'Every one of those unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests'. --Gurdjieff
Genealogy of the Soul
Longing for the Lost Other
Here is the book of thy descent,
Here is the book of the Sangreal,
Here begin the terrors,
Here begin the miracles.
The History of the Grail – 12th Century, Anonymous
"Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed in order to wrench us loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five hundred years ago. Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is certainly no advantage when it comes to progressiveness... . [...] Plurimi pertransibunt- but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthly ground of his being." -Jung, 'Mind and Earth', 1931
The Quest for Transcendence
Jung describes Individuation as a process of transformation that incorporates the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. This natural process facilitates the integration of the psyche. The pursuit of self-knowledge is a pilgrimage to our deep center with its divine inner spark or Light.
We seek to remember what our soul has always known. When the psyche heals it produces mandala-type images, balancing dark and light, male and female, yin and yang aspects of nature. The genealogical image is more than a metaphor: you are the center of multiple radiant lines of descent, all of which converge in your unique manifestation.
It can be combined with transpersonal techniques, including hypnotherapy, regressions, shamanic healing, vison quest, mystic arts, seasonal celebrations, spirit journeying, psychodrama, bodywork, trauma release, meditation, soul retrieval, kin contact, and personal mythology. We consider using healing therapies on our ancestors in special cases. Woolger's Deep Memory Process suggests you can use such therapies to:
• clearly recognize the core issues or complexes running your life
• journey in time to resolve childhood and other traumas
• vividly relive and resolve emotional conflicts through a healing psychodrama
• develop somatic awareness of deep memories to release them from your body
• let go of old unwanted ancestral patterns and influences
• integrate wounded soul fragments (“past lives”)
• clear your energy field of negative influences
• open up with love to higher spiritual resources within yourself
We have to find and heal the Grail King within, reowning the projections and meaning we have conveniently let others carry for us, for good and evil. In that process we may glimpse and lose the Grail many times over. Genetic descent is amplified creatively by a recursive psychological descent into the unconscious to retrieve our lost soul and lost ancestors. It establishes an intergenerational feedback loop.
Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically. Individuation is a self analysis, a self discovery, analyzing your own psyche. It serves as the guide or goal of a quest—the Holy Grail, the Elixir of Immortality, the Philosopher's Stone.
Like genealogy, individuation is the story of you as the unique individual you are. Genealogy, like a dragon's hoard, is a treasure hard to attain, yet priceless to the person who holds it. This most collective situation becomes the most individual experience because no two individuals incorporate it in exactly the same way.
We all search for something. In genealogy we narrow that search for the Holy Grail and the Precious Blood. In this case, in genealogy the blood is precious because it is our own lifegiving blood. Legend tells us the Blood and the Grail are united. In medieval literature the Grail is often associated with a feast -- it is, indeed, a great feast of metaphors attached to the primary icon.
Legend has it there is a fellowship or underground Family of the Grail that furthers and protects its interests in all worlds. The "underground stream" is yet another symbol of the Grail. The Grail appears in many forms, including radiant light and the sangreal of the Holy Bloodline that flows from the Davidic line, including the Desposyni descendants of the Holy Family, perhaps including offspring of Jesus and Mary Magdalene -- or so they say.
Genealogies bring revelations, which may belong to millions of descendants but feel extremely important because they are part of our own personal heritage. It comes with strong spiritual and mythic overtones from the elder god-kings, the royal Davidic/Solomonic line, the family of Jesus, the Merovingians, Gnostics, Grail Kings, Camelot, and crusading Templars. Internal conflict may arise when loyalties are torn between opposing forces, each of which are ancestral lines.
In fact, the symbolic treasure of genealogy is that it encodes the entire transformational process from the war of opposites to the reconciling royal marriage. Genealogy show s graphically just how intimately our very existence is through those who gave us faces. This knowledge, more than a pedigree on paper, is the treasure hard to attain that nourishes and sustains us in our intergenerational Being. This is, in fact, The Grail, which serves the divine spark within.
Phillip Stephen Lansky concludes, “Interestingly, the “chymical wedding” of alchemy was a symbol for the simultaneous constellation of psychic opposites, which we have already suggested concurs with a state of physiological paradox. Might not the contents of the two archetypal flasks represent two amines, serotonin and noradrenalin, being poured simultaneously into a marriage bath in the hypothalamus?”
The Grail symbolizes life, spirituality, youth, health, joy, purity, creativity, the unconscious, and generativity [Jung and von Franz 1970, 114]. Spirituality means the perception of transcendent meaning and participation in a higher purpose and numinous experiences. It harmonizes the conflicting opposites of male-female, rationality and emotion, dark and light, good and evil, etc. [Jung and von Franz 1970, 194]. Wholeness requires a coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites).
William Blake describes it paradoxically: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good and evil is Heaven just as evil and good is Hell."
The conflict of opposites in Parsifal's psyche needed to be discovered for him to get back into the Grail Castle. He needs to expand his consciousness and travel, psychologically speaking, far beyond the naive fool, to find the Grail Castle and discover himself, to be conscious of and reconcile the opposites in his psyche.
The Fisher King, or the Grail King, represents a limited consciousness, one who is too rational and is incapable of solving the real problem his kingdom faces [Jung and von Franz 1970, 212]. The successor who will free him was prophesied to be a wholly innocent fool who would ask a specific question. "The myth is telling us that it is the naive part of a man that will heal him and cure his Fisher King wound. It suggests that if a man is to be cured he must find something in himself about the same age and about the same mentality as he was when he was wounded" [Johnson 1989, 11].
Jung himself experienced this woundedness after his break with Freud that opened his deep unconscious, flooding him with imagery that took a lifetime to assimilate and analyze. He speaks of his soul-loss and efforts to retrieve it in his visionary tome, The Red Book, which has only recently been published, many years after his death.
The Red Book illuminates all of his theories of unconscious dynamics. As in dreams, we are all of the characters in mythological tales, and their stories hold deep meaning for us when they are activated by our own life experiences. They call us into the hero's adventure and one of their ways of doing so is the call to trace our genealogical roots.
The Wounded Fisher King
Jung and the Ancestors
The long-awaited release in the 21st century of Jung's RED BOOK (2009) reveals just how much of a role his ancestors and inner figures played in his own psychic life. They led directly to the formation of many of his theories of psychic dynamics.
Historically, in Western societies the focus of genealogy was on the kinship and descent of rulers and nobles, often arguing or demonstrating the legitimacy of claims to wealth and power. The term often overlapped with heraldry, in which the ancestry of royalty was reflected in their coats of arms. Modern scholars consider many claimed noble ancestries to be fabrications, such as the Anglo-Saxon chronicles that traced the ancestry of several English kings to the god Woden.
But Jung healed and transformed his own fragmentation by taking up imaginal relationships with his inner figures. He developed what might be called a Dialogical Gnosis -- a Way of Knowing informed by the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious, the plenum of inherent knowledge and experience.
Jung was engaged in the process of individuation -- cognitive, empathic engagement with the living and discarnate.Engagement implies committment, rather than participation, per se. Respect for the freedom of others and the intention toallow their personhood expression is a basic tenet of engagement
One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it. Individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.
New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated with concurrent experience and meaningful psychological insight. The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates unique personality. The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns.
If the ego can withstand the irrational temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that,
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude.
But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates a resonance, the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos", reflecting the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below." The Secret Garden of the Rose
The Rose in mysticism and Hermetic Philosophies is a profound symbol of consciousness and the soul personality. It symbolizes consciousness projected into the material form. Consciousness is symbolized in a very apt and beautiful way as a flowering process and an unfolding manifestation. This flowering , blooming and unfolding of its petals in a perfect
mandalic symmetry, represents man's divine inner consciousness being revealed as layers of his being open up to reveal its ever becoming center, the Inner Self. To the Rosicrucians the symbol of the Rosy Cross is sacred. The Rose crucified on the cross is the symbol of the true divinity of humanity. The cross represents the four cardinal points of being in a
balanced state. The crossing of the vertical and the horizontal lines represent the conjunction of the opposites. The vertical, being the positive and active, conjuncts the horizontal, the negative and passive. It is at this conjunction point, representing balance nd harmony, that the rose flowers and unfolds itself. The cross also represents the body of man with
outstretched arms as his whole earthly plane and his heart being again at a conjunction between the superiors and inferiors, head or heaven, feet or earth, and also between left and right as opposition between the forces of light and darkness, life and death .
To the initiates this symbol of divine consciousness crucified or infused upon and in his physical body is a most profound and sacred mystery of the incarnation of the soul.
A beautiful Hermetic saying of the Rosicrucians is,
"Ad Rosam per crucem, ad crucem per Rosam."
-Steve Kalec
More and legends and myths of the rose:
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/rose.htm
ROSA MUNDI
http://www.clanoftubalcain.org.uk/rosamundi.html
"Take the fayer Roses, white and red / And joyne them well in won bed. /
So betwixt these Roses mylde / Thou shalt bring forth a Gloriuse chylde."
(Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen C, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 254) Cult of the Archetypal Feminine
The Mother of us all is also the Earth, as the light of the divine womb (primal source) and the mystery of divine light that informs and transforms into matter. The Sangreal is a cult of bloodline. Many who are of it are unaware or unawakened to that genealogical and gnostic awareness.
Many who think they are 'awake' are merely enthralled with the fugue state or eruption of symbolic material which is actually a form of dissociation. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous i
Genealogy of the Soul
Longing for the Lost Other
Here is the book of thy descent,
Here is the book of the Sangreal,
Here begin the terrors,
Here begin the miracles.
The History of the Grail – 12th Century, Anonymous
"Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed in order to wrench us loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five hundred years ago. Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is certainly no advantage when it comes to progressiveness... . [...] Plurimi pertransibunt- but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthly ground of his being." -Jung, 'Mind and Earth', 1931
The Quest for Transcendence
Jung describes Individuation as a process of transformation that incorporates the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. This natural process facilitates the integration of the psyche. The pursuit of self-knowledge is a pilgrimage to our deep center with its divine inner spark or Light.
We seek to remember what our soul has always known. When the psyche heals it produces mandala-type images, balancing dark and light, male and female, yin and yang aspects of nature. The genealogical image is more than a metaphor: you are the center of multiple radiant lines of descent, all of which converge in your unique manifestation.
It can be combined with transpersonal techniques, including hypnotherapy, regressions, shamanic healing, vison quest, mystic arts, seasonal celebrations, spirit journeying, psychodrama, bodywork, trauma release, meditation, soul retrieval, kin contact, and personal mythology. We consider using healing therapies on our ancestors in special cases. Woolger's Deep Memory Process suggests you can use such therapies to:
• clearly recognize the core issues or complexes running your life
• journey in time to resolve childhood and other traumas
• vividly relive and resolve emotional conflicts through a healing psychodrama
• develop somatic awareness of deep memories to release them from your body
• let go of old unwanted ancestral patterns and influences
• integrate wounded soul fragments (“past lives”)
• clear your energy field of negative influences
• open up with love to higher spiritual resources within yourself
We have to find and heal the Grail King within, reowning the projections and meaning we have conveniently let others carry for us, for good and evil. In that process we may glimpse and lose the Grail many times over. Genetic descent is amplified creatively by a recursive psychological descent into the unconscious to retrieve our lost soul and lost ancestors. It establishes an intergenerational feedback loop.
Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically. Individuation is a self analysis, a self discovery, analyzing your own psyche. It serves as the guide or goal of a quest—the Holy Grail, the Elixir of Immortality, the Philosopher's Stone.
Like genealogy, individuation is the story of you as the unique individual you are. Genealogy, like a dragon's hoard, is a treasure hard to attain, yet priceless to the person who holds it. This most collective situation becomes the most individual experience because no two individuals incorporate it in exactly the same way.
We all search for something. In genealogy we narrow that search for the Holy Grail and the Precious Blood. In this case, in genealogy the blood is precious because it is our own lifegiving blood. Legend tells us the Blood and the Grail are united. In medieval literature the Grail is often associated with a feast -- it is, indeed, a great feast of metaphors attached to the primary icon.
Legend has it there is a fellowship or underground Family of the Grail that furthers and protects its interests in all worlds. The "underground stream" is yet another symbol of the Grail. The Grail appears in many forms, including radiant light and the sangreal of the Holy Bloodline that flows from the Davidic line, including the Desposyni descendants of the Holy Family, perhaps including offspring of Jesus and Mary Magdalene -- or so they say.
Genealogies bring revelations, which may belong to millions of descendants but feel extremely important because they are part of our own personal heritage. It comes with strong spiritual and mythic overtones from the elder god-kings, the royal Davidic/Solomonic line, the family of Jesus, the Merovingians, Gnostics, Grail Kings, Camelot, and crusading Templars. Internal conflict may arise when loyalties are torn between opposing forces, each of which are ancestral lines.
In fact, the symbolic treasure of genealogy is that it encodes the entire transformational process from the war of opposites to the reconciling royal marriage. Genealogy show s graphically just how intimately our very existence is through those who gave us faces. This knowledge, more than a pedigree on paper, is the treasure hard to attain that nourishes and sustains us in our intergenerational Being. This is, in fact, The Grail, which serves the divine spark within.
Phillip Stephen Lansky concludes, “Interestingly, the “chymical wedding” of alchemy was a symbol for the simultaneous constellation of psychic opposites, which we have already suggested concurs with a state of physiological paradox. Might not the contents of the two archetypal flasks represent two amines, serotonin and noradrenalin, being poured simultaneously into a marriage bath in the hypothalamus?”
The Grail symbolizes life, spirituality, youth, health, joy, purity, creativity, the unconscious, and generativity [Jung and von Franz 1970, 114]. Spirituality means the perception of transcendent meaning and participation in a higher purpose and numinous experiences. It harmonizes the conflicting opposites of male-female, rationality and emotion, dark and light, good and evil, etc. [Jung and von Franz 1970, 194]. Wholeness requires a coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites).
William Blake describes it paradoxically: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good and evil is Heaven just as evil and good is Hell."
The conflict of opposites in Parsifal's psyche needed to be discovered for him to get back into the Grail Castle. He needs to expand his consciousness and travel, psychologically speaking, far beyond the naive fool, to find the Grail Castle and discover himself, to be conscious of and reconcile the opposites in his psyche.
The Fisher King, or the Grail King, represents a limited consciousness, one who is too rational and is incapable of solving the real problem his kingdom faces [Jung and von Franz 1970, 212]. The successor who will free him was prophesied to be a wholly innocent fool who would ask a specific question. "The myth is telling us that it is the naive part of a man that will heal him and cure his Fisher King wound. It suggests that if a man is to be cured he must find something in himself about the same age and about the same mentality as he was when he was wounded" [Johnson 1989, 11].
Jung himself experienced this woundedness after his break with Freud that opened his deep unconscious, flooding him with imagery that took a lifetime to assimilate and analyze. He speaks of his soul-loss and efforts to retrieve it in his visionary tome, The Red Book, which has only recently been published, many years after his death.
The Red Book illuminates all of his theories of unconscious dynamics. As in dreams, we are all of the characters in mythological tales, and their stories hold deep meaning for us when they are activated by our own life experiences. They call us into the hero's adventure and one of their ways of doing so is the call to trace our genealogical roots.
The Wounded Fisher King
Jung and the Ancestors
The long-awaited release in the 21st century of Jung's RED BOOK (2009) reveals just how much of a role his ancestors and inner figures played in his own psychic life. They led directly to the formation of many of his theories of psychic dynamics.
Historically, in Western societies the focus of genealogy was on the kinship and descent of rulers and nobles, often arguing or demonstrating the legitimacy of claims to wealth and power. The term often overlapped with heraldry, in which the ancestry of royalty was reflected in their coats of arms. Modern scholars consider many claimed noble ancestries to be fabrications, such as the Anglo-Saxon chronicles that traced the ancestry of several English kings to the god Woden.
But Jung healed and transformed his own fragmentation by taking up imaginal relationships with his inner figures. He developed what might be called a Dialogical Gnosis -- a Way of Knowing informed by the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious, the plenum of inherent knowledge and experience.
Jung was engaged in the process of individuation -- cognitive, empathic engagement with the living and discarnate.Engagement implies committment, rather than participation, per se. Respect for the freedom of others and the intention toallow their personhood expression is a basic tenet of engagement
One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it. Individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.
New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated with concurrent experience and meaningful psychological insight. The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates unique personality. The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns.
If the ego can withstand the irrational temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that,
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude.
But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates a resonance, the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos", reflecting the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below." The Secret Garden of the Rose
The Rose in mysticism and Hermetic Philosophies is a profound symbol of consciousness and the soul personality. It symbolizes consciousness projected into the material form. Consciousness is symbolized in a very apt and beautiful way as a flowering process and an unfolding manifestation. This flowering , blooming and unfolding of its petals in a perfect
mandalic symmetry, represents man's divine inner consciousness being revealed as layers of his being open up to reveal its ever becoming center, the Inner Self. To the Rosicrucians the symbol of the Rosy Cross is sacred. The Rose crucified on the cross is the symbol of the true divinity of humanity. The cross represents the four cardinal points of being in a
balanced state. The crossing of the vertical and the horizontal lines represent the conjunction of the opposites. The vertical, being the positive and active, conjuncts the horizontal, the negative and passive. It is at this conjunction point, representing balance nd harmony, that the rose flowers and unfolds itself. The cross also represents the body of man with
outstretched arms as his whole earthly plane and his heart being again at a conjunction between the superiors and inferiors, head or heaven, feet or earth, and also between left and right as opposition between the forces of light and darkness, life and death .
To the initiates this symbol of divine consciousness crucified or infused upon and in his physical body is a most profound and sacred mystery of the incarnation of the soul.
A beautiful Hermetic saying of the Rosicrucians is,
"Ad Rosam per crucem, ad crucem per Rosam."
-Steve Kalec
More and legends and myths of the rose:
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/rose.htm
ROSA MUNDI
http://www.clanoftubalcain.org.uk/rosamundi.html
"Take the fayer Roses, white and red / And joyne them well in won bed. /
So betwixt these Roses mylde / Thou shalt bring forth a Gloriuse chylde."
(Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen C, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 254) Cult of the Archetypal Feminine
The Mother of us all is also the Earth, as the light of the divine womb (primal source) and the mystery of divine light that informs and transforms into matter. The Sangreal is a cult of bloodline. Many who are of it are unaware or unawakened to that genealogical and gnostic awareness.
Many who think they are 'awake' are merely enthralled with the fugue state or eruption of symbolic material which is actually a form of dissociation. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous i
RSS Feed
