PSYCHE & MATTER
Psyche Is Matter
What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter”
in alchemy were always one – the Psyche. ~Marie-Louise von Franz.
The material event of trauma presents a dissonance of belief, which the bodymind may not easily absorb. In some individuals, this forces a temporal splitting between present and past, in which (without appropriate treatment) the trauma event continues to replay in an interminable present, notably in many Holocaust survivors. This severing can be likened to a separation between body and mind dissociation. It is necessary to recognise the time differences, their meanings and somatisation. Therapy must therefore intervene to collate and elide time, permitting integration of the bodymind.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17432979.2013.748976
The proverbial Holy Grail is human curiosity and discovery. Human consciousness has taken many forms, transcending primitive myth, spirituality, religion, philosophy, and science. Today's genealogy combines elements of them all. The family tree has mythic elements, it evokes and challenges our spiritual beliefs and faith, the nature of existence and reality, and our rational materialistic view of self, others, and cosmos.
Genealogy and working the family tree for transgenerational integration can be particularly valuable form of discovery for finding meaning in the second half of life. Like Jung's method being true to who you are carries an innate healing function, especially for uprooted lives divorced from nature. The entire phenomenon of life is alchemy. The human lifecycle and the maturation of psychological stages is an alchemical journey.
The tree creates a sacred and ritual space -- a sacred container for our larger Being and the process of re-connection. Jung defines unconscious in a way that can relate to our experience of the Family Tree and ancestors:
Unconscious: "the sum total of autonomous contents. Each of those contents has a consciousness in itself."
Consciousness: "An association of things with an ego center."
"Wherever there is such a center, there is consciousness. Therefore what we call the unconscious could be a form of consciousness." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 154.)
Longing for Belonging
Through this consciously created act, we descend into the unconscious where we are no longer separated or single. Can we assume that just as the unconscious affects us, the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious, as Jung suggests in his essay 'On Life After Death'? The spiritual and healing practices of our ancestors were designed to modify the collective consciousness and maintain transgenerational laws.
Our tree is a conscious representation of an approximation to totality -- the truth of our nature. The living totality is represented by our embodied self as a living riddle of nature. We are our own representation of the way we came into being.
While it isn't possible to establish a conscious relationship with the archetypal natural self, we can have one that extends toward the realm of the transcendent through our family tree and reconciling the hidden pieces of our lives. We come to terms with our lives when we realize what happened to our own, not just what we may have believed.
The collective unconscious is comprised of the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us.
We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present. They are available to our search for spiritual sustenance as well as family history. If the collective unconscious is a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors, we all possess specifics of humankind's knowledge from birth. As we realize it, it becomes conscious.
Symbols, images and archetypes are the language of the soul, of the collective unconscious -- perceptions of supra-normal comprehension. Thus, we gain knowledge of, and participate in, the domains of matter (senses), mind (reason; language), soul (feeling; nonordinary states), and spirit (intuition; silence; gnosis).
Collective unconscious influences every aspect of our life, especially the emotional ones. The reflection of the collective unconscious in our family tree helps us consciously see and study collective unconscious, its patterns and ways of influence. Psyche is a unity of three parts: ego, personal unconscious and collective unconscious, a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors.
Connectivity
The unconscious is the Holy Grail of consciousness, the supreme value of life, which we find when we truly realize ourselves, joining the family of the Grail. In the family tree we find the presence of the most ancient symbolic appearance of the Grail itself -- the illuminated heart. The soul takes flesh and descends...the hidden gate through which all creation moves.
The youth does not know what the Grail is, but he remarks that as they walk, he seems scarcely to move, yet seems to travel far. Gurnemanz says that in this realm, time becomes space (Wagner, "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit").
Robert Johnson says, “The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail.” That is, we serve not our materialistic questing ego, but our inner spirituality. Here we integrate the mother, the father, and the inner masculine/feminine connection to life that brings us to our personal Grail of spirituality. It may appear as our personal spiritual quest, but, in fact, is a shared journey.
The ancestors, the gods, and the Grail were always there in our Tree, which we bring to completion when we finally bring ourselves to it, fully. Here, we serve ourselves, the ancestors, and the gods as revealed in our own family tree. It is our own matter that forms the elements of the Grail tradition, the present embodiment of past times.
We can, in our genealogical quest, do as Meister Eckhart suggests: “Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. If you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be.” He also said, “We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born." We all carry that spirit and seek the inner reality of the Grail behind the symbols and stories.
Relatedness
We depart from ourselves following the paths of our descent back up into the heights and roots of our Tree. Crossing that threshold we begin our Genealogical Journey. Our two branches become four, the four branches become eight, the eight, sixteen great-grandparents, and so on.
Jung left the "Spirit of the Times" to enter the "Spirit of the Depths," where he met ancestors and spirits of the dead and resumed a dialogue with his soul. He explains, "without relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610).
Go where we went and you will know why.
DEATH BECOMES THE MUSE
Right Now Eternity is Going On
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.”
--Carl G. Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they bring into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling , their way of experiencing life and the world, gods and men. The existence of these archaic strata is presumably the source of man's belief in reincarnations and in memories of "previous experiences". Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.
(Jung, CW vol. 9.I (1959), "Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation" (1939), ¶518 (pp. 286–287).
Jung left the "Spirit of the Times" to enter the "Spirit of the Depths," where he met Ancestors and Spirits of the Dead and resumed a dialogue with his soul.
What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter”
in alchemy were always one – the Psyche. ~Marie-Louise von Franz.
The material event of trauma presents a dissonance of belief, which the bodymind may not easily absorb. In some individuals, this forces a temporal splitting between present and past, in which (without appropriate treatment) the trauma event continues to replay in an interminable present, notably in many Holocaust survivors. This severing can be likened to a separation between body and mind dissociation. It is necessary to recognise the time differences, their meanings and somatisation. Therapy must therefore intervene to collate and elide time, permitting integration of the bodymind.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17432979.2013.748976
The proverbial Holy Grail is human curiosity and discovery. Human consciousness has taken many forms, transcending primitive myth, spirituality, religion, philosophy, and science. Today's genealogy combines elements of them all. The family tree has mythic elements, it evokes and challenges our spiritual beliefs and faith, the nature of existence and reality, and our rational materialistic view of self, others, and cosmos.
Genealogy and working the family tree for transgenerational integration can be particularly valuable form of discovery for finding meaning in the second half of life. Like Jung's method being true to who you are carries an innate healing function, especially for uprooted lives divorced from nature. The entire phenomenon of life is alchemy. The human lifecycle and the maturation of psychological stages is an alchemical journey.
The tree creates a sacred and ritual space -- a sacred container for our larger Being and the process of re-connection. Jung defines unconscious in a way that can relate to our experience of the Family Tree and ancestors:
Unconscious: "the sum total of autonomous contents. Each of those contents has a consciousness in itself."
Consciousness: "An association of things with an ego center."
"Wherever there is such a center, there is consciousness. Therefore what we call the unconscious could be a form of consciousness." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 154.)
Longing for Belonging
Through this consciously created act, we descend into the unconscious where we are no longer separated or single. Can we assume that just as the unconscious affects us, the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious, as Jung suggests in his essay 'On Life After Death'? The spiritual and healing practices of our ancestors were designed to modify the collective consciousness and maintain transgenerational laws.
Our tree is a conscious representation of an approximation to totality -- the truth of our nature. The living totality is represented by our embodied self as a living riddle of nature. We are our own representation of the way we came into being.
While it isn't possible to establish a conscious relationship with the archetypal natural self, we can have one that extends toward the realm of the transcendent through our family tree and reconciling the hidden pieces of our lives. We come to terms with our lives when we realize what happened to our own, not just what we may have believed.
The collective unconscious is comprised of the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. Our inheritance consists in physiological paths -- mental processes in our ancestors that traced these paths. It matters because we matter as the psychophysical expression of all those who came before us.
We continue to embody them. Thus, the ancestors are personal, collective, and present. They are available to our search for spiritual sustenance as well as family history. If the collective unconscious is a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors, we all possess specifics of humankind's knowledge from birth. As we realize it, it becomes conscious.
Symbols, images and archetypes are the language of the soul, of the collective unconscious -- perceptions of supra-normal comprehension. Thus, we gain knowledge of, and participate in, the domains of matter (senses), mind (reason; language), soul (feeling; nonordinary states), and spirit (intuition; silence; gnosis).
Collective unconscious influences every aspect of our life, especially the emotional ones. The reflection of the collective unconscious in our family tree helps us consciously see and study collective unconscious, its patterns and ways of influence. Psyche is a unity of three parts: ego, personal unconscious and collective unconscious, a summary of experiences of our ancient ancestors.
Connectivity
The unconscious is the Holy Grail of consciousness, the supreme value of life, which we find when we truly realize ourselves, joining the family of the Grail. In the family tree we find the presence of the most ancient symbolic appearance of the Grail itself -- the illuminated heart. The soul takes flesh and descends...the hidden gate through which all creation moves.
The youth does not know what the Grail is, but he remarks that as they walk, he seems scarcely to move, yet seems to travel far. Gurnemanz says that in this realm, time becomes space (Wagner, "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit").
Robert Johnson says, “The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail.” That is, we serve not our materialistic questing ego, but our inner spirituality. Here we integrate the mother, the father, and the inner masculine/feminine connection to life that brings us to our personal Grail of spirituality. It may appear as our personal spiritual quest, but, in fact, is a shared journey.
The ancestors, the gods, and the Grail were always there in our Tree, which we bring to completion when we finally bring ourselves to it, fully. Here, we serve ourselves, the ancestors, and the gods as revealed in our own family tree. It is our own matter that forms the elements of the Grail tradition, the present embodiment of past times.
We can, in our genealogical quest, do as Meister Eckhart suggests: “Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. If you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be.” He also said, “We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born." We all carry that spirit and seek the inner reality of the Grail behind the symbols and stories.
Relatedness
We depart from ourselves following the paths of our descent back up into the heights and roots of our Tree. Crossing that threshold we begin our Genealogical Journey. Our two branches become four, the four branches become eight, the eight, sixteen great-grandparents, and so on.
Jung left the "Spirit of the Times" to enter the "Spirit of the Depths," where he met ancestors and spirits of the dead and resumed a dialogue with his soul. He explains, "without relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610).
Go where we went and you will know why.
DEATH BECOMES THE MUSE
Right Now Eternity is Going On
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.”
--Carl G. Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they bring into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling , their way of experiencing life and the world, gods and men. The existence of these archaic strata is presumably the source of man's belief in reincarnations and in memories of "previous experiences". Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.
(Jung, CW vol. 9.I (1959), "Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation" (1939), ¶518 (pp. 286–287).
Jung left the "Spirit of the Times" to enter the "Spirit of the Depths," where he met Ancestors and Spirits of the Dead and resumed a dialogue with his soul.
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.