THE GREAT UNBROKEN CHAIN
Depth Psychology & Genealogy
SPIRIT THREAD
Genealogy is Fractal Ontology
There is no pure individual; the group is inside the individual.
Nature (genetics) and nurture (epigenetics) encompass the biological,
relational, and environmental aspects of life.
Environment * Relationships * Biological Capabilities * Stress * Dynamics * Problem Solving * Patterns The universe is steadily giving birth to itself, producing new information. Metaphorically, it is a self-unfolding story. Individual events are the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ of the evolutionary opus. Events do not pass away into non-existence but remain forever as an indelible part of the whole.
The Tree of Nature includes the evolutionary phylogenetic system of the various forms of life. The very base of everything that exists includes space and time, the laws of Nature, the material particles and the forces acting between them. The vacuum of absolute space, which exists within and without us, is the groundstate.
Death is the completion of a lifetime. An information cycle incorporates all events in which the respective person (the ‘Self’) has acted as an information processing entity. Death is not the end of it all, as we erroneously believe.
The universe as a whole continues to live and grow; not only directed outwardly (in the dimensions of space and time), but also inwardly. In some way, the lifetime of each individual remains part of this ‘story of the universe’- forever, in all eternity. The so-called "vacuum" has a memory. Our psychophysical being is nothing but memory. The body is the unconscious.
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James Hillman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006) http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/Whitlark.htm
Fields of Meaning
Telling ancestral stories was the way that the tellers came to understand their own being. And the same is true today. Campbell speaks of the similar stories that our ancestors shared -- universal ways of telling tales. Such myths allow us to resonate with some greater emotional connection with our world.
In genealogy, we put together our personal and mythic history in a way that reflects nature. The pedigree provides a vast historical panorama for pattern recognition -- the big picture. It is a way of consciously recovering and reclaiming one's deep past via the ancestral field. Putting things together in a meaningful way is one of the basic features of nature,’ according to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi*, 1977.
Potential information is indeterminate latent information that yields factual information once it is taken up and understood, in some way. It is charged with meaning. All kinds of interpretations of a given situation depend upon the receiver of the information and the corresponding context. The ‘real effect’ on the receiver can be regarded as the most important aspect of an information cycle. Genealogy is one such method of accruing new information about oneself and family. It can have a transformative effect.
Depth psychology has ancient roots. Though its antecedents stretch backward toward antiquity, depth psychology begins with Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, two visionaries who called attention to the importance of what lies below the surface of conscious awareness. There are Jungian, post-Jungian, archetypal, and developmental lineages of depth psychology. The study of myth and depth psychology opens the full range of the human senses and psyche.
This dimension of psychic reality is revealed in literature, the expressive arts of different cultures, dreams, and in the collective symptoms suffered by individuals and societies. Concepts at the core of depth psychology are central to genealogy. Ideas such as the importance of image, metaphor, and psyche in personal and cultural expression, and the interplay between the aesthetics of the natural world and the human experience, are deeply ingrained. Depth psychology is a long process of exploration and listening at the margins of all collective thought.
Jung revealed his 'gnostic' orientation his Red Book, but it was not limited to medieval gnostic doctrine. Rather it expressed his direct experience -- the self-knowledge of raw psychic elements, which included his ancestors. Psyche is a dynamic spiritual function.
Jung realized that the ancient practice of alchemy contained a rich symbolic language which mirrored the process of transformation inherent to individuation. He called it "a momentous discovery" -- a process of psychophysical transformation and healing.
The central dynamic in Jungian psychology is the individuation process, psyche's journey toward wholeness, an embodiment of the archetype of the Self. In Jungian psychology, this is done in large part by balancing or uniting the opposites within the psyche, including the feminine and masculine principles, known as the anima and animus.
Archetypal psychology is one of the central strands of post-Jungian theory. James Hillman, (its main proponent), emphasized the development of a mythic sensibility in confronting the complexity and multiplicity of psychological life. Through symbols, the unconscious speaks to us and through us with its visual language for conveying the deep mysteries of life.
In "A Review of the Complex Theory," Jung calls complexes the via regia, or royal road, to the personal and collective unconscious. We explore complexes on multiple levels— personal, familial, group, cultural, and political — looking at their phenomenology, their autonomy, and their biology.
James Hillman wrote, "Psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress." Understanding the connection between mythology and psychology, Jung argued that it is important to our psychological health to know the myth we are living. There are archetypal motifs in fairy tales and myths that appear in our personal and collective psychological lives.
Jung pioneered working with unconscious material in the psyche via Active Imagination. We work with an image or dialogue with an inner figure in the course of doing our genealogy, too. The Red Book contains 16 years of Jung's active imagination, and helps us explore this powerful technique and its relationship to psychic creativity and consciousness. Romantic relationships are often laden with psychological expectations of mythic proportions.
Jung wrote, "The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit—the two really being one." We explore the interrelationship between psyche and soma. Topics include the body as shadow; the body as a site of trauma, healing, and contact with the divine. Bodywork practices like dance, authentic movement, yoga, and breathwork embody the process. Healing traditions facilitate the relationship of the body with the collective unconscious, including concepts like cellular memory, deep fields, and archetypes as bodily-based inherited images.
As Jung saw it, "Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." Many of us feel split off from that nourishment today, living within a worldview which divides the inner from the outer, spirit from matter, and humans from nature. An ecopsychological perspective remedies this malaise by considering individuation as rooted not only in our relationship to self and human others, but to the natural world as well. The importance of place to the psyche includes observation of the natural world as it appears in our dreamscapes.
"There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored." --Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization (283).
"Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence." - Paul Ricœur
Depth Psychology & Genealogy
SPIRIT THREAD
Genealogy is Fractal Ontology
There is no pure individual; the group is inside the individual.
Nature (genetics) and nurture (epigenetics) encompass the biological,
relational, and environmental aspects of life.
Environment * Relationships * Biological Capabilities * Stress * Dynamics * Problem Solving * Patterns The universe is steadily giving birth to itself, producing new information. Metaphorically, it is a self-unfolding story. Individual events are the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ of the evolutionary opus. Events do not pass away into non-existence but remain forever as an indelible part of the whole.
The Tree of Nature includes the evolutionary phylogenetic system of the various forms of life. The very base of everything that exists includes space and time, the laws of Nature, the material particles and the forces acting between them. The vacuum of absolute space, which exists within and without us, is the groundstate.
Death is the completion of a lifetime. An information cycle incorporates all events in which the respective person (the ‘Self’) has acted as an information processing entity. Death is not the end of it all, as we erroneously believe.
The universe as a whole continues to live and grow; not only directed outwardly (in the dimensions of space and time), but also inwardly. In some way, the lifetime of each individual remains part of this ‘story of the universe’- forever, in all eternity. The so-called "vacuum" has a memory. Our psychophysical being is nothing but memory. The body is the unconscious.
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James Hillman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006) http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/Whitlark.htm
Fields of Meaning
Telling ancestral stories was the way that the tellers came to understand their own being. And the same is true today. Campbell speaks of the similar stories that our ancestors shared -- universal ways of telling tales. Such myths allow us to resonate with some greater emotional connection with our world.
In genealogy, we put together our personal and mythic history in a way that reflects nature. The pedigree provides a vast historical panorama for pattern recognition -- the big picture. It is a way of consciously recovering and reclaiming one's deep past via the ancestral field. Putting things together in a meaningful way is one of the basic features of nature,’ according to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi*, 1977.
Potential information is indeterminate latent information that yields factual information once it is taken up and understood, in some way. It is charged with meaning. All kinds of interpretations of a given situation depend upon the receiver of the information and the corresponding context. The ‘real effect’ on the receiver can be regarded as the most important aspect of an information cycle. Genealogy is one such method of accruing new information about oneself and family. It can have a transformative effect.
Depth psychology has ancient roots. Though its antecedents stretch backward toward antiquity, depth psychology begins with Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, two visionaries who called attention to the importance of what lies below the surface of conscious awareness. There are Jungian, post-Jungian, archetypal, and developmental lineages of depth psychology. The study of myth and depth psychology opens the full range of the human senses and psyche.
This dimension of psychic reality is revealed in literature, the expressive arts of different cultures, dreams, and in the collective symptoms suffered by individuals and societies. Concepts at the core of depth psychology are central to genealogy. Ideas such as the importance of image, metaphor, and psyche in personal and cultural expression, and the interplay between the aesthetics of the natural world and the human experience, are deeply ingrained. Depth psychology is a long process of exploration and listening at the margins of all collective thought.
Jung revealed his 'gnostic' orientation his Red Book, but it was not limited to medieval gnostic doctrine. Rather it expressed his direct experience -- the self-knowledge of raw psychic elements, which included his ancestors. Psyche is a dynamic spiritual function.
Jung realized that the ancient practice of alchemy contained a rich symbolic language which mirrored the process of transformation inherent to individuation. He called it "a momentous discovery" -- a process of psychophysical transformation and healing.
The central dynamic in Jungian psychology is the individuation process, psyche's journey toward wholeness, an embodiment of the archetype of the Self. In Jungian psychology, this is done in large part by balancing or uniting the opposites within the psyche, including the feminine and masculine principles, known as the anima and animus.
Archetypal psychology is one of the central strands of post-Jungian theory. James Hillman, (its main proponent), emphasized the development of a mythic sensibility in confronting the complexity and multiplicity of psychological life. Through symbols, the unconscious speaks to us and through us with its visual language for conveying the deep mysteries of life.
In "A Review of the Complex Theory," Jung calls complexes the via regia, or royal road, to the personal and collective unconscious. We explore complexes on multiple levels— personal, familial, group, cultural, and political — looking at their phenomenology, their autonomy, and their biology.
James Hillman wrote, "Psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress." Understanding the connection between mythology and psychology, Jung argued that it is important to our psychological health to know the myth we are living. There are archetypal motifs in fairy tales and myths that appear in our personal and collective psychological lives.
Jung pioneered working with unconscious material in the psyche via Active Imagination. We work with an image or dialogue with an inner figure in the course of doing our genealogy, too. The Red Book contains 16 years of Jung's active imagination, and helps us explore this powerful technique and its relationship to psychic creativity and consciousness. Romantic relationships are often laden with psychological expectations of mythic proportions.
Jung wrote, "The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit—the two really being one." We explore the interrelationship between psyche and soma. Topics include the body as shadow; the body as a site of trauma, healing, and contact with the divine. Bodywork practices like dance, authentic movement, yoga, and breathwork embody the process. Healing traditions facilitate the relationship of the body with the collective unconscious, including concepts like cellular memory, deep fields, and archetypes as bodily-based inherited images.
As Jung saw it, "Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." Many of us feel split off from that nourishment today, living within a worldview which divides the inner from the outer, spirit from matter, and humans from nature. An ecopsychological perspective remedies this malaise by considering individuation as rooted not only in our relationship to self and human others, but to the natural world as well. The importance of place to the psyche includes observation of the natural world as it appears in our dreamscapes.
"There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored." --Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization (283).
"Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence." - Paul Ricœur
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