting from the ancestor who in the binary tree would occupy two places.
In some cultures, cousins were encouraged or required to marry to keep kin bonds, wealth and property within a family (endogamy). Among royalty, the frequent requirement to only marry other royals resulted in a reduced gene pool in which most individuals were the result of extensive pedigree collapse. Alfonso XII of Spain, for example, had only four great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. Furthermore, two of these great-grandparents, Charles IV of Spain and Maria Luisa of Parma, were parents of another twice great-grandmother, Maria Isabella of Spain. More generally, in many cultures intermarriage may frequently occur within a small village, limiting the available gene pool.
This is not about DNA (Genealogy is not Genetics)
These findings do not necessarily have any implications for our DNA. To descend from someone does not mean you necessarily inherit any DNA from them. These findings do not conflict with the idea that most or all of your DNA is inherited from your local area. Even if you do descend from the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, that does not mean this can be detected in your DNA. In fact, there may be no evidence at all of these findings in humanity's DNA. And yet the findings can still be true. To see this, imagine one Western European sailor blown off course in classical times, say 100 AD, and landing in the Caribbean, with no way home. He is not killed but rather taken in by a tribe who need strong young men.
If you have a line of descendants that doesn't die out, eventually you are the ancestor of the whole future world. Through this, you affect all future world history.
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
A Jesus bloodline is a hypothetical sequence of lineal descendants of the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene, or some other woman, usually portrayed as his wife or a hierodule. Differing and contradictory versions of a Jesus bloodline hypothesis have been proposed in numerous books by authors such as Louis Martin (1886), Donovan Joyce (1973), Andreas Faber-Kaiser (1977), Barbara Thiering (1992), Margaret Starbird (1993), and various websites. Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code used the premise for its plot line. The 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus proposed that evidence existed to show that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that their son was named Judah, based upon inscriptions found on ossuaries discovered in Jerusalem in 1980.[1] Biblical scholar and author James Tabor has recently affirmed his belief in a married Jesus,[2] while Karen King announced the discovery of text in a Coptic papyrus fragment, alleged to be a translation of a lost 2nd century Gospel, in which Jesus is made to refer to "my wife". That fragment is now considered, by most experts, to be a fake.[3]
According to the vast majority of professional historians and scholars from related fields, there is no historical, biblical, apocryphal, archaeological, genealogical, or genetic evidence which supports this hypothesis.[4] Hypothetical Jesus bloodlines should not be confused with the biblical genealogy of Jesus or the historical relatives of Jesus and their descendants, who are known as the Desposyni. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_bloodline
Why We're All Jesus' Children, Steve Olson, Slate, March 15, 2006:
Olson points out that The Da Vinci Code does not understand genealogy: "no matter how the court case turns out, both books are confused. If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet."
IMMORTALITY ON LOAN
WE ARE NOT WHO WE THINK WE ARE
So try to live as consciously, as conscientiously, and as completely as possible and learn who you are and who or what it is that ultimately decides.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
If you learn about yourself and if eventually you discover more or less who you are, you also learn about God, and who He is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
You have to live thoroughly and very consciously for many years in order to understand what your will is and what Its will is. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 300-301
People who think that they know the reasons for everything are unaware of the obvious fact that the existence of the universe itself is one big unfathomable secret, and so is our human existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 252-253.
The essential dream-image: the Man, the Tree, the Stone, looks quite inaccessible, but only to our modern consciousness which is, as a rule, unconscious of its historical roots. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 325-327.
Did you not see that when your creative force turned to the world, how the dead things moved under it and through it, how they grew and prospered, and how your thoughts flowed in rich rivers? If your creative force now turns to the place of the soul, you will see how your soul becomes green and how its field bears wonderful fruit.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 236.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
~Widening Circles by Rainer Rilke.And everywhere there, the Tree of Life,
and the resurrection of flesh from the Tree. --Origen
These are our roots. A tree can only renew itself
through its roots. --M.-L. von Franz
All old truths want a new interpretation,
so that they can live on in a new form.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 163-174
SOUL GENEALOGY
A Spiritual Pilgrimage
Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago. . . . Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self. -Jung
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality.
At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71.
The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create. The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 239.
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. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 298.
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 232.
"But "the heart glows," and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being."
--Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
illus. Johann Daniel Mylius’ Rosarium Philosophorum, image #2
CONTENTS
"Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature,
that we are different from Nature?
No, we are Nature and think exactly like Nature." --Jung
I. Soulful Genealogy:
Approaches to Genealogy; What Psyche Knows; Worldview; The Living Past; The Naked Tree; Cognitive & Emotional Unconscious; Uprooted; Buried Secrets; Bridge of Spirits; The Call of Our Ancestors; Shamanism Meets Genealogy; Transgenerational Genealogy; Soul Into Soul; Crossing the Veil;
Jungian Genealogy; Re-member Who You Are; Passed Lives; Shades of Our Past; Climbing Your Family Tree; Songs of Our Ancestors; GenIsis; First Family; Through Ancient Eyes; Kindred Experience; Bone Collecting; Blessings & Curses; Touching the Past; We Never Forgot Who We Are; Family Reunion;
II. The Royal We:
Branching Out; Grave Digging: Digging Up Dirt on Your Ancestors; Enliven Your Tree; Those Who Lie Buried Within; Greening Your Tree; Guides From Beyond; The Snake In Our Tree; The Tree of Life; Survival of the Image; Branching Descent; Rosa Mundi; Dynastic Houses; They Ride Forever Through the Nightlands; Liminal Lineage; Hand Me Down Genes; Imminent Inheritance; It Gets Under Your Skin; Rank & File; Snakes & Ladders;
III. The Royal Art:
Vita Brevis; In the Shade of Your Family Tree, Living Roots; Kin You Imagine; Family Resemblance; Origi-Nations; The Past Remains Present; Working In the Past for the Future; Reigniting Ancestral Knowledge, Climbing for Roots; Tree of Life; Wise Blood; Chains of Generations; Where Loyalty Lies; Internal Inquiry; Full-Blooded Genealogy; Dream Genealogy; Ancestral Pilgrimage; Living In the Past; Shaping Lives & Values; Binding Family Ties; Remembrance Is Veneration;
IV. Facing Your Soul:
Who Am I? And What Does It All Mean?; Soul Guides & Ghostly Lovers;
Meta-Genesis; What Will You Preserve?; The Family Initiatory Vessel; Legends & Lineage; The Trail of the Grail; Grail-Carriers; How Did They Live?; Consanguinity;
Holy Blood, Holy Trail; Roots & Gnosis; Descent From Antiquity; Bare Bones; The Tree of Voices; Tree of Golden Light; Presence of the Past; Bones of Contention; Spiritual Genealogy; Walking Your Genealogical Labyrinth; Subjective Genealogy;
V. Collective Memory:
Ancestral Legacy; Lifespan - Wisdom Bridge; The World Tree; The Cosmic Tree; Tangled Roots; Ancestral Soul; Reciting Your Kin; Digital Ancestry; House of Our Flesh; Soul's Gold; In Their Footsteps; Who Will Remember Us?; Hearth of the Heart; Council of Ancestors; Our Nameless Ancestors; Putting It All Together;
Inherit-Ability; Drop Lines & Dreams; Soul Dust; You Speak for the Dead;
10,000 Ancestors Will Dream of Me; The Heart of the Matter; Called Home; Listening for Echoes of the Past.
Take pains to waken the dead.
Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead.
Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent.
But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 244.
"My name is not my own, it is borrowed from my ancestors. I must return it unstained. My honor is not my own, it is borrowed from my descendants, I must give it to them unbroken. Our blood is not our own, it is a gift to generations yet unborn. We should carry it with responsibility." --Vincent Fund
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books
but lives in our very blood? --Carl Jung
The Unconscious believes in Life after Death. --Carl Jung
You may call me death-death that rose with the sun.
I come with quiet pain and long peace.
I lay the cover of protection on you. In the midst of life begins death.
I lay cover upon cover upon you so that your warmth will never cease.
~A Dark Form to Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 355.
The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those which have inspired the basic images of ritual and mythology. These eternal ones of the dream are not to be confused with the personality modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmares or madness to the tormented individual. Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream. --Joseph Campbell
No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dream and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a different situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude; the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. --C. G. Jung
Projection is mistakenly attributing your own repressed thoughts onto someone else, including thoughts, feelings, motives, and attitudes. In this case, it includes unowned emotions, metaphysical speculations and pseudo-scientific worldviews. Such figures stand in place of one's own self-actualization.
Balancing Genealogical Projection & Critical Thinking
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence. Genalogical data can act like a blank canvas for psychological projections, both in a potentially informing way and a self-delusory way. Therefore, it is well for us to be consciously aware of such dynamics in the interpretation of our family tree. Naturally, our hermeneutics will have imaginal and poetic aspects, yet the documented historical aspects help us from abdicating psychological responsibility to ourselves and family.
Participation Mystique is another way that identification can make its way into our reactions and attitudes about our pedigree and ancestors. Some people, finding a royal line among the commoners in their lists, experience inflation, leading to the misconcept that they are somehow royal. Such "men who would be kind" are too numerous to mention. These individuals have failed to do the math of decendancy.
One major problem is to mistake a historical person for an archetypal force or wisdom figure. This is how history is transmogrified into mythology. In psychological projection our unconsciousness is attributed to others, and they carry that unconscious content until or unless we become aware of it as our own. All assertions of ascended masters, channeled gurus, and secret chiefs fall into this category of archetypal protectors, mentors or teachers. The historical figure carried many of these qualities, powerful in collective wisdom and knowledge of the beyond. But being dead does not make you smarter.
Projection is self-mystification, a self-induced trance state, whether the content is positive or negative. The ego splits off the unconscious content, either over-valuing or undervaluing it. When we reach our archetypal boundaries we begin projecting, sort of an adult form of "let's pretend."
Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally.
There is no literal explanation of such recurrent themes, only their psychological appearances arising from the needs of those who weave such notions into their personal narratives. Such figures of the unconscious are naturally represented as immortal, as they are eternal archetypes in personified dress...a sort of adult "imaginary friend." This is the source of channeled wisdom and spirit possession. During his lifetime the moral rectitude of St. Germain was questioned, but in the immortal version he becomes sanitized.
Jung elaborated on such transformative wisdom figures as the archetypes of the "mana personality" and Self: the Wise Old Man and the Wise Old Woman. They can also appear as aspects of one's anima or animus. Jung even experienced one or more such characters he personified as his soul guide Philemon, who he linked back to the historical Simon Magus. But he did not take such interaction literally but rather imaginally -- an "as if real" experience he engaged with dialogue. Such figures can offer guidance and wisdom gleaned from personal and cultural experience. They can also spew faulty logic, silly notions, inferior thinking, and pseudo-scientific ideas.
A false idea can be hyped through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm. Without critical thinking we can derail the dynamic process of self transformation, by leading us down the garden path of false beliefs. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation. Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment.
Jung's Wise Old Woman and the Wise Old Man are archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. 'The "wise old woman"...[or] helpful "old woman" is a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature'. One of her current popular incarnations is Mary Magdalene, a soul-mate, or Sophia, who has captured contemporary imaginations with ideas about the divine feminine and gnosis. The 'Wise Old Man, or some other very powerful aspect of eternal masculinity' is her male counterpart.
In Jung's thought, the individuation process was marked by a sequence of archetypes, each acquiring predominance at successive stages, and so reflecting what he termed an ascending psychic scale or 'hierarchy of the unconscious'. Thus, starting with the intermediate position of 'anima or animus...just as the latter have a higher position in the hierarchy than the shadow, so wholeness lays claim to a position and a value superior' still. The Wise Old Woman and Man, as what he termed "Mana" personalities or "supraordinate" personalities, stood for that wholeness of the self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinary personality...as the "self"'.
As von Franz cautions, 'If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem, so that he, or she, is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality. In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
The wise old man (also called senex, sage or sophos) is an archetype as described by Carl Jung, as well as a classic literary figure, and may be seen as a stock character. The wise old man can be a profound philosopher distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment but confounded with Shadow it can be a Trickster.
This type of character is typically represented as a kind and wise, older father-type figure who uses personal knowledge of people and the world to help tell stories and offer guidance that, in a mystical way, may impress upon his audience a sense of who they are and who they might become, thereby acting as a mentor. He may occasionally appear as an absent-minded professor, appearing absent-minded due to a predilection for contemplative pursuits.
The wise old man is often seen to be in some way "foreign", that is, from a different culture, nation, or occasionally, even a different time, from those he advises. In extreme cases, he may be a liminal being, such as Merlin, who was only half human.
In medieval chivalric romance and modern fantasy literature, he is often presented as a wizard. He can also or instead be featured as a hermit. This character type often explained to the knights or heroes—particularly those searching for the Holy Grail—the significance of their encounters.
In the individuation process, the archetype of the Wise old man was late to emerge, and seen as an indication of the Self. 'If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem...the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth'.
As Borges contends:
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is. Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Subconscious Supernatural
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. Some of it echoes parental authority. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE
Projection & Identification
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/participation.html
People with a narrow conscious life exteriorize their unconscious, they are continually in participation mystique with other people… if more unconscious things have become conscious to you, then you live less in participation mystique. ~Carl Jung, Visions, para 1184.
Multigenerational Epigenetics
So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet‑to‑be‑conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.
Soft evolution is like an annotated book. Those who read different annotations of the same book may end up with very different learning.
As we experience stress, love, aging, fear, pleasure, infection, pain, exercise, or hunger, various hormones adjust various physical responses within our bodies. Hormones surge through our blood; changes in cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, interleukin, leptin, insulin, oxytocin, thyroid hormone, growth hormone, and adrenaline make us behave and develop in different ways. And they signal to our epigenomes, “Time to flip some switches!”Genes get shut off or turned on as the world around us changes.
The Book of LifeSoft evolution is analogous to an annotated book. The basic text and argument of the book remain the same. But if the text is gradually surrounded by margin notes and comments, then those who read different annotations of the exact same book may end up with very different learning, depending on who annotated the particular copy they borrowed, how they treated the original text, how the reader decided to interpret the interplay between the original printed text and the annotations, and whether some of the annotations were erased or modified by other readers.
There are multiple ways to add in rapid, inherited epigenetic adaptations without any change in the core DNA code. One basic and common mechanism is DNA methylation: Enzymes in our cells attach a methyl group (CH3) to a cytosine (C) located next to a guanine (G) in our DNA, forming a methylated island. This tells the gene that follows next, “Shhh, do not express yourself.”
One of the key reasons for human diversity is that about 70 percent, or roughly 14,000, of our genes have these “on/off” switches plus random mutations among them, so there are countless combinations of ways that these switches are flipped in the human population.
Sperm and eggs get a nearly fresh start: An estimated 90 percent of the switches are erased before conception occurs, which means most epigenetic memories are lost. But there is still a lot of recent data moving from generation to generation. (Those who described sperm as simple bags of DNA with a tail could never explain why sperm had so many receptors for so many hormones not directly related to reproduction, including leptin, one of the obesity genes, as well as 19 growth factors, cytokines, and neurotransmitters.)
Epigenetic switches can be flipped on and off in sperm, eggs, or embryos, so your kids and grandkids can share your environmental experiences and knowledge, and be better prepared for the environment they will soon be entering. For instance, if you were a male smoker, and your brother was not, 28 epigenetic signals in your sperm would be different from his. Sperm are listening.
At conception, your grandchildren listen to distant tales, and sometimes pass them on.
Reprinted from Evolving Ourselves by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) Juan Enriquez and Steven Gullans, 2015.
Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes
Your ancestors' lousy childhoods or excellent adventures might change your personality, bequeathing anxiety or resilience by altering the epigenetic expressions of genes in the brain
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes#.UwOqevk7t8E
Below: Iona and her paternal Grandmother, Amy Delena and maternal Grandmother Rosa
Five Criteria to Assess Wisdom:
- Factual knowledge: Knowing the 'whats' of the human condition and human nature
- Procedural knowledge: Strategies for solving life's problems
- Lifespan contextualism: Knowledge of life's settings and social situations and how they change overtime
- Relativism of values: Being aware of cultural differences and being considerate and sensitive to different values
- Awareness and management of uncertainty: Recognizing the limits of knowledge, and understanding the uncertainty of the future http://berlinwisdommodel.weebly.com/baltes-assessment-of-wisdom.html
Multigenerational Epigenetics
In psychology, genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time. It is based on the idea that common experiences of a species become incorporated into its genetic code, not by a Lamarckian process that encodes specific memories but by a much vaguer tendency to encode a readiness to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. Shares much with the modern concept of epigenetics.
Genetic memory is invoked to explain ethnic group memory postulated by Carl Jung. Jungian psychology suggests memories, feelings and ideas inherited from our ancestors as part of a "collective unconscious". The term "epigenetic" refers to heritable traits that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. This can occur over rounds of cell division, while some epigenetic features can effect transgenerational inheritance and are inherited from one generation to the next.
Multigenerational epigenetics is today regarded as another aspect to evolution and adaptation. Culture is the most fundamental force that has shaped man's life through the aeons. Its effect is, in all likelihood, established in the genome in a few generations.The concept implies that genes have a 'memory'; what you do in your lifetime, and what you are exposed to, could in turn affect your grandchildren.
Epigenetics adds a whole new layer to genes beyond the DNA, the so called "epigenome". Among other things, it proposes a control system of 'switches' that turn genes on or off. The things that people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans. The switches themselves can also be inherited. This means that a 'memory' of an event could be passed through generations. A simple environmental effect could switch genes on or off - and this change could be inherited.
Epigenetics can impact evolution when epigenetic changes are heritable.[1] A sequestered germ line or Weismann barrier is specific to animals, and epigenetic inheritance is more common in plants and microbes. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have argued that these effects may require enhancements to the standard conceptual framework of the modern evolutionary synthesis.[97][98] Other evolutionary biologists have incorporated epigenetic inheritance into population genetics models[99] or are openly skeptical.[100]
Two important ways in which epigenetic inheritance can be different from traditional genetic inheritance, with important consequences for evolution, are that rates of epimutation can be much faster than rates of mutation[101] and the epimutations are more easily reversible.[102] In plants heritable DNA methylation mutations are 100.000 times more likely to occur compared to DNA mutations.[103] An epigenetically inherited element such as the PSI+ system can act as a "stop-gap", good enough for short-term adaptation that allows the lineage to survive for long enough for mutation and/or recombination to genetically assimilate the adaptive phenotypic change.[104] The existence of this possibility increases the evolvability of a species.
More than 100 cases of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance phenomena have been reported in a wide range of organisms, including prokaryotes, plants, and animals.[105] For instance, Mourning Cloak butterflies will change color through hormone changes in response to experimentation of varying temperatures.[106] Bacteria make widespread use of postreplicative DNA methylation for the epigenetic control of DNA-protein interactions. Bacteria make use of DNA adenine methylation (rather than DNA cytosine methylation) as an epigenetic signal. DNA adenine methylation is important in bacteria virulence in organisms such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Haemophilus, and Brucella. In Alphaproteobacteria, methylation of adenine regulates the cell cycle and couples gene transcription to DNA replication. In Gammaproteobacteria, adenine methylation provides signals for DNA replication, chromosome segregation, mismatch repair, packaging of bacteriophage, transposase activity and regulation of gene expression.[107][108]
The filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa is a prominent model system for understanding the control and function of cytosine methylation. In this organisms, DNA methylation is associated with relics of a genome defense system called RIP (repeat-induced point mutation) and silences gene expression by inhibiting transcription elongation.[109]
The yeast prion PSI is generated by a conformational change of a translation termination factor, which is then inherited by daughter cells. This can provide a survival advantage under adverse conditions. This is an example of epigenetic regulation enabling unicellular organisms to respond rapidly to environmental stress. Prions can be viewed as epigenetic agents capable of inducing a phenotypic change without modification of the genome.[108]
Direct detection of epigenetic marks in microorganisms is possible with single molecule real time sequencing, in which polymerase sensitivity allows for measuring methylation and other modifications as a DNA molecule is being sequenced.[110] Several projects have demonstrated the ability to collect genome-wide epigenetic data in bacteria.[111][112][113][114]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
CONCEPTIONS & MISCONCEPTIONS
Genealogist Mark Humphreys says, "Your ancestors were the same mix of bullies, fools, bigots, incompetents, cowards, and occasional smart and admirable people that always make up society. You exist because of many people who you would despise if you met them. Genealogy is about finding out who they were, it should have no interest in whether they were admirable or not.
Indeed, it's more fun when they murder each other, marry descendants of their ancestors' bitter enemies, conceive your ancestor as a result of sordid and regretted affairs, die before their child is born, and so on. It makes us realize how precarious our existence is, and how messy and unlikely our genetic inheritance. Anyone who believes they belong to one race, or that their ancestors were fine people, hasn't done enough genealogy."
Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty. He began to think that such descent was the rule rather than the exception in the Western world, even if relatively few people had the documents to demonstrate it.
Humphrys compiled his family genealogies first on paper and then using computers. He did much of his work on royal genealogies in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was just coming into general use. He began to put his findings on Web pages, with hyperlinks connecting various lines of descent. Suddenly dense networks of ancestry jumped out at him.
"I'd known these descents were interconnected, but I'd never known how much," he told me. "You can't see the connections reading the printed genealogies, because it's so hard to jump from tree to tree. The problem is that genealogies aren't two-dimensional, so any attempt to put them on paper is more or less doomed from the start. They aren't three-dimensional, either, or you could make a structure. They have hundreds of dimensions."
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne. English, French and other European royal families are all inter-related, and all descend ultimately from Charlemagne.
All humanity is interrelated many times over (contrary to what an endless procession of racists and tribalists throughout history have claimed or implied). For any two humans in history or today, it is not a question of do they have a common ancestor, it is only a question of when was the most recent one.
If we had full genealogical records for all of human history and pre-history, then any two living people on earth could identify their closest relationship to each other. Or indeed any two living organisms on earth, since DNA probably did not evolve twice. One could also pick any famous person, alive or dead, and show your closest relationship to them. For they are all related. See pre-historical estimates for Common ancestors of all humans.
It's true that everyone's roots go back to the same family tree, he said. But each path to our common past is different, and reconstructing that path, using whatever records are available, is its own reward. "You can ask whether everyone in the Western world is descended from Charlemagne, and the answer is yes, we're all descended from Charlemagne. But can you prove it? That's the game of genealogy."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal-we/302497/
Without pedigree collapse, a person's ancestor tree is a binary tree, formed by the person, the parents, grandparents, and so on. However, the number of individuals in such a tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, a single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have roughly a billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.[1]
This apparent paradox occurs because the individuals in the binary tree are not distinct: instead, a single individual may occupy multiple places in the binary tree. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are cousins (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves).[2][3] For example, the offspring of two first cousins has at most only six great-grandparents instead of the normal eight. This reduction in the number of ancestors is pedigree collapse. It collapses the binary tree into a directed acyclic graph with two different, directed paths starting from the ancestor who in the binary tree would occupy two places.
In some cultures, cousins were encouraged or required to marry to keep kin bonds, wealth and property within a family (endogamy). Among royalty, the frequent requirement to only marry other royals resulted in a reduced gene pool in which most individuals were the result of extensive pedigree collapse. Alfonso XII of Spain, for example, had only four great-grandparents instead of the usual eight. Furthermore, two of these great-grandparents, Charles IV of Spain and Maria Luisa of Parma, were parents of another twice great-grandmother, Maria Isabella of Spain. More generally, in many cultures intermarriage may frequently occur within a small village, limiting the available gene pool.
This is not about DNA (Genealogy is not Genetics)
These findings do not necessarily have any implications for our DNA. To descend from someone does not mean you necessarily inherit any DNA from them. These findings do not conflict with the idea that most or all of your DNA is inherited from your local area. Even if you do descend from the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, that does not mean this can be detected in your DNA. In fact, there may be no evidence at all of these findings in humanity's DNA. And yet the findings can still be true. To see this, imagine one Western European sailor blown off course in classical times, say 100 AD, and landing in the Caribbean, with no way home. He is not killed but rather taken in by a tribe who need strong young men.
- He mates with one of the native women and has children. 1/2 of their DNA is European.
- The children mate with pure natives and have grandchildren. About 1/4 (can be more or less, by chance) of their DNA is European.
- The grandchildren mate with pure natives and have great-grandchildren. About 1/8 (more or less) of their DNA is European.
- And so on.
If you have a line of descendants that doesn't die out, eventually you are the ancestor of the whole future world. Through this, you affect all future world history.
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
A Jesus bloodline is a hypothetical sequence of lineal descendants of the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene, or some other woman, usually portrayed as his wife or a hierodule. Differing and contradictory versions of a Jesus bloodline hypothesis have been proposed in numerous books by authors such as Louis Martin (1886), Donovan Joyce (1973), Andreas Faber-Kaiser (1977), Barbara Thiering (1992), Margaret Starbird (1993), and various websites. Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code used the premise for its plot line. The 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus proposed that evidence existed to show that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that their son was named Judah, based upon inscriptions found on ossuaries discovered in Jerusalem in 1980.[1] Biblical scholar and author James Tabor has recently affirmed his belief in a married Jesus,[2] while Karen King announced the discovery of text in a Coptic papyrus fragment, alleged to be a translation of a lost 2nd century Gospel, in which Jesus is made to refer to "my wife". That fragment is now considered, by most experts, to be a fake.[3]
According to the vast majority of professional historians and scholars from related fields, there is no historical, biblical, apocryphal, archaeological, genealogical, or genetic evidence which supports this hypothesis.[4] Hypothetical Jesus bloodlines should not be confused with the biblical genealogy of Jesus or the historical relatives of Jesus and their descendants, who are known as the Desposyni. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_bloodline
Why We're All Jesus' Children, Steve Olson, Slate, March 15, 2006:
Olson points out that The Da Vinci Code does not understand genealogy: "no matter how the court case turns out, both books are confused. If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet."
- He criticizes DNA studies, which - by focusing on male-male or female-female lines only - make people look less connected than they really are: "The risk of today's genetic genealogy tests is that they tend to divide people into groups, whereas the real message that emerges from genealogy is one of connections. ... People may like to think that they're descended from some ancient group while other people are not. But human ancestry doesn't work that way".
- How many genetic ancestors do you have? Short answer: you get DNA from about 2n ancestors n generations back, up to 8 generations, then about 68 additional ancestors for each generation after that.
About 360 years, or just short of 15 generations. At 15 generations, an individual living today would carry only three thousands of 1% (00.003052%) of the DNA of an ancestor who was “pure” anything 15 generations ago. So even if one ancestor was indeed Mediterranean 15 generations ago, unless they continuously intermarried within a pure Mediterranean population, the amount would drop by 50% with each generation to the miniscule amount that would be found in today’s current generation. With today’s technology, this is simply untraceable in autosomal DNA.
Genetic genealogy suffers from the problem of only focusing on the ancestors from whom you have inherited DNA, not all your ancestors. You can descend from someone without having inherited their DNA at a specific location on the genome, or even without having inherited their DNA at all. http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
An autosomal DNA test only goes back 8 generations.
Below: Frank Franklin, Tunnel 09
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.