HALL OF RECORDS
VITA BREVIS, GENEALOGIA LONGA
20/20 Hindsight - Family History & the Human Family
Circles With A Spiritual Center
Nature centers into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.
--Emerson, Circles, http://www.emersoncentral.com/circles.htm
"The eye is first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”
Here Emerson is linking up the idea of that little orbit, or the pupil through which we perceive the world, with the symbol of God, it is the equivalent of God.
It is the creative eye that sees everything and creates everything.
The first cosmogonic myth was the creation of light, the seeing – out of the eye of God came the first light. So when we enter the pupil, are we entering our own eye, or the creative womb of the world?” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 307
Hermeneutic Union
Hermes was messenger and interpreter between gods and mortals. Hermeneutics is "to make clear." It is an approach cultivating our ability to interpret or understand from another's perspective, and applying that insight, empathy, and understanding to interpretation or making sense of any situation.
Hermeneutics is a technique for background understanding of another’s mind and worldview. It concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations by contextualizing them and comparing them.
Text & Context
Hermeneutics is a research paradigm we can apply in genealogy research. A hermeneutical and less epistemological understanding of the genealogical method avoids the paradoxes of perspectivism and the metaphorics of vision by construing the phenomenon not as a physical object but as a text.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing and the content that is believed. A genealogy explains the advent of a belief, in the sense of a believing, (an attitude) in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications, for the truth of what is believed.
Knowledge Transfer Pathways
Human affairs aren't governed by a set of natural laws, so hermeneutics provides interpretive understanding of the actions and meanings created by historically and culturally situated actors. Our ancestors are symbolically situated along the knowledge transfer pathways of the branches of the family tree, genetic and epigenetic vectors. These convergent ancestral lines are like great caravan routes of the mind, littered with the bones of ancient journeys.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
Life, Expression, Understanding
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Interpretive Perspectives
In philosophy and psychology it includes the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning, including experiences. In the domain of genealogy it also includes recognition, metaphors, and insinuation. Psychological hermeneutics is the body of knowledge enabling insight and the discussion of biopsychosocial cause and effect.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
However, we are never other people nor do we ever have access to their consciousness. We cannot feel what they do or have the same life experiences as they. We can only interpret others from our prior understanding. Empathy occurs within oneself but is the central connection to others. To be empathic is to interpret empathy “out of” one’s own experience of other people.
Genealogy As Context
Experiences derive meaning from their overall position in the totality of our involvements in the world. Once born into the specific body, family, place and time in which we live, we have to deal with the details of ordinary life, temporal contexts, and social relationships. In this view there is no doing without being, no thought without feeling, no action without reaction, no values without ethics, no self without others. Being in a context is a multi-faceted whole, classically symbolized in the genealogical chart.
Hermeneutic engagement works with both Above and Below. Hermeneutic union lies in the shared realities through which we create meaning. It amplifies environmental identity for our ancestors. We all create symbolic and imaginal worlds.
Our genealogy personal history is the best promise we have for understanding our shared humanity because it is physiologically grounded. As genealogists we interpret our own psycho-history. Psychogenealogy is a rigorous psychological and historical analysis of our lineage and its interactive effect on ourselves.
The genealogist does claim to be capturing the phenomenon as it really is. Genealogy is not simply another perspective. The only way to challenge the results of one genealogical analysis would be to produce another genealogical analysis either of the original phenomenon or of the initial genealogical account itself. Genealogy is not easy to do successfully.
Goddess of Childbirth
The name Artemis, from αρτεμέω , means “to be safe and sound.” In the first century, Strabo (63/64 BC–ca. AD 24) wrote in his Geography, “Artemis has her name from the fact that she makes people ‘artemeas’ meaning sound, well, or delivered.” Strabo connects “Artemis” with deliverance. Artemis, having special sympathy for women in travail from her first days, came to be associated with virginity and midwifery, especially in Ephesus.
In Attic Greek, the concepts of “deliver” and “save” went together. Although Artemis Ephesia is associated with “childbirth” and midwifery, she is not linked with mothering or domestic life. A distinction must be made between delivering babies and actually bearing children—between midwifery and fertility or sexuality.
Rather than a fertility goddess, Artemis Ephesia was revered for delivering a woman through life’s most dangerous passage, childbirth -- the number one cause of death in women. The fully female, yet undomesticated goddess presided at births without links to sex, fertility, or nurturing. As there is midwifery for birth, there is midwifery for death -- for a Dark Goddess midwife of the soul and authentic clarity. Nature is our balm and our spirit is fed by the earth.
Images are the "creative womb of the world," and we are each the midwife of the soul. Jung says you "must give dignity to your image as a life-giving factor, you must know that your imagination is capable of something, that it is able to create, no matter what its apparent antecedents were." (Visions Seminar, Page 306.)
Trans-Sensory Aesthetic
We perceive psychic imagery from an expanded palette of perceptual nuance. Psychic images are 'perceived' as trans-sensory. Synesthesia is a melding of senses unconstrained by external perception, combining different sensory stimuli extending to new sensory domains. Multisensory aesthetics engages them all in aesthetic totality. Creativity is a necessary factor in coming to know and opening to the other. To uncover or discover something is to come upon it.
Images come in from outside through our senses, and are generated internally by unconscious dynamics as an immediate multisensory narrative of experience, often metaphorical in nature. We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness – day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery.
Experience is never a full encounter with primary 'raw' material, but we may find ourselves in the otherness of existence. Jeanne Achterberg describes how pre-verbal imagery acts on our cellular, biochemical, and physiological activity to alter our physical being. She suggests a sort of nonlocal imagery transfer from one person to the physical substrate of others.
For metaphor to elicit nuance it must be fresh, not dead; it must shock the mind into wonder by opening up a gap, an abyss, a void. The patterning principle transcends and contains all forms. Imagery is the natural expression of the pregnant void urgently fleshing itself out to the fullest extent. These images are not ‘ours’, but arise from the primordial matrix. This image stream is full of unborn information and we are its midwife.
Such transpersonal imagery is qualitative yet effective. Poetry helps us bring together what life has separated or violence torn apart, defying the space that separates with metaphor and correspondence -- conjunction, making connections, past and present. Almost forgotten archaeological layers of belief still poke through the surface, old echoes that stretch sacred religious absolutes.
Transpersonal imagery is psycho-sensory imagery that exists and acts across persons -- from one person to another, and we can add alive or not. The imagery functions as a bridge, connecting the conscious or unconscious, imaginal content or activity of one person with the conscious or unconscious, physiological or psychological activities or experiences of another person.
Reflection gives shape to the imaginal. Each ancestor, object, or body is also an imaginal image. We can call it resonance, or reflected waveforms, or echoes. Echoes sound in a deep dark unity, as vast as night itself and as the light, scents, colors, and sounds correspond. The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life.
Synaesthetic Imagery
In "Correspondences", Baudelaire says, " As far-off echoes from a distance sound In unity profound and recondite, Boundless as night itself and as the light, Sounds, fragrances, and colors correspond." He reasoned that sound should suggest color, and color a melody as a reciprocal analogy of sensory modes, as indivisible totality.
Nature, as Anima Mundi is a primeval partner with humanity that 'talks', 'watches', symbolizes, and associates. A sense of clustering associations between individual and collective past is a 'genuine' experience.
Naturally, in genealogy, such experiences explore processes that extend beyond ordinary conditions of knowing, being, and doing. They encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche and cosmos, placing the personal in a larger 'spiritual' context and awareness in which we are coterminous and continual. Such images can be exciting or calming. We can attune to the powers of archetypal symbols. Capacity for symbol use is universal, innate, and central to understanding. Images are always unique and contextual.
Encountering the Past
The reach of the imaginal includes distant knowing and distant imaginal influences. Henri Corbin has described the different forms of imaginal process or creative imagination where it becomes possible to directly perceive subtle or spiritual realities. Such empowered imagination is dynamic and nonlocal.
Our ancient ancestors may have taken such phenomena much more literally, as animistic and ontological 'beings' with names derived from their cultural beliefs. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct material level.
But we don't need to defend against separation by returning to participation mystique or literalism. The truth of the psyche precedes every other kind of truth, back to the phenomenological ground, to the images themselves, not a return to the things.
Real Presences, Not Literal
Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data and making it concrete. But Hillman sees literalism and reification psychologically as an ego viewpoint, the enemy of the soul, and suggests we seek the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. Though the soul does not construct its reality out of literal sense impressions, and it cannot be observed only by the physical senses, it is no less real.
"Rationality is only one aspect of the world and does not cover the whole field of experience. Psychic events are not caused merely from without and mental contents are not mere derivatives of sense-perceptions." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, P. 600-603) Both Jung and Hillman, who represents 3rd generation Jungian thought, caution us against literalism:
"Even a genuine and original inner life has a tendency to succumb again and again to the sensualism and rationalism of consciousness, i.e., to literal-mindedness. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603)
“An axiom of depth psychology asserts that what is not admitted into awareness irrupts in ungainly obsessive, literalistic ways, affecting consciousness with precisely the qualities it strives to exclude. Personifying not allowed as a metaphorical vision returns in concrete form: we seize upon people, we cling to other persons.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 46.)
Hillman's argument can also be applied to psychogenealogy:
"It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn." (The Dream and the Underworld)
The future looks even more bizarre than our wildest dreams,
but, as a modern fantasy, it may suggest or help us conceptualize a way to revision our ancestors:
Imagine a world where the entire World-Wide Web (augmented by the coming 3-D Metaverse, successor to 2-D Internet) becomes your exocortex with instant access to information and virtual reality experience. You can interact with and/or experience yourself as any person on the planet ever lived - AI would recreate that person out of available records and collective subconscious. Furthermore, you can experience virtually any being, creature, historical or imaginary, any idea or entity, or collective of minds.
From the evolutionary point of view our biological brains are a bridge to post-biological artificial superbrains. And one could argue with a high degree of certainty that posthumanity will represent a highly organized network of digital minds of our post-biological descendants, substrate independent advanced informational beings, "infomorphs".
While infomorphs may have multiple cybernetic and virtual bodies, they will possess near-perfect information-handling abilities by using holographic language, instant data and knowledge transfer, inherent synthetic telepathy and intersubjective mind sharing for interaction as well as conceptual merging/un-merging
http://www.ecstadelic.net/ecstadelic/tue-feb-09-2016
The core point is that humans are inherently delusional and that most (not all) efforts at secrecy are aimed at preserving delusions. The one antidote to delusion is reciprocal accountability and criticism — others do not share your delusions. They can use evidence to point out your errors… and you will return the favor. This is the very heart of science — not some gnosticmystic search for “hidden codes.”
The validity of preverbal imagery as an accurate means of knowing and efficacy has been demonstrated by Larry Dossey, MD and others in immunological, physiological and behavioral studies. The imagery is 'transpersonal' by definition because it acts on a person other than the 'source' from which it originates, or a person other than the person in whom it is acting.
Jung claimed in his Visions Seminar: "Thinking would be up in the head; sensation about the level of the mouth; intuition in the region of the heart; and then down below in the abdomen would be feeling. You feel with the abdomen, not the heart, and that is of course a particular kind of feeling."
Some are more acutely aware of the imaginal, more open to the reflective instinct. The perpetual stream of consciousness is undergird by a dynamic flux of multisensory imagery, which springs from the creative fountain within us all. We imagine rather than perceive images. Images are a dynamic meld of multimodal textures. Imagination itself has an intermediary status between the physical and conceptual level of spirit.
Morphing images are the only reality we apprehend directly. When we look at fantasy images we see the face of instinctual libido staring back at us. Fantasy is an imaginal activity that is the flow of psychic energy. Image and meaning are identical, embodied perpetually in the dynamically shifting image stream. The entire image conveys its own mood and meaning instinctually and does not require analysis or interpretation.
Images only relate indirectly to external reality. They emerge as reverie, proto-emotion, impulse, and amorphous cognition. An image carries its own inherent meaning which is sort of a ‘condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole.’ Further, ‘the image is an expression of the unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment,’ according to Jung.
Images are self-revelatory. Imagination is a direct expression of psychic life. Imagination flows forth from the imaginal field continually, self-organizing its multisensory narrative and conditioning our experiences. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it.
Anyone can apply as much or little of such ideas as they like to their ancestral project. We all have the capacity. But we can enhance our capacity through preparedness, familiarity with the imaginal world, self-regulation, concentration, and developing skill in negotiating this realm with creative imagination...and knowing our living lineage. Genealogy can be a death/rebirth initiation.
We die at home in history. Confronting non-being, existence takes on vitality. Confronting death bring us to the threshold of living authentically. It may change what we perceive is real about life. Here and now takes on the importance of the moment.
The Sum of All Fears
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. --Arthur Golden
Awareness and openness to the reality of death is a link to all we value in human experience, from love to creativity, to yearning for immortality. We all struggle for the courage to confront death and to struggle against it. Fear of death and creativity are related through the long term perspective we bring to it.
Rebirth brings a reassessment of the meaning of life and the means to express buried creative energy. Genealogy is the sum of all histories -- a path integral formulation which generalizes all action into a unique trajectory -- a sum over history of probabilities and fundamental events.
We all develop fictions about our lives. We build things up over the years in our imagination and come to believe them as true. Healing and integration comes when we discover or rediscover our own personal story. Almost any story is certainly some kind of 'lie' but also contains the greater truth of primal patterns.
We learn to 'read' the lives of our ancestor like a painter read the marks, or behaviors on the canvas as one might read a literary passage. Our vocabulary needs building and in this process verbal discussion can be very helpful. Genealogy provides an adequately functional vocabulary.
Archetypes represent such sums deriving individual histories from fundamental processes. Larger fundamental processes are one of the great central ideas in managing infinities. The sum of all ancestors implies we do travel every possible path and choose our individual path through interference patterns from those infinities.
Jung thought it necessary to coordinate the activities streaming out of the matrix of the unconscious with consciousness. He funneled the fantasies of the unconscious into the conscious mind, not in order to destroy them but to develop them. "Developing fantasy means perfecting our humanity." "The repressed tendencies that are made conscious should not be destroyed but, on the contrary, should be developed further."
Genealogy is an ultimate integral symbol. Integral means necessary, very important, essential to completeness, composed of constituent parts, elemental, indispensable, intrinsic, fundamental. As Jung suggests, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
In Jung's depth-oriented approach, depth-oriented approach. “Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries.” To paraphrase Jung, our genealogy contains 'readable archetypes', and presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated.
What is the sum of all nostrils that have breathed, all teeth that have eaten, all fingers that have felt, ears that heard, and eyes that have seen? The sum of all parts -- the indefinite integral essential to completeness -- the sum of all helical gears from the endpoint of genetic potential is a mutual awakening.
Psychological distress can be managed by experientially-based, self-directed change and integration. With our genealogical integration, we re-member ourselves to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness. There is a Source underlying the creation and evolution of the universe from which all things originate and to which all things return.
"The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding, and all the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580)
As Nietzsche says: "Out of such abysses, from such severe sicknesses, one returns newborn...with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy."
20/20 Hindsight - Family History & the Human Family
Circles With A Spiritual Center
Nature centers into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.
--Emerson, Circles, http://www.emersoncentral.com/circles.htm
"The eye is first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”
Here Emerson is linking up the idea of that little orbit, or the pupil through which we perceive the world, with the symbol of God, it is the equivalent of God.
It is the creative eye that sees everything and creates everything.
The first cosmogonic myth was the creation of light, the seeing – out of the eye of God came the first light. So when we enter the pupil, are we entering our own eye, or the creative womb of the world?” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 307
Hermeneutic Union
Hermes was messenger and interpreter between gods and mortals. Hermeneutics is "to make clear." It is an approach cultivating our ability to interpret or understand from another's perspective, and applying that insight, empathy, and understanding to interpretation or making sense of any situation.
Hermeneutics is a technique for background understanding of another’s mind and worldview. It concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations by contextualizing them and comparing them.
Text & Context
Hermeneutics is a research paradigm we can apply in genealogy research. A hermeneutical and less epistemological understanding of the genealogical method avoids the paradoxes of perspectivism and the metaphorics of vision by construing the phenomenon not as a physical object but as a text.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing and the content that is believed. A genealogy explains the advent of a belief, in the sense of a believing, (an attitude) in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications, for the truth of what is believed.
Knowledge Transfer Pathways
Human affairs aren't governed by a set of natural laws, so hermeneutics provides interpretive understanding of the actions and meanings created by historically and culturally situated actors. Our ancestors are symbolically situated along the knowledge transfer pathways of the branches of the family tree, genetic and epigenetic vectors. These convergent ancestral lines are like great caravan routes of the mind, littered with the bones of ancient journeys.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
Life, Expression, Understanding
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Interpretive Perspectives
In philosophy and psychology it includes the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning, including experiences. In the domain of genealogy it also includes recognition, metaphors, and insinuation. Psychological hermeneutics is the body of knowledge enabling insight and the discussion of biopsychosocial cause and effect.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
However, we are never other people nor do we ever have access to their consciousness. We cannot feel what they do or have the same life experiences as they. We can only interpret others from our prior understanding. Empathy occurs within oneself but is the central connection to others. To be empathic is to interpret empathy “out of” one’s own experience of other people.
Genealogy As Context
Experiences derive meaning from their overall position in the totality of our involvements in the world. Once born into the specific body, family, place and time in which we live, we have to deal with the details of ordinary life, temporal contexts, and social relationships. In this view there is no doing without being, no thought without feeling, no action without reaction, no values without ethics, no self without others. Being in a context is a multi-faceted whole, classically symbolized in the genealogical chart.
Hermeneutic engagement works with both Above and Below. Hermeneutic union lies in the shared realities through which we create meaning. It amplifies environmental identity for our ancestors. We all create symbolic and imaginal worlds.
Our genealogy personal history is the best promise we have for understanding our shared humanity because it is physiologically grounded. As genealogists we interpret our own psycho-history. Psychogenealogy is a rigorous psychological and historical analysis of our lineage and its interactive effect on ourselves.
The genealogist does claim to be capturing the phenomenon as it really is. Genealogy is not simply another perspective. The only way to challenge the results of one genealogical analysis would be to produce another genealogical analysis either of the original phenomenon or of the initial genealogical account itself. Genealogy is not easy to do successfully.
Goddess of Childbirth
The name Artemis, from αρτεμέω , means “to be safe and sound.” In the first century, Strabo (63/64 BC–ca. AD 24) wrote in his Geography, “Artemis has her name from the fact that she makes people ‘artemeas’ meaning sound, well, or delivered.” Strabo connects “Artemis” with deliverance. Artemis, having special sympathy for women in travail from her first days, came to be associated with virginity and midwifery, especially in Ephesus.
In Attic Greek, the concepts of “deliver” and “save” went together. Although Artemis Ephesia is associated with “childbirth” and midwifery, she is not linked with mothering or domestic life. A distinction must be made between delivering babies and actually bearing children—between midwifery and fertility or sexuality.
Rather than a fertility goddess, Artemis Ephesia was revered for delivering a woman through life’s most dangerous passage, childbirth -- the number one cause of death in women. The fully female, yet undomesticated goddess presided at births without links to sex, fertility, or nurturing. As there is midwifery for birth, there is midwifery for death -- for a Dark Goddess midwife of the soul and authentic clarity. Nature is our balm and our spirit is fed by the earth.
Images are the "creative womb of the world," and we are each the midwife of the soul. Jung says you "must give dignity to your image as a life-giving factor, you must know that your imagination is capable of something, that it is able to create, no matter what its apparent antecedents were." (Visions Seminar, Page 306.)
Trans-Sensory Aesthetic
We perceive psychic imagery from an expanded palette of perceptual nuance. Psychic images are 'perceived' as trans-sensory. Synesthesia is a melding of senses unconstrained by external perception, combining different sensory stimuli extending to new sensory domains. Multisensory aesthetics engages them all in aesthetic totality. Creativity is a necessary factor in coming to know and opening to the other. To uncover or discover something is to come upon it.
Images come in from outside through our senses, and are generated internally by unconscious dynamics as an immediate multisensory narrative of experience, often metaphorical in nature. We rarely focus our conscious awareness on this imaginal wellspring, but sometimes it intrudes on consciousness during our gaps in awareness – day dreaming, fantasies, reverie, lacunae, inspiration, discovery.
Experience is never a full encounter with primary 'raw' material, but we may find ourselves in the otherness of existence. Jeanne Achterberg describes how pre-verbal imagery acts on our cellular, biochemical, and physiological activity to alter our physical being. She suggests a sort of nonlocal imagery transfer from one person to the physical substrate of others.
For metaphor to elicit nuance it must be fresh, not dead; it must shock the mind into wonder by opening up a gap, an abyss, a void. The patterning principle transcends and contains all forms. Imagery is the natural expression of the pregnant void urgently fleshing itself out to the fullest extent. These images are not ‘ours’, but arise from the primordial matrix. This image stream is full of unborn information and we are its midwife.
Such transpersonal imagery is qualitative yet effective. Poetry helps us bring together what life has separated or violence torn apart, defying the space that separates with metaphor and correspondence -- conjunction, making connections, past and present. Almost forgotten archaeological layers of belief still poke through the surface, old echoes that stretch sacred religious absolutes.
Transpersonal imagery is psycho-sensory imagery that exists and acts across persons -- from one person to another, and we can add alive or not. The imagery functions as a bridge, connecting the conscious or unconscious, imaginal content or activity of one person with the conscious or unconscious, physiological or psychological activities or experiences of another person.
Reflection gives shape to the imaginal. Each ancestor, object, or body is also an imaginal image. We can call it resonance, or reflected waveforms, or echoes. Echoes sound in a deep dark unity, as vast as night itself and as the light, scents, colors, and sounds correspond. The image stream or imaginal process is our primary experience and permeates and conditions all facets of human life.
Synaesthetic Imagery
In "Correspondences", Baudelaire says, " As far-off echoes from a distance sound In unity profound and recondite, Boundless as night itself and as the light, Sounds, fragrances, and colors correspond." He reasoned that sound should suggest color, and color a melody as a reciprocal analogy of sensory modes, as indivisible totality.
Nature, as Anima Mundi is a primeval partner with humanity that 'talks', 'watches', symbolizes, and associates. A sense of clustering associations between individual and collective past is a 'genuine' experience.
Naturally, in genealogy, such experiences explore processes that extend beyond ordinary conditions of knowing, being, and doing. They encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche and cosmos, placing the personal in a larger 'spiritual' context and awareness in which we are coterminous and continual. Such images can be exciting or calming. We can attune to the powers of archetypal symbols. Capacity for symbol use is universal, innate, and central to understanding. Images are always unique and contextual.
Encountering the Past
The reach of the imaginal includes distant knowing and distant imaginal influences. Henri Corbin has described the different forms of imaginal process or creative imagination where it becomes possible to directly perceive subtle or spiritual realities. Such empowered imagination is dynamic and nonlocal.
Our ancient ancestors may have taken such phenomena much more literally, as animistic and ontological 'beings' with names derived from their cultural beliefs. Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest, most direct material level.
But we don't need to defend against separation by returning to participation mystique or literalism. The truth of the psyche precedes every other kind of truth, back to the phenomenological ground, to the images themselves, not a return to the things.
Real Presences, Not Literal
Modern thought often tries to find body by gathering literal data and making it concrete. But Hillman sees literalism and reification psychologically as an ego viewpoint, the enemy of the soul, and suggests we seek the bodies of ideas and words themselves, the body of an image. Though the soul does not construct its reality out of literal sense impressions, and it cannot be observed only by the physical senses, it is no less real.
"Rationality is only one aspect of the world and does not cover the whole field of experience. Psychic events are not caused merely from without and mental contents are not mere derivatives of sense-perceptions." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, P. 600-603) Both Jung and Hillman, who represents 3rd generation Jungian thought, caution us against literalism:
"Even a genuine and original inner life has a tendency to succumb again and again to the sensualism and rationalism of consciousness, i.e., to literal-mindedness. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603)
“An axiom of depth psychology asserts that what is not admitted into awareness irrupts in ungainly obsessive, literalistic ways, affecting consciousness with precisely the qualities it strives to exclude. Personifying not allowed as a metaphorical vision returns in concrete form: we seize upon people, we cling to other persons.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 46.)
Hillman's argument can also be applied to psychogenealogy:
"It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn." (The Dream and the Underworld)
The future looks even more bizarre than our wildest dreams,
but, as a modern fantasy, it may suggest or help us conceptualize a way to revision our ancestors:
Imagine a world where the entire World-Wide Web (augmented by the coming 3-D Metaverse, successor to 2-D Internet) becomes your exocortex with instant access to information and virtual reality experience. You can interact with and/or experience yourself as any person on the planet ever lived - AI would recreate that person out of available records and collective subconscious. Furthermore, you can experience virtually any being, creature, historical or imaginary, any idea or entity, or collective of minds.
From the evolutionary point of view our biological brains are a bridge to post-biological artificial superbrains. And one could argue with a high degree of certainty that posthumanity will represent a highly organized network of digital minds of our post-biological descendants, substrate independent advanced informational beings, "infomorphs".
While infomorphs may have multiple cybernetic and virtual bodies, they will possess near-perfect information-handling abilities by using holographic language, instant data and knowledge transfer, inherent synthetic telepathy and intersubjective mind sharing for interaction as well as conceptual merging/un-merging
http://www.ecstadelic.net/ecstadelic/tue-feb-09-2016
The core point is that humans are inherently delusional and that most (not all) efforts at secrecy are aimed at preserving delusions. The one antidote to delusion is reciprocal accountability and criticism — others do not share your delusions. They can use evidence to point out your errors… and you will return the favor. This is the very heart of science — not some gnosticmystic search for “hidden codes.”
The validity of preverbal imagery as an accurate means of knowing and efficacy has been demonstrated by Larry Dossey, MD and others in immunological, physiological and behavioral studies. The imagery is 'transpersonal' by definition because it acts on a person other than the 'source' from which it originates, or a person other than the person in whom it is acting.
Jung claimed in his Visions Seminar: "Thinking would be up in the head; sensation about the level of the mouth; intuition in the region of the heart; and then down below in the abdomen would be feeling. You feel with the abdomen, not the heart, and that is of course a particular kind of feeling."
Some are more acutely aware of the imaginal, more open to the reflective instinct. The perpetual stream of consciousness is undergird by a dynamic flux of multisensory imagery, which springs from the creative fountain within us all. We imagine rather than perceive images. Images are a dynamic meld of multimodal textures. Imagination itself has an intermediary status between the physical and conceptual level of spirit.
Morphing images are the only reality we apprehend directly. When we look at fantasy images we see the face of instinctual libido staring back at us. Fantasy is an imaginal activity that is the flow of psychic energy. Image and meaning are identical, embodied perpetually in the dynamically shifting image stream. The entire image conveys its own mood and meaning instinctually and does not require analysis or interpretation.
Images only relate indirectly to external reality. They emerge as reverie, proto-emotion, impulse, and amorphous cognition. An image carries its own inherent meaning which is sort of a ‘condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole.’ Further, ‘the image is an expression of the unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment,’ according to Jung.
Images are self-revelatory. Imagination is a direct expression of psychic life. Imagination flows forth from the imaginal field continually, self-organizing its multisensory narrative and conditioning our experiences. In fact, this imaginal dimension is our experience. Everything we perceive of ourselves, others and world is filtered through it.
Anyone can apply as much or little of such ideas as they like to their ancestral project. We all have the capacity. But we can enhance our capacity through preparedness, familiarity with the imaginal world, self-regulation, concentration, and developing skill in negotiating this realm with creative imagination...and knowing our living lineage. Genealogy can be a death/rebirth initiation.
We die at home in history. Confronting non-being, existence takes on vitality. Confronting death bring us to the threshold of living authentically. It may change what we perceive is real about life. Here and now takes on the importance of the moment.
The Sum of All Fears
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are. --Arthur Golden
Awareness and openness to the reality of death is a link to all we value in human experience, from love to creativity, to yearning for immortality. We all struggle for the courage to confront death and to struggle against it. Fear of death and creativity are related through the long term perspective we bring to it.
Rebirth brings a reassessment of the meaning of life and the means to express buried creative energy. Genealogy is the sum of all histories -- a path integral formulation which generalizes all action into a unique trajectory -- a sum over history of probabilities and fundamental events.
We all develop fictions about our lives. We build things up over the years in our imagination and come to believe them as true. Healing and integration comes when we discover or rediscover our own personal story. Almost any story is certainly some kind of 'lie' but also contains the greater truth of primal patterns.
We learn to 'read' the lives of our ancestor like a painter read the marks, or behaviors on the canvas as one might read a literary passage. Our vocabulary needs building and in this process verbal discussion can be very helpful. Genealogy provides an adequately functional vocabulary.
Archetypes represent such sums deriving individual histories from fundamental processes. Larger fundamental processes are one of the great central ideas in managing infinities. The sum of all ancestors implies we do travel every possible path and choose our individual path through interference patterns from those infinities.
Jung thought it necessary to coordinate the activities streaming out of the matrix of the unconscious with consciousness. He funneled the fantasies of the unconscious into the conscious mind, not in order to destroy them but to develop them. "Developing fantasy means perfecting our humanity." "The repressed tendencies that are made conscious should not be destroyed but, on the contrary, should be developed further."
Genealogy is an ultimate integral symbol. Integral means necessary, very important, essential to completeness, composed of constituent parts, elemental, indispensable, intrinsic, fundamental. As Jung suggests, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
In Jung's depth-oriented approach, depth-oriented approach. “Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries.” To paraphrase Jung, our genealogy contains 'readable archetypes', and presents not only a picture of the actual situation but also of the future, exactly like dreams. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated.
What is the sum of all nostrils that have breathed, all teeth that have eaten, all fingers that have felt, ears that heard, and eyes that have seen? The sum of all parts -- the indefinite integral essential to completeness -- the sum of all helical gears from the endpoint of genetic potential is a mutual awakening.
Psychological distress can be managed by experientially-based, self-directed change and integration. With our genealogical integration, we re-member ourselves to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness. There is a Source underlying the creation and evolution of the universe from which all things originate and to which all things return.
"The older I grow the more impressed I am by the frailty and uncertainty of our understanding, and all the more I take recourse to the simplicity of immediate experience so as not to lose contact with the essentials, namely the dominants which rule human existence throughout the millenniums." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 579-580)
As Nietzsche says: "Out of such abysses, from such severe sicknesses, one returns newborn...with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy."
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.