CRADLE OF AWAKENING
THE CRADLE OF AWAKENING
by Iona Miller, 2016
"It is indeed a major effort-the magnum opus in fact-to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580)
Life Force
Stay in your living presence, feel all the life going on in you at once; feel the cohesion, the live presence of open awareness, here and now. See how you come directly to life. Come into living presence, more and more.
We are called to remembrance of where we came from -- the cradle of nature -- to refresh the dream of mythic origins. Feel the rhythm of awakening to the lifeworld, the root pulse encoding our becoming.
Contemplate the origin of the universe, the creation of matter, and the creation of life and reproduction -- "they who engender, they who create" -- evolution entering into time.
Oceanic Metaphor
We chart our legacy in an ancestral sea with many shores -- an almost infinite genepool of lifeforms. We navigate between our role-bound persona currents and the rip tides of mythic imperatives. The abyss of the transcendent imagination is symbolized by the sea. Those waters, swelling waves of humanity, are charged with memories. You can see the past. Between our ordinary social lives and the timeless mythic realm we remain attentive to whatever comes to presence.
As we move forward in imaginal space with only our shadows behind, we find our passed lives in front of us. The serpent curls back to eat its tail and digests childhood, gestation, the ancestors, our phylogeny.
The personal and universal tale of psyche quickens and sustains us through cyclic emergence, death and resurrection, connecting individual destiny with transcendent humanity. Unknowable transpersonal nature, non-conscious, integrates us further back than conscious processes.
Collective Generative Space
Genealogy is a dynamic expression and an experience of psycho-historical recovery of the self. It is our initiation into a deeper awareness, larger order, a greater ecology of Being. Why waste the time of eternity?
Embarking on our genealogical project is essentially a contract with ourselves to make a labyrinthine transformational journey through psycho-history and human development to complete it. Psyche informs our experience of ourselves and the universe in the most fundamental ways, including trans-sensory imagery or synesthesia.
We compress time to quickly mull over a prospective path before embarking upon it. As generators of reality, we feel where our center of gravity pulls most fully. There lies our spring of awakening. Through our dreams we know what life has to offer.
When we listen, psyche speaks. Even sadness, grief, and pain carry sacred life energy. Stay close to those sensations and surround it with presence and with warmth. Not your story ‘about’ sadness or pain, nor an interpretations of it, but the raw sensations coursing through you as a living guide of aliveness, come to remind you of something you’ve forgotten.
We Being
Our project is one of both ancestral and psycho-historical recovery. A virtually indescribable sense of wonder accompanies any new discovery. The fusion of history and psyche is a marriage of what we have been and what we eternally are. The shock of recognition is mediated and nuanced by our ancestors. Metaphor makes symbolic use of historical material.
We can use our genealogy to engage the figures of our ancestors, those who came before. We find well-being when we are connected to Source, to the 'well' of our psychic creativity, the 'well of living water' or the 'still waters' of the inner soul, symbol of the unchanging source from which we all drink deeply.
From ancient times, the well is symbolically, and literally, located at the center of the community. There they drew water, the basic sustenance for life. Metaphorically, the well represents all the social resources of the community necessary to endure and thrive. If the well falls into disrepair, if the life giving water is polluted or diminished in quantity, the community suffers [like Flint, Michigan recently].
The well is a symbol for our 'inner community'. The well is a universal symbol for that which sustains life. We enrich our lives by delving deeply into our essential natures to reach the source of true nourishment. The well is also a symbol of healthy community.
Beyond heroic counseling and ordinary external well-being is 'we-being' and the reality of the living psyche, also reflected in the I Ching hexagram, The Well. It also appears as the image of a woman as a source of water: cross-culturally, the well serves as an image and symbol of woman. You might find your spouse at the well in times past.
We may understand being unconsciously conscious but we can also be consciously aware of the unconscious. Stimulating us, perhaps we stimulating it, an energy exchange is occurring. As we begin to know about this, the energy exchange occurs as waves of energy that flow through us and perhaps some means that establishes a coherence.
Paths of Transformation
We are each living metaphors. Our genealogy is our natural History. Our psychogenealogy is the natural history of our soul. The ancestors saturate our ordinary lives, as do successful rituals such as genealogy practice which are central to our lives. There is another kind of primordial human in us that responds to a transgenerational approach to the family tree -- a therapy of the heart and ideas.
This biologically encoded history of the human race is present in every person at the unconscious level as archaic traits. In this sense, the meaning of life is you. Gnosis (not Gnosticism) dissolves the idea that outer and inner or personal and cosmic distinctions exist, allowing phenomena to return to its basis -- the awakening ground -- as a single, uninterrupted continuum, as symbolized in our Family Tree.
Unlimited, Immortal Archetype
"Self-reflection, or – what comes to the same thing – the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man.
In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." --Jung, Collected Works 11, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass; Paragraph 401
Jung called the primordial ancestor 'the two million year old man," the instinctive self, rooted in nature, who speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. It encompasses the entire history of the human race. The age is arbitrary. In 1997 a 4.4 million-year-old human ancestor was found, the most primitive hominid species known. The father of all men is 340,000 years old.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-all-men-is-340000-years-old/
http://phys.org/news/2014-07-scientists-timeline-human.html
Our unknown companion -- the 'Indigenous One' or indigenous root -- symbolizes the emergence of our species as a personal revelation. "Well now, I have within myself a “man” who is millions of years old, and he perhaps can throw light on these metaphysical problems." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 12).
The "Seed of Mankind"
Genealogy and depth psychology are both psychic archaeology, seeking elemental wisdom to reconnect us and heal our wounds. Both are a move from biological to cultural transformation. How can we know the unknowable, much less make friends and relations of this archetypal self as a mirror of our universe, this healing principle of our species from the beginning of time?
Our survival is mutually entwined with our instincts, connection to nature, and unforgotten wisdom. Giving up our roots results in a restlessness of the soul that leads to many forms of mental and emotional problems, the worst of which is meaninglessness. Sir Francis Bacon said, 'In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.' And, "wounds cannot be cured without searching." Our separation is painful because it is more than our souls can stand.
As Hermann Hesse noted in Reflections, "We each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man’s genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever existed in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions."
"The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.)
All epochs dwell in us as the unconscious, timeless, creative matrix of the psyche. It only seems like we experience the archetypes at the existential levels for the first time, because they are inherent. Our personal history is rooted in the collective transhistorical journey. Recovering old knowledge creates new possibilities. We realize ourselves as living history.
Our genealogy reflects the metaphor of a landscape and travelers. The travelers obey inherited rules (archetypes) that determine loosely which routes are possible and which not, separating the feasible from the impossible. The rules are hidden, but are recorded in our charts and patterns, in the form of myths, stories, rituals, norms and other archetypal images.
Surprisingly, even with vast correlations, only a few pathways (patterns) emerge. Each branch of the tree is a set of parallel landscapes, corresponding to different levels of being or consciousness, but all part of the same world (unus mundus).
Ancestral Medicine Ways
Gaining consciousness within the flow of the Spirit is the sacred purpose of Ancestral ways. Medicine is revealed when this consciousness is established. Discoveries that follow are from the participation with the Great Spirit and Mother Life. A carrier of these ways accepts the responsibilities, ethics, principles and records that are held accountable to all that exists.
Resolution or failure of an epigenetic crisis by a global historical figure can have potent consequences in their own age, and perhaps others, including their descendants. Psycho-history is full of such examples, especially in noble and royal lines.
We all have ancestors, both of blood and of spirit, and each of our lives rests firmly on the foundation of their sacrifice. They are as near to us as our breath and bones, and when related with in conscious ways, they can be a tremendous source of healing, guidance, and companionship. We can learn to accept life with all its imperfections -- unconditional acceptance of life itself.
The ancestors we choose to honor may include not only recent and more distant family but also beloved friends and community, cultural and religious leaders, and even other-than-human kin such as companion animals. Our ancestors bring vital support to fulfill our potential here on Earth, and, through involvement in our lives, also further their own growth and maturation in the spirit realms.
Like the living, spirits of the deceased run the full spectrum from wise and loving to self-absorbed and harmful. Physical death is a major event for the soul, a rite of passage we will all face, and the living can provide critical momentum for the recently deceased to make the initiatory leap to become a helpful ancestor.
Once the dead have become ancestors, part of their post-death journey may include making repairs for wrongs committed while here on Earth. For their sake and for ours, it’s good to spend a little time now and again feeding our relationships with the ancestors. We think and speak about life in terms of travel: birth as “arrival,” death as “departure,” careers as “paths” and choices as “crossroads.”
Direct contact with the spirits of the ancestors can be cultivated through ritual practices; however, communication may also happen spontaneously in forms such as dream contact, waking encounters, and synchronicity. When we have a framework to receive their outreach, their work is made easier and we are open to the enjoyment of conscious, ongoing relationship.
You don’t have to be an indigenous shaman or ghost whisperer to have a direct, intimate, and healthy relationship with your ancestors. We all have loving ancestors who want us to fulfill our destiny as happy and well-adjusted people, and in my experience, our ancestors are the ideal guides for family healing as they are invested in seeing their future generations thrive.
Just as in any meaningful relationship, our bonds with the ancestors call for care and renewal. By proactively engaging in simple actions to honor and feed these relationships, our ancestors can become a tremendous source of healing, empowerment, and nourishment in our everyday lives. Fortunately, these practices of tending are relatively simply and can be carried out by anyone with sincere intent.
http://ancestralmedicine.org/five-ways-to-honor-your-ancestors/
Going Nowhere: Ascending & Descending
As a whole, the Tree symbolizes the true self. Ancestors are among the most essential ways we have of participating with realities greater than ourselves. Our lines are full of ascending and descending currents we can follow to Source and Ground -- the One in the Many and the Many in the One. Genealogy is a metaphysical map of our personal paths back to the legendary and mythic layers of our being in connective boundary-transcending conscious events.
Consciousness is the alchemical prima materia, our awareness, our true selves -- the essence of the Great Work. The mystical marriage is the unification and transcendence of male/female duality. Conflicting drives originating on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels create splits in the personality. "We can conquer unconsciousness by regular work but never by a grand gesture." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 31)
Jung says that, "The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis."
Further, Jung said that "it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude.
I find that this "choice" is in many cases rather a fate than a voluntary decision.
I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called " free will" and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice.
They are, as a matter of fact, dominants up to a certain point. That is the reason why one is confronted with an archetype, because we cannot undo it by merely making it conscious. It has to be taken into account and that is the main task of any prolonged analysis. The deviation from the dominants causes a certain dissociation, i.e., a loss of vitality, what the primitives call "a loss of soul." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626)
Conscious Relationships
An integrated approach roots us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore, including family ties, legacies, parenting, matriarchy and patriarchy (Gaillard).
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
"It is possible that a certain historical atmosphere is born with us by means of which we can repeat strange details almost as if they were historical facts." (Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy and the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage:
"We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science."
The Transgenerational Integration movement is developing such awareness for both therapists and the general population. Part of that school of thought is an active psychological approach to genealogy and the ebb and flow of life itself, whether self-initiated or in the therapeutic relationship.
TI has its own genealogy rooted in the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm, and other methods, such as Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and Metaphor Therapy. It also draws on established conceptual models from family therapy, including the genogram, a map of the family system that discloses the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviors and emotional experiences.
Entanglement & Re-enactment
TI does not suggest a radical paradigm shift to different tenets or fundamental assumptions, say, about the nature of reality -- changing initial conditions and/or assumptions. It amplifies existing therapeutic models. However, it helps account for errors and anomalies in the old or waning and competing paradigms and provides greater clarity and a higher information ratio.
All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.
Transgenerational therapy focuses on the relationships in a family. We carry many patterns from the generations that preceded us in our family tree. Family patterns are a very important factor that affects the 'inner child’. Many unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, loneliness, alcoholism, and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families.
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide. In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away.
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory, locked in relationship between symptom and consciousness. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
Liminal Entities
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
The fact, too, that the subject of these visions is very old and in confinio mortis suggests that a glance has been cast beyond the border, or that something from the other side has seeped through into our three-dimensional world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 611-612
We in our Western ignorance do not see, or have forgotten, that man has or is visited by subjective inner experiences of an irrational nature which cannot be successfully dealt with by rational argument, scientific evidence, and depreciative diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Accessing multidimensional reality includes intellectual, emotional and empathic knowing, as well as sensual or somatic knowing, including visionary and intuitive realizations. Spiritual knowing is related to participatory action or co-creation. These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. Intuition demands representation for communication.
Jung notes, "Fantasy is a pre-stage of the symbol, but it is an essential characteristic of the symbol that it is not mere fantasy." (1925 Seminar, Page 11). There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as the ancestors and their transpersonal gnosis.
All knowing means we are engaged and participating, as well as experiencing. Insight is experiential vision, encompassing wisdom aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos. It is an emergent phenomena co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event -- a personal engagement in world-transfiguring events as well as states of mind.
Rather than our ancestors, we can only look at the character of the knowledge they provide in ordinary and non-ordinary ways. Hidden knowledge’ is where fragile new ideas incubate. Conceptual confusion leads to metaphysical speculation and epistemological assumptions. Raw experience entangles with cultural forms.
What we know is that our god-image and self-images get transferred by interpretation of the nature of our own self-images, relationships, and experiences. Attachment is strong affectional bonds in which we play out emotional joy and distress, personality disturbance, anxiety, anger, depression, and detachment from unwilling separation or loss.
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Relational Model
Genealogy is a relational model. Our part is to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is only for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless. Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions.
Liminality Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous phenomenon. Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity. Jung said, “…The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous.” (1973: 377)
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree -- the drama of kinship.
An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience. Liminal refers to a marginalized space of fertile chaos and creative potential ...a definition that reminiscent of our genealogical project.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity,” a shift in the constitution.
Liminal Archetype
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the horizon of consciousness -- the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.
The family of Oedipus is a kinship of tragedy because of incest (e.g. Antigone is the fruit of an incestuous union), slaying of kin, ancestral curses and personal errors that can be related to inherited guilt.
"Ismene my true sister, born from the same mother, is there any torment Oedipus suffered which Zeus will not impose on us while we yet live? There is nothing —
neither grief nor violence, shame nor dishonor —no evil you and I have not endured already." (Translation by Fainlight-Littman 2009, 139)
Antigone exposes a tragic ethical rift between the so-called feminine "Divine Law" which Antigone represents and the "Human Law," represented by the ruler Creon. A female figure questions the role of the patriarchal state and challenges the system that writes her off as insignificant. She denies, she refuses, she means it. Her authentic voice and claim to autonomy suggests a knowledge of unknown origin but consequence.
Questioning the system and political struggles and multiple exclusions is a very modern theme for an ancient tragedy. How many times has Antigone been reborn with the same predicament of delayed and displaced punishment? But she demands and maintains her voice, and sticks up for her family values without making her true self disappear. Her name is a homologue of that: Anti-Gone.
Antigone is a paradigm of bodily exposure and exile, political and gender struggles, bare and naked life -- naked awareness. In Sophocles, she puts the will of the gods ahead of man-made laws, but a cascade of fateful deaths still ensues to close the tragedy. But in Euripides, the calamity is averted by the intercession of Dionysus, followed by the marriage of Antigone and Hæmon.
Liminal Wisdom
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness.
Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Although irrepresentable and intangible, archetypes and ancestors can be visualized through their effects -- archetypal patterns, symbols, images, plots, characters and situations. These dynamic effects, can be expressed in myths, dreams, metaphors and generally narratives.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration -- signs of a symbolic psyche and self-awareness. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
Trans-Sensory Imagery
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
by Iona Miller, 2016
"It is indeed a major effort-the magnum opus in fact-to escape in time from the narrowness of its embrace and to liberate our mind to the vision of the immensity of the world, of which we form an infinitesimal part." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580)
Life Force
Stay in your living presence, feel all the life going on in you at once; feel the cohesion, the live presence of open awareness, here and now. See how you come directly to life. Come into living presence, more and more.
We are called to remembrance of where we came from -- the cradle of nature -- to refresh the dream of mythic origins. Feel the rhythm of awakening to the lifeworld, the root pulse encoding our becoming.
Contemplate the origin of the universe, the creation of matter, and the creation of life and reproduction -- "they who engender, they who create" -- evolution entering into time.
Oceanic Metaphor
We chart our legacy in an ancestral sea with many shores -- an almost infinite genepool of lifeforms. We navigate between our role-bound persona currents and the rip tides of mythic imperatives. The abyss of the transcendent imagination is symbolized by the sea. Those waters, swelling waves of humanity, are charged with memories. You can see the past. Between our ordinary social lives and the timeless mythic realm we remain attentive to whatever comes to presence.
As we move forward in imaginal space with only our shadows behind, we find our passed lives in front of us. The serpent curls back to eat its tail and digests childhood, gestation, the ancestors, our phylogeny.
The personal and universal tale of psyche quickens and sustains us through cyclic emergence, death and resurrection, connecting individual destiny with transcendent humanity. Unknowable transpersonal nature, non-conscious, integrates us further back than conscious processes.
Collective Generative Space
Genealogy is a dynamic expression and an experience of psycho-historical recovery of the self. It is our initiation into a deeper awareness, larger order, a greater ecology of Being. Why waste the time of eternity?
Embarking on our genealogical project is essentially a contract with ourselves to make a labyrinthine transformational journey through psycho-history and human development to complete it. Psyche informs our experience of ourselves and the universe in the most fundamental ways, including trans-sensory imagery or synesthesia.
We compress time to quickly mull over a prospective path before embarking upon it. As generators of reality, we feel where our center of gravity pulls most fully. There lies our spring of awakening. Through our dreams we know what life has to offer.
When we listen, psyche speaks. Even sadness, grief, and pain carry sacred life energy. Stay close to those sensations and surround it with presence and with warmth. Not your story ‘about’ sadness or pain, nor an interpretations of it, but the raw sensations coursing through you as a living guide of aliveness, come to remind you of something you’ve forgotten.
We Being
Our project is one of both ancestral and psycho-historical recovery. A virtually indescribable sense of wonder accompanies any new discovery. The fusion of history and psyche is a marriage of what we have been and what we eternally are. The shock of recognition is mediated and nuanced by our ancestors. Metaphor makes symbolic use of historical material.
We can use our genealogy to engage the figures of our ancestors, those who came before. We find well-being when we are connected to Source, to the 'well' of our psychic creativity, the 'well of living water' or the 'still waters' of the inner soul, symbol of the unchanging source from which we all drink deeply.
From ancient times, the well is symbolically, and literally, located at the center of the community. There they drew water, the basic sustenance for life. Metaphorically, the well represents all the social resources of the community necessary to endure and thrive. If the well falls into disrepair, if the life giving water is polluted or diminished in quantity, the community suffers [like Flint, Michigan recently].
The well is a symbol for our 'inner community'. The well is a universal symbol for that which sustains life. We enrich our lives by delving deeply into our essential natures to reach the source of true nourishment. The well is also a symbol of healthy community.
Beyond heroic counseling and ordinary external well-being is 'we-being' and the reality of the living psyche, also reflected in the I Ching hexagram, The Well. It also appears as the image of a woman as a source of water: cross-culturally, the well serves as an image and symbol of woman. You might find your spouse at the well in times past.
We may understand being unconsciously conscious but we can also be consciously aware of the unconscious. Stimulating us, perhaps we stimulating it, an energy exchange is occurring. As we begin to know about this, the energy exchange occurs as waves of energy that flow through us and perhaps some means that establishes a coherence.
Paths of Transformation
We are each living metaphors. Our genealogy is our natural History. Our psychogenealogy is the natural history of our soul. The ancestors saturate our ordinary lives, as do successful rituals such as genealogy practice which are central to our lives. There is another kind of primordial human in us that responds to a transgenerational approach to the family tree -- a therapy of the heart and ideas.
This biologically encoded history of the human race is present in every person at the unconscious level as archaic traits. In this sense, the meaning of life is you. Gnosis (not Gnosticism) dissolves the idea that outer and inner or personal and cosmic distinctions exist, allowing phenomena to return to its basis -- the awakening ground -- as a single, uninterrupted continuum, as symbolized in our Family Tree.
Unlimited, Immortal Archetype
"Self-reflection, or – what comes to the same thing – the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man.
In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up." --Jung, Collected Works 11, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass; Paragraph 401
Jung called the primordial ancestor 'the two million year old man," the instinctive self, rooted in nature, who speaks the forgotten symbolic language of the unconscious. It encompasses the entire history of the human race. The age is arbitrary. In 1997 a 4.4 million-year-old human ancestor was found, the most primitive hominid species known. The father of all men is 340,000 years old.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23240-the-father-of-all-men-is-340000-years-old/
http://phys.org/news/2014-07-scientists-timeline-human.html
Our unknown companion -- the 'Indigenous One' or indigenous root -- symbolizes the emergence of our species as a personal revelation. "Well now, I have within myself a “man” who is millions of years old, and he perhaps can throw light on these metaphysical problems." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 12).
The "Seed of Mankind"
Genealogy and depth psychology are both psychic archaeology, seeking elemental wisdom to reconnect us and heal our wounds. Both are a move from biological to cultural transformation. How can we know the unknowable, much less make friends and relations of this archetypal self as a mirror of our universe, this healing principle of our species from the beginning of time?
Our survival is mutually entwined with our instincts, connection to nature, and unforgotten wisdom. Giving up our roots results in a restlessness of the soul that leads to many forms of mental and emotional problems, the worst of which is meaninglessness. Sir Francis Bacon said, 'In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.' And, "wounds cannot be cured without searching." Our separation is painful because it is more than our souls can stand.
As Hermann Hesse noted in Reflections, "We each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man’s genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever existed in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions."
"The other Gods died of their temporality, yet the supreme meaning never dies, it turns into meaning and then into absurdity, and out of the fire and blood of their collision the supreme meaning rises up rejuvenated anew." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 230.)
All epochs dwell in us as the unconscious, timeless, creative matrix of the psyche. It only seems like we experience the archetypes at the existential levels for the first time, because they are inherent. Our personal history is rooted in the collective transhistorical journey. Recovering old knowledge creates new possibilities. We realize ourselves as living history.
Our genealogy reflects the metaphor of a landscape and travelers. The travelers obey inherited rules (archetypes) that determine loosely which routes are possible and which not, separating the feasible from the impossible. The rules are hidden, but are recorded in our charts and patterns, in the form of myths, stories, rituals, norms and other archetypal images.
Surprisingly, even with vast correlations, only a few pathways (patterns) emerge. Each branch of the tree is a set of parallel landscapes, corresponding to different levels of being or consciousness, but all part of the same world (unus mundus).
Ancestral Medicine Ways
Gaining consciousness within the flow of the Spirit is the sacred purpose of Ancestral ways. Medicine is revealed when this consciousness is established. Discoveries that follow are from the participation with the Great Spirit and Mother Life. A carrier of these ways accepts the responsibilities, ethics, principles and records that are held accountable to all that exists.
Resolution or failure of an epigenetic crisis by a global historical figure can have potent consequences in their own age, and perhaps others, including their descendants. Psycho-history is full of such examples, especially in noble and royal lines.
We all have ancestors, both of blood and of spirit, and each of our lives rests firmly on the foundation of their sacrifice. They are as near to us as our breath and bones, and when related with in conscious ways, they can be a tremendous source of healing, guidance, and companionship. We can learn to accept life with all its imperfections -- unconditional acceptance of life itself.
The ancestors we choose to honor may include not only recent and more distant family but also beloved friends and community, cultural and religious leaders, and even other-than-human kin such as companion animals. Our ancestors bring vital support to fulfill our potential here on Earth, and, through involvement in our lives, also further their own growth and maturation in the spirit realms.
Like the living, spirits of the deceased run the full spectrum from wise and loving to self-absorbed and harmful. Physical death is a major event for the soul, a rite of passage we will all face, and the living can provide critical momentum for the recently deceased to make the initiatory leap to become a helpful ancestor.
Once the dead have become ancestors, part of their post-death journey may include making repairs for wrongs committed while here on Earth. For their sake and for ours, it’s good to spend a little time now and again feeding our relationships with the ancestors. We think and speak about life in terms of travel: birth as “arrival,” death as “departure,” careers as “paths” and choices as “crossroads.”
Direct contact with the spirits of the ancestors can be cultivated through ritual practices; however, communication may also happen spontaneously in forms such as dream contact, waking encounters, and synchronicity. When we have a framework to receive their outreach, their work is made easier and we are open to the enjoyment of conscious, ongoing relationship.
You don’t have to be an indigenous shaman or ghost whisperer to have a direct, intimate, and healthy relationship with your ancestors. We all have loving ancestors who want us to fulfill our destiny as happy and well-adjusted people, and in my experience, our ancestors are the ideal guides for family healing as they are invested in seeing their future generations thrive.
Just as in any meaningful relationship, our bonds with the ancestors call for care and renewal. By proactively engaging in simple actions to honor and feed these relationships, our ancestors can become a tremendous source of healing, empowerment, and nourishment in our everyday lives. Fortunately, these practices of tending are relatively simply and can be carried out by anyone with sincere intent.
http://ancestralmedicine.org/five-ways-to-honor-your-ancestors/
Going Nowhere: Ascending & Descending
As a whole, the Tree symbolizes the true self. Ancestors are among the most essential ways we have of participating with realities greater than ourselves. Our lines are full of ascending and descending currents we can follow to Source and Ground -- the One in the Many and the Many in the One. Genealogy is a metaphysical map of our personal paths back to the legendary and mythic layers of our being in connective boundary-transcending conscious events.
Consciousness is the alchemical prima materia, our awareness, our true selves -- the essence of the Great Work. The mystical marriage is the unification and transcendence of male/female duality. Conflicting drives originating on the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels create splits in the personality. "We can conquer unconsciousness by regular work but never by a grand gesture." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 31)
Jung says that, "The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis."
Further, Jung said that "it very often does not depend upon the use one makes of an image, but rather upon the use the archetypes make of ourselves, which decides the question whether it will be artistic creation or a change of religious attitude.
I find that this "choice" is in many cases rather a fate than a voluntary decision.
I see that many of my pupils indulge in a superstitious belief in our so-called " free will" and pay little attention to the fact that the archetypes are, as a rule, autonomous entities, and not only material subject to our choice.
They are, as a matter of fact, dominants up to a certain point. That is the reason why one is confronted with an archetype, because we cannot undo it by merely making it conscious. It has to be taken into account and that is the main task of any prolonged analysis. The deviation from the dominants causes a certain dissociation, i.e., a loss of vitality, what the primitives call "a loss of soul." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 625-626)
Conscious Relationships
An integrated approach roots us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore, including family ties, legacies, parenting, matriarchy and patriarchy (Gaillard).
https://books.google.com/books?id=_8xCBgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Rooted+in+the+Present,+The+Emergence+of+the+Self+By+Thierry+Gaillard&source=bl&ots=sgePs-mKEu&sig=hz8-_otrO0u3ve0lHsusWYC7gHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63I7Eg8HKAhUCsoMKHVf3BocQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=Rooted%20in%20the%20Present%2C%20The%20Emergence%20of%20the%20Self%20By%20Thierry%20Gaillard&f=false
"It is possible that a certain historical atmosphere is born with us by means of which we can repeat strange details almost as if they were historical facts." (Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy and the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage:
"We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science."
The Transgenerational Integration movement is developing such awareness for both therapists and the general population. Part of that school of thought is an active psychological approach to genealogy and the ebb and flow of life itself, whether self-initiated or in the therapeutic relationship.
TI has its own genealogy rooted in the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm, and other methods, such as Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, and Metaphor Therapy. It also draws on established conceptual models from family therapy, including the genogram, a map of the family system that discloses the deeper forces that unknowingly influence our thoughts, behaviors and emotional experiences.
Entanglement & Re-enactment
TI does not suggest a radical paradigm shift to different tenets or fundamental assumptions, say, about the nature of reality -- changing initial conditions and/or assumptions. It amplifies existing therapeutic models. However, it helps account for errors and anomalies in the old or waning and competing paradigms and provides greater clarity and a higher information ratio.
All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.
Transgenerational therapy focuses on the relationships in a family. We carry many patterns from the generations that preceded us in our family tree. Family patterns are a very important factor that affects the 'inner child’. Many unconsciously "take on" destructive familial patterns of anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, loneliness, alcoholism, and even illness as a way of "belonging" in our families.
The impact of historical trauma and grief is transferred across successive generations. Transgenerational trauma manifests in current, repetitive personal issues and collective social issues. Trauma symptomology can include depression, unresolved grief, risk of self harm, relationship problems, destructive behaviors, emotional storms, and suicide. In the worst case, the trauma eliminates the ability to experience. If we hide ourselves or go numb to survive, to make pain and suffering go away, we make ourselves go away.
We can disentangle our destructive parts like we disentangle our ancestral lines. There is a truism in the recovery movement, that we must 'take care of it or pass it on,' to future generations. As invisible as Hades to our metaphorical blindness, hidden psychic contents or symptoms exert their influence upon us through the opacity of memory, locked in relationship between symptom and consciousness. There is a live past and a dead past, in generational dynamics.
The same fatal mistakes can be transmitted and repeated. Tragedies include ancestral fault, inherited guilt and family curses, a liability for transgressions, such as a self destructive disposition. Reflecting on death can sometimes help us see more clearly what’s important and what’s not. It’s a practice that can help us be able to experience more directly—and remind ourselves—what our real priorities are.
Greek tragedy has the recurrent motif of catastrophe that strikes not only the immediate family but determines the course of life for future offspring. Epigenetics as gene expression supports that notion. Networks of genes respond to social experiences, and because the unconscious does not distinguish, those experiences can be 'real' or imaginal. The soul is the true mother of the divine child.
Jung discovered that "the unconscious is working out enormous collective fantasies." (1925 Seminar, Page 35) Trauma can be inherited, but so can resilience.
Liminal Entities
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
The fact, too, that the subject of these visions is very old and in confinio mortis suggests that a glance has been cast beyond the border, or that something from the other side has seeped through into our three-dimensional world. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 611-612
We in our Western ignorance do not see, or have forgotten, that man has or is visited by subjective inner experiences of an irrational nature which cannot be successfully dealt with by rational argument, scientific evidence, and depreciative diagnosis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Accessing multidimensional reality includes intellectual, emotional and empathic knowing, as well as sensual or somatic knowing, including visionary and intuitive realizations. Spiritual knowing is related to participatory action or co-creation. These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. Intuition demands representation for communication.
Jung notes, "Fantasy is a pre-stage of the symbol, but it is an essential characteristic of the symbol that it is not mere fantasy." (1925 Seminar, Page 11). There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as the ancestors and their transpersonal gnosis.
All knowing means we are engaged and participating, as well as experiencing. Insight is experiential vision, encompassing wisdom aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos. It is an emergent phenomena co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event -- a personal engagement in world-transfiguring events as well as states of mind.
Rather than our ancestors, we can only look at the character of the knowledge they provide in ordinary and non-ordinary ways. Hidden knowledge’ is where fragile new ideas incubate. Conceptual confusion leads to metaphysical speculation and epistemological assumptions. Raw experience entangles with cultural forms.
What we know is that our god-image and self-images get transferred by interpretation of the nature of our own self-images, relationships, and experiences. Attachment is strong affectional bonds in which we play out emotional joy and distress, personality disturbance, anxiety, anger, depression, and detachment from unwilling separation or loss.
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Relational Model
Genealogy is a relational model. Our part is to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is only for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless. Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions.
Liminality Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous phenomenon. Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity. Jung said, “…The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous.” (1973: 377)
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree -- the drama of kinship.
An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience. Liminal refers to a marginalized space of fertile chaos and creative potential ...a definition that reminiscent of our genealogical project.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity,” a shift in the constitution.
Liminal Archetype
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the horizon of consciousness -- the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.
The family of Oedipus is a kinship of tragedy because of incest (e.g. Antigone is the fruit of an incestuous union), slaying of kin, ancestral curses and personal errors that can be related to inherited guilt.
"Ismene my true sister, born from the same mother, is there any torment Oedipus suffered which Zeus will not impose on us while we yet live? There is nothing —
neither grief nor violence, shame nor dishonor —no evil you and I have not endured already." (Translation by Fainlight-Littman 2009, 139)
Antigone exposes a tragic ethical rift between the so-called feminine "Divine Law" which Antigone represents and the "Human Law," represented by the ruler Creon. A female figure questions the role of the patriarchal state and challenges the system that writes her off as insignificant. She denies, she refuses, she means it. Her authentic voice and claim to autonomy suggests a knowledge of unknown origin but consequence.
Questioning the system and political struggles and multiple exclusions is a very modern theme for an ancient tragedy. How many times has Antigone been reborn with the same predicament of delayed and displaced punishment? But she demands and maintains her voice, and sticks up for her family values without making her true self disappear. Her name is a homologue of that: Anti-Gone.
Antigone is a paradigm of bodily exposure and exile, political and gender struggles, bare and naked life -- naked awareness. In Sophocles, she puts the will of the gods ahead of man-made laws, but a cascade of fateful deaths still ensues to close the tragedy. But in Euripides, the calamity is averted by the intercession of Dionysus, followed by the marriage of Antigone and Hæmon.
Liminal Wisdom
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness.
Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Although irrepresentable and intangible, archetypes and ancestors can be visualized through their effects -- archetypal patterns, symbols, images, plots, characters and situations. These dynamic effects, can be expressed in myths, dreams, metaphors and generally narratives.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration -- signs of a symbolic psyche and self-awareness. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
Trans-Sensory Imagery
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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