Reanimation
Opening the Mouth of the Dead
Rebirth is not a process that we can in any way observe. We can neither measure nor weigh nor photograph it. It is entirely beyond sense perception. . . . One speaks of rebirth; one professes rebirth; one is filled with rebirth. . . . We have to be content with its psychic reality. Carl Jung [Concerning Rebirth," CW 9i, par. 206.]
It is a spiritual and psychological archetype, like Mother, Trickster, and Spirit,
a process experienced as a renewal or transformation of the personality.
Psychological rebirth was Jung's focus. Induced by ritual or stimulated by immediate personal experience, it results in an enlargement of the personality. He acknowledged that one might feel transformed during certain group experiences, but he cautioned against confusing this with genuine rebirth (individuation).
If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience of individual transformation. A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal . . . .
. . . The group experience goes no deeper than the level of one's own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, but the change does not last.[Ibid, pars. 225f.]
It is a spiritual and psychological archetype, like Mother, Trickster, and Spirit,
a process experienced as a renewal or transformation of the personality.
Psychological rebirth was Jung's focus. Induced by ritual or stimulated by immediate personal experience, it results in an enlargement of the personality. He acknowledged that one might feel transformed during certain group experiences, but he cautioned against confusing this with genuine rebirth (individuation).
If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience of individual transformation. A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal . . . .
. . . The group experience goes no deeper than the level of one's own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, but the change does not last.[Ibid, pars. 225f.]
“When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, “One becomes two,” and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivity captive”: that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life – a moment of deadliest peril!” (Jung, p.121, CW9)
Jung on Natural transformations: “Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth… Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams… a… process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves – that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul. That is why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual, an example being the friendship between Mithras and the sun god. . . It is the representation of a friendship between two men which is simply the outer reflection of an inner fact: it reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself would like to change us – that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolutely master in our own house…” ( Jung, pp. 130-131, CW9)
Jung on Natural transformations: “Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth… Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams… a… process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves – that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul. That is why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual, an example being the friendship between Mithras and the sun god. . . It is the representation of a friendship between two men which is simply the outer reflection of an inner fact: it reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself would like to change us – that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolutely master in our own house…” ( Jung, pp. 130-131, CW9)
Arnold Bocklin's 3rd version of ISLE OF THE DEAD, a stunning series of paintings. This is the "daylight" version.
Harken, I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In eternity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, so for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the external and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma. (Jung, Seven Sermons to the Dead)
In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution. CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and infinite. But we have share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed...in our essence as creatures, which is confined within time and space. Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous...nowhere divided. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point in us and the foundless firmament about us.
The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created being came to pass, not creatura; since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all time and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.
Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctiveness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Therefore man discriminateth because his nature is distinctiveness. Wherefore also he distinguiseth qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore must he speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not. ...When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. ...What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? ...We fall into indistinctiveness, ...we fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. ...Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. (Jung, Seven Sermons...)
On February 29, 1919, Jung wrote a letter to Joan Corrie and commented on the Sermons, with particular reference to the last one:
"The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation & out of this process, which is like pregnancy, arises a divine child, a reborn God, no more (longer) dispersed into the millions of creatures, but being one & this individual, and at the same time all individuals, the same in you as in me.
Dr. L[ong] has a little book: VII sermones ad mortuous. There you find the description of the Creator dispersed into his creatures, & in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises ... The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don't know it. He is a spiritual God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities" (Copied in Constance Long's diary, Countway Library of
Medicine, pp. 21-22) ~The Red Book, Footnote 123.
In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution. CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and infinite. But we have share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed...in our essence as creatures, which is confined within time and space. Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous...nowhere divided. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point in us and the foundless firmament about us.
The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created being came to pass, not creatura; since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all time and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.
Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctiveness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Therefore man discriminateth because his nature is distinctiveness. Wherefore also he distinguiseth qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore must he speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not. ...When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. ...What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? ...We fall into indistinctiveness, ...we fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. ...Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. (Jung, Seven Sermons...)
On February 29, 1919, Jung wrote a letter to Joan Corrie and commented on the Sermons, with particular reference to the last one:
"The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation & out of this process, which is like pregnancy, arises a divine child, a reborn God, no more (longer) dispersed into the millions of creatures, but being one & this individual, and at the same time all individuals, the same in you as in me.
Dr. L[ong] has a little book: VII sermones ad mortuous. There you find the description of the Creator dispersed into his creatures, & in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises ... The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don't know it. He is a spiritual God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities" (Copied in Constance Long's diary, Countway Library of
Medicine, pp. 21-22) ~The Red Book, Footnote 123.
Our conscious mind is limited to the sequential flow of words and their corresponding ideas which arise from our subconscious. Our subconscious mind being formed from knowledge and experiences gathered over our lifetime (and possibly from the lives of our ancestors where knowledge is stored in genetic structures). Thus if we are to have harmony between our conscious and sub-conscious minds and the external world we experience, we must unite these apparently separate things. To do to this at a fundamental level requires understanding what matter is and thus what we are (as humans) and how we are necessarily connected to all other matter in the universe. ~Carl Jung.
A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it – even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. --C. G. Jung, , Memories, Dreams, Reflections. (NY: Vintage, [1961]1963), p. 329.
In Lament of the Dead, the late Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) and historian Shamdasani (C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books) engage in conversations about the Red Book, a tome recently unearthed, edited, and translated by Shamdasani, in which Jung explored the ancestral, archetypal, and mythic figures that populated his fantasies. It explores the crux of individual encounter with one's own depths.
Murray Stein says we need to re-vision the dead and to hang on to our dreams and visions of the afterlife, even in a skeptical environment. Can we reverse the wheel of history and cherish in our times the dreams, visions, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors that paid homage to the afterlife? They spared no means in erecting visible signs of a continued presence of the dead among the living. The vast burial mounds of Neolithic culture, the great pyramids of Egypt, the wooden stretchers of Native Americans were visible signs and tangible embodiments of a continuous universe, inspiring great works of art that survived the ravages of time.
Such processes can only be indirectly observed, namely by the Eros consciousness. If one is unconscious of it, spontaneous, non-intentional parapsychological, especially psychokinetic events happen. They are teleological or final; “effects” without any “cause.” The depth psychological aspect of such a change on the level of consciousness consists mostly in an unintentional breakdown of the will-possessed Logos ego (the “conscious king”), and corresponds to Jung’s “night sea journey” of 1913 to 1918. It is the forced transformation into the Eros ego, the “conscious queen.” Later Jung called this principle behind this process the counter-will of the unconscious.
This aspect of the unconscious unio corporalis is demonstrated by the saga of Raymond and Melusina: Exactly in the moment in which Raymond’s life style collapses, in which “all bridges back into the past are broken and there seems to be no way forward into the future” (C.G. Jung), the water-nixie Melusina appears to Raymond as an apparition. (Remo Roth, Self-fertilizing World Soul)
The winged dragon represents the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, which is the sum total of planetary existence -- the holographic blueprint on which form is based, the informational level or primal source of being - Zero Point. It is said that medicine providing the gift of youth can be made from its venom.
The dragon is a healing power. The spiritual food of immortality signifies the ability of the ego to assimilate the previously unconscious aspects of the Self. This is the elixir of youth that creates the immortal body, equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone is kept in the custody of the reawakened Dragon, the Adept who inhabits his or her (subtle body) Body of Light.
Alchemy itself is a triple process of uniting the physical, psychological and spiritual. In Masonry, each line of the triangle itself symbolizes a kingdom of nature -- mineral, vegetable and animal. Psychologically, the dragon is the union of ordinary human reality with the transpersonal Self and a passion for transformation. Some now say it is a symbol of DNA or the kundalini energy. Thus, it is a symbol of the Great Work.
All these "ghosts" are ours: Calculate from your parents and double the number of ancestors for each generation. That comes out to 2 to the nth power. So, when you get to 64 generations back you have something like 18 quintillion ancestors. At 25 generations the number overruns the population of the country to 18 quintillion. So, yes, many of the ancestors have to be the same people. So, you can say we cross many paths many times over.
Being and non-being creates the interplay of the opposites that creates movement. It is the means through which the individual is pulled out of the extroverted life of division and into the introverted life of union and oneness.
The Gnostics felt that procreative power is only a special instance of the procreative nature of the Whole. In the Holy Wedding archetype, the unio corporalis of Hermetic alchemy, the queen and the king create a new world with their union.
Thus, genealogy is an analogy for the recursive self-fertilizing potential of the psyche. In the energetic feedback of psychobiological coniunctio, serving the psyche means being in-formed by it. The essence of life, the world soul, does not need a masculine partner for her creation and incarnation process.
The creative life essence influences also the beyond and its “inhabitants,” the deceased in their essentially timeless and spaceless domain. They seem in some way to be resurrected from death in their afterlife. We observe processes in which physical and/or psychic energy transforms into the magic energy of the unus mundus and re-transforms into physical/psychic energy of higher order. Symbolically, it leads to to the cure of the disease of mankind and the universe -- the panacea. Spontaneous realizations become incarnated in our world; creation by mere observation.
Our creative power emerges out of the psychophysical root of the sexual drive . The Crusader, who is dead as well as still living, is a symbol of the repressed but still living realm of the deeper principle of the creative power, of the unus mundus, the “intermediary realm,” only psychophysically obervable.
Melusina is a symbolic equivalent to the Crusader, a “psychic principle with quasi-material attributes” (C.G. Jung). Thus, she also symbolizes the principle of matter-psyche, magic energy. The water-nixie and her acausal incarnations can only be observed by an altered state of consciousness. Matter-psyche is the energetic principle of the psychophysical nonlocal world, of the subtle body and of the world soul. The psychophysical quantum leap is nonlocal.
Melusina adds a further aspect to the Hermetic unio corporalis: Since she lives (also) in the blood of men and releases the blood of Jesus Christ, the Anthropos (the God-man); she redeems herself. Translated into a modern scientific language this motif means that such incarnation processes happen themselves, acausal or indeterministically.
This means especially that the Eros ego has the duty to just observe these inner acausal processes. This attitude is exactly contrary to the one in Jung’s Active Imagination. It is some sort of a “passive imagination”, active passiveness. (Remo Roth) -- Simply by observing, we are loving into being. Melusina/world soul/dea abscondita corresponds to the tripartite goddess of the Celts – the magic energy of the unus mundus.
We are at the end of a long and winding genetic journey that continues after and through us. We are probably all connected by the 25th gr-grparents if you do the math. There is a great possibility that we are descendants (or are related) from almost everyone alive some seven hundred years ago. Considering the line of our parents as Nº 1, the number of persons is 33,554,432. That number is the theoretical result of (x2) progression, since many of those ancestors are the same persons. Yet, somehow a determined gen can survive intact through all those descendants and become a particle of memory that will give you a dejá vu once in a while.
Jung calls attention to the one deep, missing part of our culture, which is the realm of the dead. The realm not just of your personal ancestors but the realm of the dead, the repressed weight of human history. The real repressed is like a great monster eating us from within and from below and sapping our strength as a culture.
Joseph Campbell said, "What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. . .Meanwhile, you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime."
Genealogy widens and deepens our sense of self. It ignites a sustained dialogue with the past that collapses the timeline. Time dilates. contracts, and compresses. It is all that is forgotten, and not just forgotten in the past, but that we are living in a world which is alive with the dead, they are around us, they are areas. They are with us and are us.
Such revelations throw light on things, helping us see in the darkness of the depths. As long as a symbol has life, it has magic and meaning. We can be consciously in the stream not the victim of events. Such water of life becomes refreshing, not drowning. Crossing the great river or sea is a rebirth image.
Genealogy can be a highly synchronous process. That is, you can miraculously find some clue or elusive missing bit, or come across a meaningful story in some uncanny way even without looking. Jung said that “Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.” Sometimes it feels like the ancestors are pulling the strings. The figures, the memories, the ghosts, it's all there, and as you get older your borders dissolve, and you realize "I am among them" and understand your identity at the deepest level.
Everything penetrates everything at all levels from the quantum to cosmological. There is both physical and spiritual, objective and subjective generation. An Arab text says, "the different spiritual and corporeal forces must be converging and not moving apart, the physical and spiritual forces must be similar so that they can mutually help each other." Jean Dubuis said, "The whole alchemical process occurs simultaneously with the inner and the outer.
In this sense genealogy is therapy for the dead and ourselves. We can allow them to work on us as we work on our lines. Genealogy, particularly of ancient lineage shares many of the exemplary tropes of Jungian transformation and alchemy, such as the Royal Marriage (Royal Syzygy), Holy Grail, union of opposites, and heroic god-kings.
Matter and spirit continually pull the soul in opposite directions. The poles of the psyche are united in an integrate duality that is likened to a marriage. Reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. In alchemy this marriage of opposites is called coniunctio, a new perspective or functional unification of soul and spirit, including the feminine and masculine aspects of self. That allows you to experience the opposites simultaneously from an integrative or nondual viewpoint that brings new freedom and a new burden of knowledge.
The ascent to another way of being, the ascent of transformation, cannot occur without disintegration, without the process of breaking down completely -- being pulverized really, physically, emotionally, spiritually. If the container of self is not smashed, the vision cannot enter. The vision is the flash of light that re-organizes the self. Afterwards, if one is fortunate and graced by the generosity of the gods -- one reconstitutes, or is reconstituted, according to the laws and principles of a new life, a new dimension, a new world, a new universe.
As one of today's most popular hobbies, genealogy symbolically reflects the search for wholeness and the self-fertilizing ability to create the subtle body or deified body for the afterlife. Death means "letting go", emptying the mindbody, whether permanently or in the ego-death of meditation (die daily), by means of silence, immobility, internalization, and spontaneity. The empty body becomes the Grail filled with the incorporeal plenum. Sub Rosa is the symbol of such pregnant silence.
A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it – even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. --C. G. Jung, , Memories, Dreams, Reflections. (NY: Vintage, [1961]1963), p. 329.
In Lament of the Dead, the late Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman (The Soul’s Code) and historian Shamdasani (C.G. Jung: A Biography in Books) engage in conversations about the Red Book, a tome recently unearthed, edited, and translated by Shamdasani, in which Jung explored the ancestral, archetypal, and mythic figures that populated his fantasies. It explores the crux of individual encounter with one's own depths.
Murray Stein says we need to re-vision the dead and to hang on to our dreams and visions of the afterlife, even in a skeptical environment. Can we reverse the wheel of history and cherish in our times the dreams, visions, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors that paid homage to the afterlife? They spared no means in erecting visible signs of a continued presence of the dead among the living. The vast burial mounds of Neolithic culture, the great pyramids of Egypt, the wooden stretchers of Native Americans were visible signs and tangible embodiments of a continuous universe, inspiring great works of art that survived the ravages of time.
Such processes can only be indirectly observed, namely by the Eros consciousness. If one is unconscious of it, spontaneous, non-intentional parapsychological, especially psychokinetic events happen. They are teleological or final; “effects” without any “cause.” The depth psychological aspect of such a change on the level of consciousness consists mostly in an unintentional breakdown of the will-possessed Logos ego (the “conscious king”), and corresponds to Jung’s “night sea journey” of 1913 to 1918. It is the forced transformation into the Eros ego, the “conscious queen.” Later Jung called this principle behind this process the counter-will of the unconscious.
This aspect of the unconscious unio corporalis is demonstrated by the saga of Raymond and Melusina: Exactly in the moment in which Raymond’s life style collapses, in which “all bridges back into the past are broken and there seems to be no way forward into the future” (C.G. Jung), the water-nixie Melusina appears to Raymond as an apparition. (Remo Roth, Self-fertilizing World Soul)
The winged dragon represents the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, which is the sum total of planetary existence -- the holographic blueprint on which form is based, the informational level or primal source of being - Zero Point. It is said that medicine providing the gift of youth can be made from its venom.
The dragon is a healing power. The spiritual food of immortality signifies the ability of the ego to assimilate the previously unconscious aspects of the Self. This is the elixir of youth that creates the immortal body, equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone is kept in the custody of the reawakened Dragon, the Adept who inhabits his or her (subtle body) Body of Light.
Alchemy itself is a triple process of uniting the physical, psychological and spiritual. In Masonry, each line of the triangle itself symbolizes a kingdom of nature -- mineral, vegetable and animal. Psychologically, the dragon is the union of ordinary human reality with the transpersonal Self and a passion for transformation. Some now say it is a symbol of DNA or the kundalini energy. Thus, it is a symbol of the Great Work.
All these "ghosts" are ours: Calculate from your parents and double the number of ancestors for each generation. That comes out to 2 to the nth power. So, when you get to 64 generations back you have something like 18 quintillion ancestors. At 25 generations the number overruns the population of the country to 18 quintillion. So, yes, many of the ancestors have to be the same people. So, you can say we cross many paths many times over.
Being and non-being creates the interplay of the opposites that creates movement. It is the means through which the individual is pulled out of the extroverted life of division and into the introverted life of union and oneness.
The Gnostics felt that procreative power is only a special instance of the procreative nature of the Whole. In the Holy Wedding archetype, the unio corporalis of Hermetic alchemy, the queen and the king create a new world with their union.
Thus, genealogy is an analogy for the recursive self-fertilizing potential of the psyche. In the energetic feedback of psychobiological coniunctio, serving the psyche means being in-formed by it. The essence of life, the world soul, does not need a masculine partner for her creation and incarnation process.
The creative life essence influences also the beyond and its “inhabitants,” the deceased in their essentially timeless and spaceless domain. They seem in some way to be resurrected from death in their afterlife. We observe processes in which physical and/or psychic energy transforms into the magic energy of the unus mundus and re-transforms into physical/psychic energy of higher order. Symbolically, it leads to to the cure of the disease of mankind and the universe -- the panacea. Spontaneous realizations become incarnated in our world; creation by mere observation.
Our creative power emerges out of the psychophysical root of the sexual drive . The Crusader, who is dead as well as still living, is a symbol of the repressed but still living realm of the deeper principle of the creative power, of the unus mundus, the “intermediary realm,” only psychophysically obervable.
Melusina is a symbolic equivalent to the Crusader, a “psychic principle with quasi-material attributes” (C.G. Jung). Thus, she also symbolizes the principle of matter-psyche, magic energy. The water-nixie and her acausal incarnations can only be observed by an altered state of consciousness. Matter-psyche is the energetic principle of the psychophysical nonlocal world, of the subtle body and of the world soul. The psychophysical quantum leap is nonlocal.
Melusina adds a further aspect to the Hermetic unio corporalis: Since she lives (also) in the blood of men and releases the blood of Jesus Christ, the Anthropos (the God-man); she redeems herself. Translated into a modern scientific language this motif means that such incarnation processes happen themselves, acausal or indeterministically.
This means especially that the Eros ego has the duty to just observe these inner acausal processes. This attitude is exactly contrary to the one in Jung’s Active Imagination. It is some sort of a “passive imagination”, active passiveness. (Remo Roth) -- Simply by observing, we are loving into being. Melusina/world soul/dea abscondita corresponds to the tripartite goddess of the Celts – the magic energy of the unus mundus.
We are at the end of a long and winding genetic journey that continues after and through us. We are probably all connected by the 25th gr-grparents if you do the math. There is a great possibility that we are descendants (or are related) from almost everyone alive some seven hundred years ago. Considering the line of our parents as Nº 1, the number of persons is 33,554,432. That number is the theoretical result of (x2) progression, since many of those ancestors are the same persons. Yet, somehow a determined gen can survive intact through all those descendants and become a particle of memory that will give you a dejá vu once in a while.
Jung calls attention to the one deep, missing part of our culture, which is the realm of the dead. The realm not just of your personal ancestors but the realm of the dead, the repressed weight of human history. The real repressed is like a great monster eating us from within and from below and sapping our strength as a culture.
Joseph Campbell said, "What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. . .Meanwhile, you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime."
Genealogy widens and deepens our sense of self. It ignites a sustained dialogue with the past that collapses the timeline. Time dilates. contracts, and compresses. It is all that is forgotten, and not just forgotten in the past, but that we are living in a world which is alive with the dead, they are around us, they are areas. They are with us and are us.
Such revelations throw light on things, helping us see in the darkness of the depths. As long as a symbol has life, it has magic and meaning. We can be consciously in the stream not the victim of events. Such water of life becomes refreshing, not drowning. Crossing the great river or sea is a rebirth image.
Genealogy can be a highly synchronous process. That is, you can miraculously find some clue or elusive missing bit, or come across a meaningful story in some uncanny way even without looking. Jung said that “Synchronicity reveals the meaningful connections between the subjective and objective world.” Sometimes it feels like the ancestors are pulling the strings. The figures, the memories, the ghosts, it's all there, and as you get older your borders dissolve, and you realize "I am among them" and understand your identity at the deepest level.
Everything penetrates everything at all levels from the quantum to cosmological. There is both physical and spiritual, objective and subjective generation. An Arab text says, "the different spiritual and corporeal forces must be converging and not moving apart, the physical and spiritual forces must be similar so that they can mutually help each other." Jean Dubuis said, "The whole alchemical process occurs simultaneously with the inner and the outer.
In this sense genealogy is therapy for the dead and ourselves. We can allow them to work on us as we work on our lines. Genealogy, particularly of ancient lineage shares many of the exemplary tropes of Jungian transformation and alchemy, such as the Royal Marriage (Royal Syzygy), Holy Grail, union of opposites, and heroic god-kings.
Matter and spirit continually pull the soul in opposite directions. The poles of the psyche are united in an integrate duality that is likened to a marriage. Reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. In alchemy this marriage of opposites is called coniunctio, a new perspective or functional unification of soul and spirit, including the feminine and masculine aspects of self. That allows you to experience the opposites simultaneously from an integrative or nondual viewpoint that brings new freedom and a new burden of knowledge.
The ascent to another way of being, the ascent of transformation, cannot occur without disintegration, without the process of breaking down completely -- being pulverized really, physically, emotionally, spiritually. If the container of self is not smashed, the vision cannot enter. The vision is the flash of light that re-organizes the self. Afterwards, if one is fortunate and graced by the generosity of the gods -- one reconstitutes, or is reconstituted, according to the laws and principles of a new life, a new dimension, a new world, a new universe.
As one of today's most popular hobbies, genealogy symbolically reflects the search for wholeness and the self-fertilizing ability to create the subtle body or deified body for the afterlife. Death means "letting go", emptying the mindbody, whether permanently or in the ego-death of meditation (die daily), by means of silence, immobility, internalization, and spontaneity. The empty body becomes the Grail filled with the incorporeal plenum. Sub Rosa is the symbol of such pregnant silence.
Mything Link
Remarkably, at the far reaches of our genealogies we find legendary and mythic figures who may or may not have been based on living personalities. But, they continue to live as progenitors within us, informing us as 'powers': spirits, daemons, gods, archetypes, laws, ideals, or whatever name we give such factors that we find powerful, dangerous, helpful, grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to devote attention and love. Things become alive with meaning through contemplation. Images arise out of the unconscious, out of nature.
They represent the pre-historical or even deeper aspects of culture and the psyche which have always manifested as primordial and persistent ancestral awareness. This dynamism was expressed in the past in the great proselytizing movements, in crusades, religious wars, and persecutions, in heresy hunts and witch hunts, and in the creative efforts which caused
men to build vast tombs and places of worship filled with every kind of treasure. An inescapable fact carried secretly in our lines is that most of us have ancestors on all sides of most historical conflicts due to intermarriage.
"All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious." (Jung; The Integration of the Personality p. 72)
The conceptual categories of psychology are conveniences, not as important as the direct experience (gnosis), without excessive theories or interpretations. We spontaneously experience our ancestors as deep spiritual connections and mysterious relations within our inner lives. Inwardly, they fascinate, and it's as if we were still ruled by such archaic gods, particularly so for those to whom the royal bloodlines 'speak'.
Visionary experiences arise from such substrate. The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Such "clear vision", second sight, or anomalous cognition is an acknowledged family trait of the Bloodline, and possibly a product of the entanglement of our psychophysical processes. In search of our own myth we encounter an epochal human story, an "as if" reality in which the preconscious myths form us of the manifold essence of the inner world.
Veneration of the Dead
What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul.
Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman / there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future. (Jung; Red Book)
Jung discovered that 'the archetypes of the unconscious are the equivalents of religious dogmas " and they correspond to all the known religious ideas. He codified the phenomenology. However, this doesn't mean that the unconscious actually produces religious dogmas - these are the product of conscious thought working on and refining the raw material of the unconscious.
Jung’s explorations led inexorably toward the visionary tradition, the mysterium coniunctionis. Historically it has been symbolized in the holy wedding of two natures with many names: divine and human, male and female, eros and logos, king and queen, salt and sulfur, inner and outer, sense and nonsense, above and below.
For Jung, the collective ancestry is indistinguishable from his concept of the Collective Unconscious - an autonomous organizing principle of structure and experience, reflecting the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul, patterns of information. They speak in images.
Physics tell us the dead have a continued existence informationally in the virtual vacuum and energetically in the cosmos. Information is not lost in a holographic universe that is a unitary process. In holographic theory, fragmentation created by boundaries does not exist. Each component is an embedded part of an unbroken whole. Each ancestor is a node in the unfathomably vast field of meaning. Consciousness is the essential core of life—a vast, unbounded, unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena.
The Luminous Gospels (Bauman) encourage us in this direction. "From this moment onward, I go forward into the Aion, and there, where time rests in stillness in the eternity of time, I will repose in silence." The key point is that Aion is not an afterlife, another form of temporality that begins after we die, but end (or "fullness") of time itself as a structuring dimension of reality.
Natural philosophy sees mind, life and matter emerging from and returning to the womb-like nature of the vacuum potential, the energy sea that is the primary reality underlying spacetime. Biophysics tells us DNA is not merely a physical molecule; it is also the molecular form of universal creative consciousness, or “torsion” energy, as it self-transforms into what we perceive, belatedly, as the template for our physical bodies. The human being can be modeled as a quantum biohologram, or field body.
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Everything, including life and consciousness emerges from and returns to the vacuum potential.
Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space described by contemporary physics as "The Field", scalar field, luminiferous ether, virtual vacuum, zero point and torsion field. Jung and the Gnostics called it the Pleroma or Plenum. The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy -- an ocean of virtual Light -- that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is μετάνοια metanoia, or repentance, relinquishing material existence and returning to the Pleroma.
In the Gnostic cosmology, source of all being is an Aeon in which an inner being dwells, known as Ennoea ("thought, intent", Greek ἔννοια), Charis ("grace", Greek χάρις), or Sige ("silence", Greek σιγή). The split perfect being conceives the second Aeon, Nous ("mind", Greek Νους), within itself. Along with the male Nous comes the female Aeon Aletheia ("truth", Greek Αληθεια). These are the primary roots of the Aeons. Complex hierarchies of Aeons are thus produced, sometimes to the number of thirty. These Aeons belong to the purely ideal, noumenal, intelligible, or supersensible world; they are immaterial, they are hypostatic ideas. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the Pleroma ("region of light", Greek πλήρωμα). The lowest regions of the Pleroma are closest to the darkness—that is, the physical world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_Gnosticism
Resurrection of the soul of the world means a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." Some notice a heightened communication and coordination between the unconscious and conscious. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact radically participatory in this One World.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
Our DNA contains all the emotional records of our ancestors. Epigenetics tells us the dead potentially possess the transgenerational ability to psychophysically influence the fortune of the living through biogenetics, modulating mutations, disease, repair, stress response, genetic imprinting and gene expression, healing, even speculative inquiry.
Could you relive and re-experience in some way great-great-great-great grandma’s or grandpa’s harrowing and hair-raising close encounter with a hungry bear two hundred years ago? What about some similar “peak experience” or life-changing event of an ancient relative five hundred years ago? What about five thousand years ago? After all, we know that at least some part of that history is inside all of us, right in the DNA in every cell of our body, right now.
To conduct our own personal research and to find out for ourselves, maybe all we need to do is listen to our inner DNA. Listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. Their lives, joys and fears are within us. In that way, they are with us always.
Epigenetics in psychology describes how nurture shapes nature. Nature refers to biological heredity and nurture means virtually everything that occurs during the life-span, including social-experience, diet and nutrition, and exposure to toxins. Epigenetics in psychology provides a framework for understanding how gene expression is influenced by experiences and the environment to produce individual differences in behavior, cognition, personality, and mental health.
Ancestral worship, pilgrimage, and rites are among the oldest of such ideas serving the dead -- recognizing the dead, recognizing the phenomenology (possession, identification, projection), recognizing our own dead. This act does not imply any belief that the departed ancestors have become deified. Rather, the act is a way to respect, honor and look after ancestors in their afterlives as well as seek their guidance for their living descendants.
Many cultures and religions have similar practices. Widespread communities were linked by pilgrimage, marriage and by descent 5000 years ago. Mounds and monuments have been made to memorialize the ancestors. The existence of the dead begs the question, "Why do we live?" Theories of the origins and nature of life are foundational to our self-understanding. They have been there since the beginning. The mystery of the nature of reality remains an unsolved paradoxical puzzle -- an enduring enigma.
Veneration involves close and distant history, much brutality and oppression of all sorts. It means learning acceptance of the burdensome knowledge of the shadow of humanity lived out in history often governed by our ancestors, through prosperous and catastrophic times. This, too, is gnosis.
Our potential for life, our unlived experience for good and evil, has surely been realized by someone within our lines. Genealogy helps us make a ‘descent into the unconscious’, a disturbing trip down the psyche’s rabbit hole from which we gather insights about the collective unconscious, informed by our ancestors.
The Living Branch
Genealogy tells us, our royal lines trace back to and beyond Egypt to Mesopotamia and early neolithic cultures around the Black Sea. The Merovingian kings claimed descent from King David, King Solomon and as Christian converts, from Jesus through Mary Magdalene and the Desposyni, descendants of the family of Jesus (Joseph of Arimathea, James the Just, John the Baptist, etc.). http://www.robertsewell.ca/merovech.html
"A number of times the Scripture refers to Jesus as 'The Branch.' Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH' (Zechariah 6:12). That is one of the names in the Old Testament for the coming of the Messiah. Also, concerning the Branch, we read in Zechariah 3:8, For, behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH.' Also 'In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious.' (Isaiah 4:2a). He is the servant, He is a man, He is God; He is the God-man, Jesus, who has come... ” (D. James Kennedy)
The Pharaohs were anointed with crocodile (dragon) fat, and thereby attained the fortitude of the Messeh (Messiah—Anointed One). The image of the majestic Messeh evolved to become the Dragon, which in turn became emblematic of mighty kingship.
Charlemagne and the Carolingians married Merovingians to consolidate claims to the throne of the Franks. Charlemagne and his descendants claimed the pedigree of tribe of Judah, whereas the Merovingians were of the tribe of Dan. This is our Branch of the great ancestral tree girt with the serpent of wisdom, of gnosis. [1]
“The royal emblem of the Merovingian king Clovis was the fleur-de-lis (the iris)...a masculine symbol. In fact, it is a graphic image of the covenant of circumcision... This three-pronged 'lily' is an ancient symbol for Israel: the capitals of the two phallic pillars of Solomon's Temple, Jachin and Boaz, were carved with 'lily work' (I Kings 7:22).” (Starbird, 1993)
Each of us is at the epicenter of a giant webwork of ancestral lines which converge in our being. Our lines run through the mystical Grail women of Avallon in the Druid-inspired Pendragon epics of King Arthur, give rise to the Templars and Cathar gnosticism, and mingles with all the royal lines of Europe and Asia back into the mists of shamanic prehistory in Siberia and Iberia.
The Bloodline is the Grail -- the royal blood informing us and igniting every cell. We are the Grail and we serve one another, in life and death.
If we are overwhelmed or submerged we fall back into an antique mentality, falling into the attraction of the old cults, by going down into the past. It is possible to lose oneself in the mysteries of the still living archetypes, particularly presented as one's direct ancestors. The ancestors are, of course, the archetypes -- the psychological ancestors.
The chief concern of Jung's Red Book, according to Hillman and Shamdasani, is giving voice to the dead - to history, to the actual dead, to buried ideas. Our culture is so forward looking, valuing novelty over reflection on the past, that the ancestors are too often forgotten. If we don't deal with them, their lament will continue to haunt and foil us. True novelty requires the seed-bed of the past's rich loam. Our's is a way not of information as much as transformation.
In 1916, still in the grip of his crisis, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness filled his home. He felt the presence of the dead – and so did his children. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon to anyone. Then, one afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly, but no one was there. He asked: “What in the world is this?” The voices of the dead answered: “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought,” words that form the beginning of Jung’s strange Seven Sermons to the Dead, a work of “spiritual dictation”, or “channelling”, he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West”. http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3847/the_occult_world_of_cg_jung.html
So it’s almost as if we are part of an active imagination ourselves, particularly as we meditatively work our genealogical lines imagining those ancestral lives with a keen ear open to the past. Now this is so crucial because it opens the door or the mouths of the dead.
Remarkably, at the far reaches of our genealogies we find legendary and mythic figures who may or may not have been based on living personalities. But, they continue to live as progenitors within us, informing us as 'powers': spirits, daemons, gods, archetypes, laws, ideals, or whatever name we give such factors that we find powerful, dangerous, helpful, grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to devote attention and love. Things become alive with meaning through contemplation. Images arise out of the unconscious, out of nature.
They represent the pre-historical or even deeper aspects of culture and the psyche which have always manifested as primordial and persistent ancestral awareness. This dynamism was expressed in the past in the great proselytizing movements, in crusades, religious wars, and persecutions, in heresy hunts and witch hunts, and in the creative efforts which caused
men to build vast tombs and places of worship filled with every kind of treasure. An inescapable fact carried secretly in our lines is that most of us have ancestors on all sides of most historical conflicts due to intermarriage.
"All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious." (Jung; The Integration of the Personality p. 72)
The conceptual categories of psychology are conveniences, not as important as the direct experience (gnosis), without excessive theories or interpretations. We spontaneously experience our ancestors as deep spiritual connections and mysterious relations within our inner lives. Inwardly, they fascinate, and it's as if we were still ruled by such archaic gods, particularly so for those to whom the royal bloodlines 'speak'.
Visionary experiences arise from such substrate. The "underworld" is the primordial cosmological groundstate -- the Spirit of the Depths. Such "clear vision", second sight, or anomalous cognition is an acknowledged family trait of the Bloodline, and possibly a product of the entanglement of our psychophysical processes. In search of our own myth we encounter an epochal human story, an "as if" reality in which the preconscious myths form us of the manifold essence of the inner world.
Veneration of the Dead
What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul.
Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman / there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future. (Jung; Red Book)
Jung discovered that 'the archetypes of the unconscious are the equivalents of religious dogmas " and they correspond to all the known religious ideas. He codified the phenomenology. However, this doesn't mean that the unconscious actually produces religious dogmas - these are the product of conscious thought working on and refining the raw material of the unconscious.
Jung’s explorations led inexorably toward the visionary tradition, the mysterium coniunctionis. Historically it has been symbolized in the holy wedding of two natures with many names: divine and human, male and female, eros and logos, king and queen, salt and sulfur, inner and outer, sense and nonsense, above and below.
For Jung, the collective ancestry is indistinguishable from his concept of the Collective Unconscious - an autonomous organizing principle of structure and experience, reflecting the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul, patterns of information. They speak in images.
Physics tell us the dead have a continued existence informationally in the virtual vacuum and energetically in the cosmos. Information is not lost in a holographic universe that is a unitary process. In holographic theory, fragmentation created by boundaries does not exist. Each component is an embedded part of an unbroken whole. Each ancestor is a node in the unfathomably vast field of meaning. Consciousness is the essential core of life—a vast, unbounded, unified field which gives rise to and pervades all manifest phenomena.
The Luminous Gospels (Bauman) encourage us in this direction. "From this moment onward, I go forward into the Aion, and there, where time rests in stillness in the eternity of time, I will repose in silence." The key point is that Aion is not an afterlife, another form of temporality that begins after we die, but end (or "fullness") of time itself as a structuring dimension of reality.
Natural philosophy sees mind, life and matter emerging from and returning to the womb-like nature of the vacuum potential, the energy sea that is the primary reality underlying spacetime. Biophysics tells us DNA is not merely a physical molecule; it is also the molecular form of universal creative consciousness, or “torsion” energy, as it self-transforms into what we perceive, belatedly, as the template for our physical bodies. The human being can be modeled as a quantum biohologram, or field body.
In science, nonduality is an exploration of the nature of awareness, the essence of life from which all arises and subsides. Modern physics describes the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness. Everything, including life and consciousness emerges from and returns to the vacuum potential.
Such ultimate vacuum states of consciousness correlate with the relative and absolute vacuum states of space described by contemporary physics as "The Field", scalar field, luminiferous ether, virtual vacuum, zero point and torsion field. Jung and the Gnostics called it the Pleroma or Plenum. The vacuum potential is a virtual background energy -- an ocean of virtual Light -- that exists throughout space, even when no matter is present. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is μετάνοια metanoia, or repentance, relinquishing material existence and returning to the Pleroma.
In the Gnostic cosmology, source of all being is an Aeon in which an inner being dwells, known as Ennoea ("thought, intent", Greek ἔννοια), Charis ("grace", Greek χάρις), or Sige ("silence", Greek σιγή). The split perfect being conceives the second Aeon, Nous ("mind", Greek Νους), within itself. Along with the male Nous comes the female Aeon Aletheia ("truth", Greek Αληθεια). These are the primary roots of the Aeons. Complex hierarchies of Aeons are thus produced, sometimes to the number of thirty. These Aeons belong to the purely ideal, noumenal, intelligible, or supersensible world; they are immaterial, they are hypostatic ideas. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the Pleroma ("region of light", Greek πλήρωμα). The lowest regions of the Pleroma are closest to the darkness—that is, the physical world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_Gnosticism
Resurrection of the soul of the world means a raising of consciousness of created things, the world's psychic reality. Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." Some notice a heightened communication and coordination between the unconscious and conscious. The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact radically participatory in this One World.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
Our DNA contains all the emotional records of our ancestors. Epigenetics tells us the dead potentially possess the transgenerational ability to psychophysically influence the fortune of the living through biogenetics, modulating mutations, disease, repair, stress response, genetic imprinting and gene expression, healing, even speculative inquiry.
Could you relive and re-experience in some way great-great-great-great grandma’s or grandpa’s harrowing and hair-raising close encounter with a hungry bear two hundred years ago? What about some similar “peak experience” or life-changing event of an ancient relative five hundred years ago? What about five thousand years ago? After all, we know that at least some part of that history is inside all of us, right in the DNA in every cell of our body, right now.
To conduct our own personal research and to find out for ourselves, maybe all we need to do is listen to our inner DNA. Listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. Their lives, joys and fears are within us. In that way, they are with us always.
Epigenetics in psychology describes how nurture shapes nature. Nature refers to biological heredity and nurture means virtually everything that occurs during the life-span, including social-experience, diet and nutrition, and exposure to toxins. Epigenetics in psychology provides a framework for understanding how gene expression is influenced by experiences and the environment to produce individual differences in behavior, cognition, personality, and mental health.
Ancestral worship, pilgrimage, and rites are among the oldest of such ideas serving the dead -- recognizing the dead, recognizing the phenomenology (possession, identification, projection), recognizing our own dead. This act does not imply any belief that the departed ancestors have become deified. Rather, the act is a way to respect, honor and look after ancestors in their afterlives as well as seek their guidance for their living descendants.
Many cultures and religions have similar practices. Widespread communities were linked by pilgrimage, marriage and by descent 5000 years ago. Mounds and monuments have been made to memorialize the ancestors. The existence of the dead begs the question, "Why do we live?" Theories of the origins and nature of life are foundational to our self-understanding. They have been there since the beginning. The mystery of the nature of reality remains an unsolved paradoxical puzzle -- an enduring enigma.
Veneration involves close and distant history, much brutality and oppression of all sorts. It means learning acceptance of the burdensome knowledge of the shadow of humanity lived out in history often governed by our ancestors, through prosperous and catastrophic times. This, too, is gnosis.
Our potential for life, our unlived experience for good and evil, has surely been realized by someone within our lines. Genealogy helps us make a ‘descent into the unconscious’, a disturbing trip down the psyche’s rabbit hole from which we gather insights about the collective unconscious, informed by our ancestors.
The Living Branch
Genealogy tells us, our royal lines trace back to and beyond Egypt to Mesopotamia and early neolithic cultures around the Black Sea. The Merovingian kings claimed descent from King David, King Solomon and as Christian converts, from Jesus through Mary Magdalene and the Desposyni, descendants of the family of Jesus (Joseph of Arimathea, James the Just, John the Baptist, etc.). http://www.robertsewell.ca/merovech.html
"A number of times the Scripture refers to Jesus as 'The Branch.' Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH' (Zechariah 6:12). That is one of the names in the Old Testament for the coming of the Messiah. Also, concerning the Branch, we read in Zechariah 3:8, For, behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH.' Also 'In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious.' (Isaiah 4:2a). He is the servant, He is a man, He is God; He is the God-man, Jesus, who has come... ” (D. James Kennedy)
The Pharaohs were anointed with crocodile (dragon) fat, and thereby attained the fortitude of the Messeh (Messiah—Anointed One). The image of the majestic Messeh evolved to become the Dragon, which in turn became emblematic of mighty kingship.
Charlemagne and the Carolingians married Merovingians to consolidate claims to the throne of the Franks. Charlemagne and his descendants claimed the pedigree of tribe of Judah, whereas the Merovingians were of the tribe of Dan. This is our Branch of the great ancestral tree girt with the serpent of wisdom, of gnosis. [1]
“The royal emblem of the Merovingian king Clovis was the fleur-de-lis (the iris)...a masculine symbol. In fact, it is a graphic image of the covenant of circumcision... This three-pronged 'lily' is an ancient symbol for Israel: the capitals of the two phallic pillars of Solomon's Temple, Jachin and Boaz, were carved with 'lily work' (I Kings 7:22).” (Starbird, 1993)
Each of us is at the epicenter of a giant webwork of ancestral lines which converge in our being. Our lines run through the mystical Grail women of Avallon in the Druid-inspired Pendragon epics of King Arthur, give rise to the Templars and Cathar gnosticism, and mingles with all the royal lines of Europe and Asia back into the mists of shamanic prehistory in Siberia and Iberia.
The Bloodline is the Grail -- the royal blood informing us and igniting every cell. We are the Grail and we serve one another, in life and death.
If we are overwhelmed or submerged we fall back into an antique mentality, falling into the attraction of the old cults, by going down into the past. It is possible to lose oneself in the mysteries of the still living archetypes, particularly presented as one's direct ancestors. The ancestors are, of course, the archetypes -- the psychological ancestors.
The chief concern of Jung's Red Book, according to Hillman and Shamdasani, is giving voice to the dead - to history, to the actual dead, to buried ideas. Our culture is so forward looking, valuing novelty over reflection on the past, that the ancestors are too often forgotten. If we don't deal with them, their lament will continue to haunt and foil us. True novelty requires the seed-bed of the past's rich loam. Our's is a way not of information as much as transformation.
In 1916, still in the grip of his crisis, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness filled his home. He felt the presence of the dead – and so did his children. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon to anyone. Then, one afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly, but no one was there. He asked: “What in the world is this?” The voices of the dead answered: “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought,” words that form the beginning of Jung’s strange Seven Sermons to the Dead, a work of “spiritual dictation”, or “channelling”, he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West”. http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3847/the_occult_world_of_cg_jung.html
So it’s almost as if we are part of an active imagination ourselves, particularly as we meditatively work our genealogical lines imagining those ancestral lives with a keen ear open to the past. Now this is so crucial because it opens the door or the mouths of the dead.
Opening of the Mouth
The 'Opening of the Mouth and Eyes' (generally abbreviated to 'Opening of the Mouth') is the ancient Egyptian title of the reanimation ritual. They believed such a ritual would restore sensory life back to the deceased's form, enabling it to see, smell, breathe, hear, and eat psychosensory offerings.
The 'Imperishable stars', the 'Great Ones', are the northern costellations, associated by the ancient Egyptians as the place of the afterlife. In ancient times, Draco and the pole star Thuban were at the immoveable center of the cosmic drama. Draco was a divine emblem of the Sumerian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, a symbol of the Egyptian Therapeutate, of the Essenes at Qumran, and was the Bistea Neptunis (the sea serpent) of the descendant Merovingian Fisher-Kings in Europe.
Osiris is the archetypal resurrecting god - a symbol of regeneration. The Pharaohs of Egypt are among our royal bloodlines, so their ceremonies are our legacy. The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was a succession ritual and symbolic animation of a statue or mummy by magically opening its mouth so that it could breathe and speak.
The opening of the mouth ritual was performed to animate the person who died so they could see and take sustenance in the afterlife. The rite varied somewhat in different eras, but sustenance and light remain the two key aspects of life desired for eternity. The eye as a place of rebirth is the meaning of the Eye of Horus.
A statue is placed in the 'House of Gold' on a bed of sand, with the face oriented to the south. Fashioning the image (living Ka) is symbolically 'giving birth'. The sculptor is 'the one who causes to live'. 'Opening of the Mouth' is a symbolic re-enactment of the clearing of a baby's mouth at birth. The ceremonial adze was made from the metal of heaven -- meteoric iron. The Pyramid Texts associate the god Set with the iron adze used to open the mouth; New Kingdom texts associate Set with the bonds obstructing the mouth.
Special ritual implements (peseshkaf ) for consecration were derived from blades used in childbirth to cut the umbilical cord. Meat offerings simulate an outpouring of blood, evoking the blood of childbirth, life, and lineage. The foreleg of a sacrificed ox transferred the life-force of the bull to the recipient of the Opening of the Mouth (alternately, the bull may have revived sexual powers). Rejuvenation is confirmed with robing and anointing, libations, fumigations, and purifications.
In the Coffin Texts, Ptah joins Horus to open the deceased's mouth, then Ptah and Thoth transform the deceased into an akh, and Thoth replaces the heart in the body, so that the deceased remembers what has been forgotten and can eat bread as desired. The akh ('magically effective one'), was associated with thought, but not as an action of the mind; rather, it was intellect as a living entity.
The Egyptian word, Ak means ‘light’, and aker means ‘light being’. Ak-hu is the archetypal Cosmic Man of Light, or ideal archetype of humanity found in a host of Hermetic and Gnostic teachings, whether Egyptian, Jewish, Christian or Islamic. As Mircea Eliade notes in Shamanism, among the Iglulik Eskimos, who were driven out of some unknown homeland, a sequence of initiations concludes with the ang-ak-oq (virtually the same word as Languedoc or L’ang-ak-oq), meaning ‘lightening’ or ‘illumination’.
This angakoq, writes Eliade, consists of,
“a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within his brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire which enables him to see with both eyes, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others.”
The emphasis here is on eyes and light.
The akh soul also played a role in the afterlife, helping with prayers and intercession, inflicting punishment, or causing nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. Veneration helped the deceased to "not die a second time" permanently in the underworld and to become an akh (unified Ba and Ka). The akh "grants memory always" to a person.
Your life happening again, without your ba being kept away from your divine corpse, with your ba being together with the akh ... You shall emerge each day and return each evening. A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall be told: "Welcome, welcome, into this your house of the living!" (Tomb of Paheri, translated by James P. Allen)
The Book of Dead says "my mouth is opened by Ptah; the bonds that gag my mouth have been loosed by my city-god. Thoth comes fully equipped with magic. My mouth has been parted by Ptah with this metal chisel of his with which he parted the mouths of the gods."
A single act of love makes the soul return to life. Once the deceased was rejuvenated back with all his senses, he could also interact and watch over the family members, affecting their lives. Letters have been found attesting to the continued contact, or at least, belief in the continued contact, between deceased and living. Through the ritual, the deceased could not only "see" but "be seen". Ancestors, invisible beloveds, live not only in your quiet center but in every cell of your being. In you, life matters and dictates all structure.
Reclaiming our genealogy is reclaiming our ancestors, our genetics, and our epigenetics...but more, it means claiming our wholeness. Perhaps this is one reason genealogy has become the leading hobby online. We are the corporeal memory and structure of ancient lines. To be whole means to become reconciled with those sides of our being which have not been taken into account. Wholeness reconciles the rational or conscious and a more or less unconscious state. Our ancestors become more than names on the page, once again taking on lives of their own within us -- liberating, healing and transforming our mundane being.
Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed. The unconscious can only become known by experience, when it is no longer unconscious in the true sense of the word, but presents itself as strange, wild, chaotic, and apparently meaningless ideas, fantasies, dreams, and visions, which can appear from time to time, or burst upon a person like a flood.
"On us rests the responsibility not alone of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral value. (“laral” in the sense of the household gods.) The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here, in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible no longer dependent upon being visible and tangible, as our own destiny continually grows at the same time more present and invisible in us." --Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Witold von Hulewicz; Sierre, Canton du Valais, Switzerland, Nov. 13th, 1925
"The life and work of the Alsatian hermeticist and Egyptosophist, René-Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) attests to the continued presence of a distinctly nondual current of alchemical precept and practice in which material transmutation and spiritual transmutation are not separate nor merely coincidental endeavors but two indispensably linked sides of the same coin. The link, for Schwaller, was perceived as a juncture of meta-physical and proto-physical forces, a process conceived in terms of an alchemical "salt" (a neutralisation reaction between an "acid" and a "base" )."
Egypt was known as the land of Khem. The word 'alchemy' originates from the Arabic phrase Al-Khemia, describing the fertile black soil and floodplains found along the Nile River. Khem was the god of fertility and reproduction who controlled the fertility of all nature, from the dark soil to humanity -- the fruit of the Tree of Life.
Mater Alchemia states, "The Royal Syzygy ~ the marriage of male and female is said to be comprised of the powers of Love and Wisdom gathering themselves, coming together as the true philosopher's gold and the great liberation is the spiritual realization that your Soul, my Soul and the World Soul are one and the same." Jung concurs that alchemy is a Western proto-psychology dedicated to the achievement of individuation. In his interpretation, alchemy was the vessel by which Gnosticism survived its various purges into the Renaissance.
H.J. Sheppard summarizes, in Darke Hierogliphicks (Linden, Stanton J. (1996):
Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).
"This thesis demonstrates that Lubiczian alchemy, by centering on the esoteric formation of all "bodies" , to include the hidden "nucleus" of continuity between metallurgical, biological and spiritual corporeality, speaks directly to the perception of alchemy as a nondual, operative-spiritual process."
http://espace. library.uq. edu.au/view/ UQ:263145
"Schwaller' s alchemy is quintessentially nondual in the sense that it encompasses both operative and spiritual processes. These are not separate but deeply interrelated realities. Through the idea of salt, Schwaller offers a holarchical explanation for the continuities between mineralogical, biological and spiritual bodies, and thus a theory for the material mechanism by which consciousness transforms phenomenal form."
The 'Opening of the Mouth and Eyes' (generally abbreviated to 'Opening of the Mouth') is the ancient Egyptian title of the reanimation ritual. They believed such a ritual would restore sensory life back to the deceased's form, enabling it to see, smell, breathe, hear, and eat psychosensory offerings.
The 'Imperishable stars', the 'Great Ones', are the northern costellations, associated by the ancient Egyptians as the place of the afterlife. In ancient times, Draco and the pole star Thuban were at the immoveable center of the cosmic drama. Draco was a divine emblem of the Sumerian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, a symbol of the Egyptian Therapeutate, of the Essenes at Qumran, and was the Bistea Neptunis (the sea serpent) of the descendant Merovingian Fisher-Kings in Europe.
Osiris is the archetypal resurrecting god - a symbol of regeneration. The Pharaohs of Egypt are among our royal bloodlines, so their ceremonies are our legacy. The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was a succession ritual and symbolic animation of a statue or mummy by magically opening its mouth so that it could breathe and speak.
The opening of the mouth ritual was performed to animate the person who died so they could see and take sustenance in the afterlife. The rite varied somewhat in different eras, but sustenance and light remain the two key aspects of life desired for eternity. The eye as a place of rebirth is the meaning of the Eye of Horus.
A statue is placed in the 'House of Gold' on a bed of sand, with the face oriented to the south. Fashioning the image (living Ka) is symbolically 'giving birth'. The sculptor is 'the one who causes to live'. 'Opening of the Mouth' is a symbolic re-enactment of the clearing of a baby's mouth at birth. The ceremonial adze was made from the metal of heaven -- meteoric iron. The Pyramid Texts associate the god Set with the iron adze used to open the mouth; New Kingdom texts associate Set with the bonds obstructing the mouth.
Special ritual implements (peseshkaf ) for consecration were derived from blades used in childbirth to cut the umbilical cord. Meat offerings simulate an outpouring of blood, evoking the blood of childbirth, life, and lineage. The foreleg of a sacrificed ox transferred the life-force of the bull to the recipient of the Opening of the Mouth (alternately, the bull may have revived sexual powers). Rejuvenation is confirmed with robing and anointing, libations, fumigations, and purifications.
In the Coffin Texts, Ptah joins Horus to open the deceased's mouth, then Ptah and Thoth transform the deceased into an akh, and Thoth replaces the heart in the body, so that the deceased remembers what has been forgotten and can eat bread as desired. The akh ('magically effective one'), was associated with thought, but not as an action of the mind; rather, it was intellect as a living entity.
The Egyptian word, Ak means ‘light’, and aker means ‘light being’. Ak-hu is the archetypal Cosmic Man of Light, or ideal archetype of humanity found in a host of Hermetic and Gnostic teachings, whether Egyptian, Jewish, Christian or Islamic. As Mircea Eliade notes in Shamanism, among the Iglulik Eskimos, who were driven out of some unknown homeland, a sequence of initiations concludes with the ang-ak-oq (virtually the same word as Languedoc or L’ang-ak-oq), meaning ‘lightening’ or ‘illumination’.
This angakoq, writes Eliade, consists of,
“a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within his brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire which enables him to see with both eyes, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others.”
The emphasis here is on eyes and light.
The akh soul also played a role in the afterlife, helping with prayers and intercession, inflicting punishment, or causing nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. Veneration helped the deceased to "not die a second time" permanently in the underworld and to become an akh (unified Ba and Ka). The akh "grants memory always" to a person.
Your life happening again, without your ba being kept away from your divine corpse, with your ba being together with the akh ... You shall emerge each day and return each evening. A lamp will be lit for you in the night until the sunlight shines forth on your breast. You shall be told: "Welcome, welcome, into this your house of the living!" (Tomb of Paheri, translated by James P. Allen)
The Book of Dead says "my mouth is opened by Ptah; the bonds that gag my mouth have been loosed by my city-god. Thoth comes fully equipped with magic. My mouth has been parted by Ptah with this metal chisel of his with which he parted the mouths of the gods."
A single act of love makes the soul return to life. Once the deceased was rejuvenated back with all his senses, he could also interact and watch over the family members, affecting their lives. Letters have been found attesting to the continued contact, or at least, belief in the continued contact, between deceased and living. Through the ritual, the deceased could not only "see" but "be seen". Ancestors, invisible beloveds, live not only in your quiet center but in every cell of your being. In you, life matters and dictates all structure.
Reclaiming our genealogy is reclaiming our ancestors, our genetics, and our epigenetics...but more, it means claiming our wholeness. Perhaps this is one reason genealogy has become the leading hobby online. We are the corporeal memory and structure of ancient lines. To be whole means to become reconciled with those sides of our being which have not been taken into account. Wholeness reconciles the rational or conscious and a more or less unconscious state. Our ancestors become more than names on the page, once again taking on lives of their own within us -- liberating, healing and transforming our mundane being.
Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed. The unconscious can only become known by experience, when it is no longer unconscious in the true sense of the word, but presents itself as strange, wild, chaotic, and apparently meaningless ideas, fantasies, dreams, and visions, which can appear from time to time, or burst upon a person like a flood.
"On us rests the responsibility not alone of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral value. (“laral” in the sense of the household gods.) The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here, in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible no longer dependent upon being visible and tangible, as our own destiny continually grows at the same time more present and invisible in us." --Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Witold von Hulewicz; Sierre, Canton du Valais, Switzerland, Nov. 13th, 1925
"The life and work of the Alsatian hermeticist and Egyptosophist, René-Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) attests to the continued presence of a distinctly nondual current of alchemical precept and practice in which material transmutation and spiritual transmutation are not separate nor merely coincidental endeavors but two indispensably linked sides of the same coin. The link, for Schwaller, was perceived as a juncture of meta-physical and proto-physical forces, a process conceived in terms of an alchemical "salt" (a neutralisation reaction between an "acid" and a "base" )."
Egypt was known as the land of Khem. The word 'alchemy' originates from the Arabic phrase Al-Khemia, describing the fertile black soil and floodplains found along the Nile River. Khem was the god of fertility and reproduction who controlled the fertility of all nature, from the dark soil to humanity -- the fruit of the Tree of Life.
Mater Alchemia states, "The Royal Syzygy ~ the marriage of male and female is said to be comprised of the powers of Love and Wisdom gathering themselves, coming together as the true philosopher's gold and the great liberation is the spiritual realization that your Soul, my Soul and the World Soul are one and the same." Jung concurs that alchemy is a Western proto-psychology dedicated to the achievement of individuation. In his interpretation, alchemy was the vessel by which Gnosticism survived its various purges into the Renaissance.
H.J. Sheppard summarizes, in Darke Hierogliphicks (Linden, Stanton J. (1996):
Alchemy is the art of liberating parts of the Cosmos from temporal existence and achieving perfection which, for metals is gold, and for man, longevity, then immortality and, finally, redemption. Material perfection was sought through the action of a preparation (Philosopher's Stone for metals; Elixir of Life for humans), while spiritual ennoblement resulted from some form of inner revelation or other enlightenment (Gnosis, for example, in Hellenistic and western practices).
"This thesis demonstrates that Lubiczian alchemy, by centering on the esoteric formation of all "bodies" , to include the hidden "nucleus" of continuity between metallurgical, biological and spiritual corporeality, speaks directly to the perception of alchemy as a nondual, operative-spiritual process."
http://espace. library.uq. edu.au/view/ UQ:263145
"Schwaller' s alchemy is quintessentially nondual in the sense that it encompasses both operative and spiritual processes. These are not separate but deeply interrelated realities. Through the idea of salt, Schwaller offers a holarchical explanation for the continuities between mineralogical, biological and spiritual bodies, and thus a theory for the material mechanism by which consciousness transforms phenomenal form."
"A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it - even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole." --Jung, , Memories, Dreams, Reflections. (New York: Vintage, [1961]1963), p. 329.
We are the result of our ancestors' biological and psychic existence, as our life derives from them. These figures represent “the dead [who] are animating us”—figuratively, the collective human memory that shapes our psyches. Descending into our depths we find ancestral images, not mere metaphors. They live on and are present in images.
There is a sense of specific historical figures emerging -- fidelity to events and precise depictions of what transpires. Something significant is happening and needs no fictionalizing of what is already quite fantastic, but real. Dramatic sequences unfold in the time machines of our lineage. Actively engaged, we facilitate presentation of the stream of imagery. Such lyrical elaborations are evocations. These are the powers of the depths, the principles of the depths, and their voices which we hear.
Our task is to uncover these figures so they show themselves. Genetic genealogy cannot provides specific names and contexts. Our descent is into human ancestry, perhaps even beyond. Our collective symptom is we have lost contact with the dead, broken a deeply spiritual connection with our ancestors. Our descent into the Underworld is an attempt to find a way to relate to the dead. We realize our lives depend on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
The task is one of valuation, to live more fully. The voices of the dead have collective strength, collective message, importance and wisdom in what is coming up. Engagement with our own inner figures is our attempt to uncover the quintessentially human with a historical and collective root in the zeitgeist. We are part of it all -- the outside inside that is our self.
We enter their process, fully engaged. Lyrical elaborations include the dramatic, aesthetic, poetic, artistic, painterly forms and all movement arts -- functional means of articulating experience. This is a process of the voices wanting the same things. We become poets of our psychophysical heritage -- a fuller and richer articulation of life, but with the weight of human history.
We exercise our vision-making function. We each use the language given by the figures we deal with. We are forced in this confrontation to encompass what we've rejected in life. This is the collective Opening of the Mouth of the dead to go back in human history and recollect the meaning beyond each of us alone, to affirm the fullness of life, including its horrific aspects.
Accepting the lament of the dead -- ancestors with their own voices -- is an eye-opening experience of looking differently into the past amplifying the eternal present, meaning beyond concepts. Engaging interactively rather than through concepts is a paradoxical way of wending through the labyrinthine collective with shared thought processes even as we individuate ourselves from it.
If our dialogues tend toward the poetic, it’s because we are continually trying to make extensions from this world to the realm that lies beneath and beyond it … to convey a sense of the interconnectedness, and even identity, of all things. The language of poetry, with its metaphors and similes, is precisely that which connects: ideas to objects, images to emotions, and in some small way, outer events to great blazing inner realizations.
Space and time collapse in the depth dimension of the eternal now, that is a way of escaping our denial of death. We cannot live in a genuine way without encountering the coldness of death. We come to terms with accepting responsibility for history. We are all engaged in this because what takes place in the collective takes place within us. We learn to recognize we are co-responsible for what happens in the world. Only by plunging into our solitude do we reconnect with the living. Life permeates the living and the dead as divine moments of truth.
We are the result of our ancestors' biological and psychic existence, as our life derives from them. These figures represent “the dead [who] are animating us”—figuratively, the collective human memory that shapes our psyches. Descending into our depths we find ancestral images, not mere metaphors. They live on and are present in images.
There is a sense of specific historical figures emerging -- fidelity to events and precise depictions of what transpires. Something significant is happening and needs no fictionalizing of what is already quite fantastic, but real. Dramatic sequences unfold in the time machines of our lineage. Actively engaged, we facilitate presentation of the stream of imagery. Such lyrical elaborations are evocations. These are the powers of the depths, the principles of the depths, and their voices which we hear.
Our task is to uncover these figures so they show themselves. Genetic genealogy cannot provides specific names and contexts. Our descent is into human ancestry, perhaps even beyond. Our collective symptom is we have lost contact with the dead, broken a deeply spiritual connection with our ancestors. Our descent into the Underworld is an attempt to find a way to relate to the dead. We realize our lives depend on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
The task is one of valuation, to live more fully. The voices of the dead have collective strength, collective message, importance and wisdom in what is coming up. Engagement with our own inner figures is our attempt to uncover the quintessentially human with a historical and collective root in the zeitgeist. We are part of it all -- the outside inside that is our self.
We enter their process, fully engaged. Lyrical elaborations include the dramatic, aesthetic, poetic, artistic, painterly forms and all movement arts -- functional means of articulating experience. This is a process of the voices wanting the same things. We become poets of our psychophysical heritage -- a fuller and richer articulation of life, but with the weight of human history.
We exercise our vision-making function. We each use the language given by the figures we deal with. We are forced in this confrontation to encompass what we've rejected in life. This is the collective Opening of the Mouth of the dead to go back in human history and recollect the meaning beyond each of us alone, to affirm the fullness of life, including its horrific aspects.
Accepting the lament of the dead -- ancestors with their own voices -- is an eye-opening experience of looking differently into the past amplifying the eternal present, meaning beyond concepts. Engaging interactively rather than through concepts is a paradoxical way of wending through the labyrinthine collective with shared thought processes even as we individuate ourselves from it.
If our dialogues tend toward the poetic, it’s because we are continually trying to make extensions from this world to the realm that lies beneath and beyond it … to convey a sense of the interconnectedness, and even identity, of all things. The language of poetry, with its metaphors and similes, is precisely that which connects: ideas to objects, images to emotions, and in some small way, outer events to great blazing inner realizations.
Space and time collapse in the depth dimension of the eternal now, that is a way of escaping our denial of death. We cannot live in a genuine way without encountering the coldness of death. We come to terms with accepting responsibility for history. We are all engaged in this because what takes place in the collective takes place within us. We learn to recognize we are co-responsible for what happens in the world. Only by plunging into our solitude do we reconnect with the living. Life permeates the living and the dead as divine moments of truth.
REFERENCES
http://www.sott.net/article/264469-Archaeologists-discover-6000-year-old-halls-of-the-dead-in-UK
http://gnosis.org/Jung-and-Aion.pdf
http://www.robertsewell.ca/merovech.html
Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934 by C.G. Jung, Volume 1 By C. Carl Gustav Jung, Mary Foote
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Resurrection- 1532. US Public Domain.
Carl Jung contemplates the archetype of rebirth and resurrection. It is through metaphorical experiences of death and rebirth that we come to know what is essential within us. His five forms of rebirth are as follows:
1. “Metempsychosis. The first of the five aspects of rebirth to which I should like to draw attention is that of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. According to this view, one’s life is prolonged in time by passing through different bodily existences; or, from another point of view, it is a life-sequence interrupted by different reincarnations. Even in Buddhism, where this doctrine is of particular importance– the Buddha himself experienced a very long sequence of such rebirths– it is by no means certain whether continuity of personality is guaranteed or not: there may be only a continuity of karma…
2. Reincarnation. This concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences and that these existences were one’s own, i.e., that they had the same ego-form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means re-birth in a human body…
3. Resurrection. means a reestablishment of human existence after death. A new element enters here: that of the change, transmutation, or transformation of one’s being. The change may be either essential, in the sense that the resurrected being is a different one; or nonessential, in the sense that only the general conditions of existence have changed, as when one finds oneself in a different place or in a body which is differently constituted. It may be a carnal body, as in the Christian assumption that this body will be resurrected. On a higher level, the process is no longer understood in a gross material sense; it is assumed that the resurrection of the dead is the raising up of the corpus glorificationis) “subtle body,” in the state of incorruptibility…
4. Rebirth (renovatio). fourth form concerns rebirth in the strict sense; that is to say, rebirth within the span of individual life. The English word rebirth the exact equivalent of the German Wiedergeburt) the French language seems to lack a term having the peculiar meaning of “rebirth.” This word has a special flavour; its whole atmosphere suggests the idea of renovation , or even of improvement brought about by magical means. Rebirth may be a renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement. Thus even bodily ills may be healed through rebirth ceremonies…
Another aspect of this fourth form is essential transformation, i.e., total rebirth of the individual. Here the renewal implies a change of his essential nature, and may be called a transmutation. As examples we may mention the transformation of a mortal into an immortal being, of a corporeal into a spiritual being, and of a human into a divine being. Well-known prototypes of this change are the transfiguration and ascension of Christ, and the assumption of the Mother of God into heaven after her death, together with her body…
5. Participation in the process of transformation. fifth and last form is indirect rebirth. is brought about not directly, by passing through death and re-birth oneself, but indirectly, by participating in a process of transformation which is conceived of as taking place outside the individual. In other words, one has to witness, or take part in, some rite of transformation. This rite may be a ceremony such as the Mass, where there is a transformation of substances.” (Carl Jung, CW 9I, para 200- 205)
1. “Metempsychosis. The first of the five aspects of rebirth to which I should like to draw attention is that of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. According to this view, one’s life is prolonged in time by passing through different bodily existences; or, from another point of view, it is a life-sequence interrupted by different reincarnations. Even in Buddhism, where this doctrine is of particular importance– the Buddha himself experienced a very long sequence of such rebirths– it is by no means certain whether continuity of personality is guaranteed or not: there may be only a continuity of karma…
2. Reincarnation. This concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, when one is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, to remember that one has lived through previous existences and that these existences were one’s own, i.e., that they had the same ego-form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation means re-birth in a human body…
3. Resurrection. means a reestablishment of human existence after death. A new element enters here: that of the change, transmutation, or transformation of one’s being. The change may be either essential, in the sense that the resurrected being is a different one; or nonessential, in the sense that only the general conditions of existence have changed, as when one finds oneself in a different place or in a body which is differently constituted. It may be a carnal body, as in the Christian assumption that this body will be resurrected. On a higher level, the process is no longer understood in a gross material sense; it is assumed that the resurrection of the dead is the raising up of the corpus glorificationis) “subtle body,” in the state of incorruptibility…
4. Rebirth (renovatio). fourth form concerns rebirth in the strict sense; that is to say, rebirth within the span of individual life. The English word rebirth the exact equivalent of the German Wiedergeburt) the French language seems to lack a term having the peculiar meaning of “rebirth.” This word has a special flavour; its whole atmosphere suggests the idea of renovation , or even of improvement brought about by magical means. Rebirth may be a renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement. Thus even bodily ills may be healed through rebirth ceremonies…
Another aspect of this fourth form is essential transformation, i.e., total rebirth of the individual. Here the renewal implies a change of his essential nature, and may be called a transmutation. As examples we may mention the transformation of a mortal into an immortal being, of a corporeal into a spiritual being, and of a human into a divine being. Well-known prototypes of this change are the transfiguration and ascension of Christ, and the assumption of the Mother of God into heaven after her death, together with her body…
5. Participation in the process of transformation. fifth and last form is indirect rebirth. is brought about not directly, by passing through death and re-birth oneself, but indirectly, by participating in a process of transformation which is conceived of as taking place outside the individual. In other words, one has to witness, or take part in, some rite of transformation. This rite may be a ceremony such as the Mass, where there is a transformation of substances.” (Carl Jung, CW 9I, para 200- 205)
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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.