Should family therapy include your deceased great-great-grandmother? Epigenetics meets after-death c

Firstly, thank you for engaging in the discussion. I can understand why many other guests abstain from doing so because of time concerns and the often quite adversarial stances people take in these forum threads. So this is a rare opportunity, which is much appreciated.

1)
For example a Jewish woman and German man fall in love and marry. The woman's persecuted great-grandmother and the man's Jew-hating great-grandfather become activated and the couple's turmoil reflects this older conflict.

I've often come across other germans of my own age who say, well that doesn't affect us any more, these were our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and we're not like them. Which I've always thought is a cop-out, but this would lend a whole new perspective to that. But I guess, what you're saying is not that these "ancestral spirits" are still around and holding the same grudges and prejudices as they did decades ago, but that what shows up in therapy is more like a personality aspect from the past? So we can at least hope they have realized their mistakes later (after death)?

2) In the example with the Irish participant, could it be confirmed that the ancestors did have this particular problem? Could it have been something that was known in the family and passed on orally?

3) If there really is verifiable information from the past or possibly from deceased people coming across in these constellations, to people who can't have had any prior knowledge, do you ask the participants if this could be documented as evidence, which could then be presented to the public or reported in scientific papers?
 
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What we do know, is that the materialist conjecture that consciousness is extinguished at death...

I don't really know what those terms mean...

...has been falsified by the many instances where accurate factual information comes into the therapy room from somewhere beyond any of the brains in the room.

...but I doubt we can say that. You can look at Helene Gauchou and Ronald Rensink's work at the University of British Columbia, in which they use a Ouija board to access - what they call - non-conscious knowledge, in blindfolded subjects...

https://thinkingdeeper.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/sheldrake-vs-ubc-the-same-experiment/

...and, depending on your perspective on these issues, there are also other ways to explain their results. The point being that we don't yet know how, or where this 'accurate factual information' is coming from.

Although probably not so important for a short period of relationship talking therapy, I think I would have some concerns letting a therapist into my head who believed in things like "dark entities". :eek:
 
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Super psi cannot explain the evidence for the afterlife:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2009/06/survival-and-super-psi.html
(more info at the link)
Spirits have to learn to communicate through certain forms of mediumship and some spirits are better learners than others. Super-psi is not a good explanation for this phenomenon.

Other characteristics of spirit communication vary with the spirit not the medium or the sitters.

Some haunting phenomena are not dependent on the presence of any single person, some of which are ended through spirit communication. Guy Lyon Playfair, William Roll, and Ian Stevenson all thought some poltergeist phenomenon were caused by spirits.

Birthmarks: When a child remembers a past life, and has a birthmark at a location of an injury in the past life, it suggests the spirit body may carry information from one life to the next. It would be absurd to believe the fetus was psychic and was fulfilling a psychological need by unconsciously creating the birth mark.

Shared Death Bed Visions, Shared Near-Death Experiences, and Multiple Witness Crisis Apparitions are not well explained by super-psi. You'd have to be a super-duper-psychic not just a super-psychic to induce hallucinations in other people.

Near Death Experiences: Cases of NDEs where the experiencer has vivid realer-than-real experiences when there is no brain activity and no veridical information, cannot be explained as psi from a living person because there is no evidence of psi and no live person during the experience. These experiences cannot be explained as ESP during an abnormal brain state shortly before or after the experience. Near-death experiencers neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung, and military remote viewer Joe McMoneagle, who have special qualifications to judge the phenomenon, all believed their near-death experiences represented evidence for survival after death.

Drop-in Communicators: A medium might be said to be fulfilling an unconscious psychological need when using super-psi to obtain information about deceased relatives of the sitters. However when the medium brings through spirits who are unrelated to the sitters and who communicate for purposes of their own, there is no psychological motivation. Super-psi cannot explain these cases.

Cross Correspondences: When more than one medium spontaneously, without being prodded by an investigator, brings through parts of a message, and the message only makes sense when the parts are put together, this indicates that spirits are independent of any medium. This also shows that spirits have initiative and the ability to organize complex tasks. Super-psi cannot explain this.

ESP is not Produced by the Brain: ESP is not limited by time or distance. It cannot be explained by the known laws of physics including quantum entanglement. Since human consciousness is capable of ESP, consciousness cannot be the result of any physical process in the brain. Anyone who acknowledges the reality of ESP has already admitted that consciousness is non-physical so they have no grounds upon which to deny survival of consciousness.
 
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The migration of symptoms among family members was researched in the 1950s. We haven't seen this in our practice.

I see. Thanks for joining the conversation! :)

We have encountered dark spiritual entities at times.

I'd be interested in knowing more about these experiences. Are these entities personified clusters of characteristics (I.e. a spirit of addiction or a spirit of rejection) or are they angry deceased humans or non-human? ...reptilian? ...Djinn?

We teach our trainees to work with fields of consciousness beyond the ordinary in their everyday life. Tuning in to the systemic intelligence that inhabits and surrounds us can be done for the ordinary, daily problems and issues of life. We are purposefully avoiding creating a class of "experts" who can access the field on behalf those who cannot. Rather, we feel that the ability to communicate with extended dimensions of consciousness is wired into the human body. Anyone has the capacity.

Cool. :) I presume meditation is a big part of this?

The best thing to ask recently deceased grandparents for is their love and support for your good life. It's a joke, but there's truth in it, that the biggest complaint of those who have passed away is they are unemployed. The next best is to ask them not to leave their unfinished business with you, your siblings or first cousins.

Well I'll certainly do that!

I know many cultures and religions especially shamanistic involved ancestor worship which included appeasing ancestors and praying to them. Seems like they actually understood a lot more about the importance and effects of deceased relatives and we've lost that in our culture. Maybe you guys can help restore some of that knowledge.


Great question. We do a lot of relationship intensives for couples. What we find is that Partner A is repeating a pattern of suffering that is inherited from Ancestor A. Partner B is repeating a pattern of suffering from Ancestor B. But the freaky thing is that Ancestor A and Ancestor B are in conflict casting an ancient wound forward on their descendants. For example a Jewish woman and German man fall in love and marry. The woman's persecuted great-grandmother and the man's Jew-hating great-grandfather become activated and the couple's turmoil reflects this older conflict. In our intensive, we disentangle everyone and bring the couple and their ancestors into harmony. Works wonders.

I think my other half and I could really benefit from this kind of disentanglement... She's half Iranian. We do seem to be repeating the issues of our parents. Don't think she'd go for this sort of spiritualist approach though.

Do you believe in the concepts of karmic debt or is that just another way of impersonally or mechanisticly describing the same thing as dealing with ancestors' issues?
 
This is the account of one of Penny Sartori's correspondents. It's not particularly relevant to the thread, I'm only posting it to show that these connections (with other world entities or what ever we want to call them) seem to begin to occur AUTOMATICALLY (ie not induced) after close brushes with death.


In 2009 I had a heart attack and cardiac arrest at the age of 44. There were many times before and when I was in hospital that I’d feel sick or dizzy and have chest pain. Once in work it happened and I woke up in the cold store with a cut on my head and bad chest pain. When I was in the hospital ward my aunt was visiting me, the next thing I knew I woke up in CCU. Another time I was talking to the doctor and she said ‘are you ok?’ I said yes but there were colours in front of my eyes. I must have been out for a while because I came to with the doctor standing over me asking if I was still there. I have no idea what happened in between me losing consciousness and waking up. I have an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator) pacemaker now.

The day I had the cardiac arrest I was lying in the hospital bed and my wife was visiting then the nurses said to my wife I think you’d better go outside for a few minutes.

All of a sudden I was in a long dark tunnel with voices all around and people calling me. I was just floating down and I could hear voices around me. There was a man at the end of the tunnel calling me. He was a dark figure but I knew he was friendly – it may have been my grandfather. He was calling me towards him.

Next thing I could see the doctor in front of me – I could just see his eyes and teeth and he said to the nurses, ‘it’s ok, he’s back’.

After Effects

Since then some really weird things have been happening to me. I thought I was losing it and I was traumatised after the heart attack so I went to counselling. The more I talked about it the more these things were happening but my counsellor seemed to understand and helped me a lot.
About two or three months after I got home the dog started looking at something behind me, it just had a fixed stare and was wagging its tail while looking at something behind me. I turned and saw a white shadow just disappear.
Then I started having out of body experiences – any time of day. I feel as if I’m drifting away and I can see myself below then find myself in my grandmother’s house. I can see everything that’s going on. I went back to when I was ten or eleven years old. It’s like I’m reliving something that’s already happened.
When I have these experiences and go to my grandmother’s house I can smell the smoke from her cigarette – she always used to have a cigarette in one hand and a rolling pin in the other hand. It’s all so plain and real, I’m actually there again.

When these things happen I can’t respond to anyone in the room with me. My wife said I just look ahead with a fixed stare, I don’t blink. My body is down there but my spirit is up there and they can’t interact with each other.
I hear voices and people calling me then people touching me on the shoulder. I was talking about a dead friend to someone else then heard a whistling noise – there was no one else around so I don’t know where that whistling came from.

When I’m in a relaxed state things happen more. I was sitting at home with just the two dogs in the room with me. The dogs seem to notice if something happens. All of a sudden there were two pieces of paper and one started to flicker and the other one turned over completely right before my eyes. There were no windows open so how do you explain that?

I also get a lot of flashbacks of looking down that tunnel. I’ve had a lot of counselling to help me get over all of this but these experiences just keep happening, I don’t know how to explain them.

I’m not afraid of dying either, my time just wasn’t up. I now live every day for the day and don’t worry about going. I feel as if I’ve got something to do in my life but I don’t know what it is.

When I’m in public places I can see spirits around people. This sounds mad I know but I can see different auras around people, some have white, some have dark the different auras mean different things. The dark auras mean keep away. If I’m watching something like ‘Most Haunted’ on TV I can see something that others who are with me can’t see. On one show there was a mist on the camera but I could see an actual man, I could see him but no one else could.
A friend of the family has been having strange things happening in her house like things moving for no reason. I went to visit one day and could see an old lady at the top of the stairs just looking at me. I said hello and she just disappeared. My friend made me a cup of coffee and I put it down on the side and it fell onto the hearth – it just moved off a stable, solid surface without anyone touching it. I’ve been back to the house twice since then and I haven’t seen that woman again but my friend still senses her presence.

In our house an old man had passed away there before we moved in. I always hear a bang upstairs and it’s always at a certain time. It comes from the room that he died in, I feel as if I am hearing him hit the floor and die.

I don’t know why all of this is happening to me, I can’t explain it. I didn’t ask for it, it just started happening after my heart attack. I’ve had lots of counselling but no one can explain exactly why this has started to happen to me. I just have to learn to accept it and that my life is very different now
 
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First, I'm not sure I'd accept that after death communication is necessarily involved here. I mean, the idea that after death, we'll hang around and be available to get involved in things like family therapy seems questionable. If we go by NDE reports, then after death we make a transition to a spiritual mode of being--something ineffable and far removed from everyday existence.

I'm more in favour of the idea that there are "fields" associated with people who were once living that hang around and are still in some sense accessible. In a way, the perceptions by us of these fields could be allied to the perception of the processes of thought that appear to us as brains--hence no surprise in the correlation between brain processes (2nd person view, as in brain scans) and consciousness (1st person view, as in internal experience). Likewise, no surprise in the possible correlation of epigenetic markers with acquired behaviours. The markers aren't causing the acquired behaviours, but rather are how those behaviours appear to us at a certain level of detail, viz. what we are pleased to call the "molecular" level.

It's the question of causation. People tend to think in terms of physical objects (e.g. atoms) causing something else rather than being simply how correlations are perceived by us; they always go looking for some kind of mechanism based on the idea of physicalism. But an alternative view is that there's no such thing as causation; that's just an idea projected onto correlations. If there is causation, it lies beyond our view/understanding: it is simply the isness of cosmic consciousness, which is axiomatic, primal, and intrinsically inexplicable.

I'm not saying that the idea of causation isn't useful; but at some point, it always breaks down and leads to inconsistencies in our view of the universe. I think that family therapy may be thinking in terms of causation, and whilst that probably leads to useful results, at some point it may well reach its explanatory limits.

I really like what you've written here and stand in agreement, with a couple of qualifications.

Admittedly, our evidence for after-death communication is circumstantial. There is a sensory veil between the living and the dead that obscures what is actually occurring. The lack of strong sensory signals combined with our human capacity of imagination and illusion casts doubts on whether we are literally communicating with the dead or perhaps having an inexplicable experience which we are contextualizing as an ADC. And with the disclaimer, it certainly appears to Emily and I that we are engaging in communication with the remnants of consciousness that survive death.

We "know" specific details and perceive life details with uncanny accuracy. For example, in one session we perceived that a client's great-grandmother was a mail-order bride from Germany. Her displacement from her homeland and family introduced a feeling of unsatisfied yearning that was felt by her great-granddaughter. This woman never felt "at home" with the contents of her life. She was overcome with sadness from out of nowhere and always felt drawn to be somewhere else no matter how many times she moved somewhere else. Our client had no data on her great-grandmother's life, but afterwards discovered through a cousin's Ancestry.com research that our tune-in was factually accurate.

That could certainly be an idea projected onto correlations. I cannot say with confidence how things work behind the veil. Only that people's longstanding sorrows and anxieties release when we make this contact and establish a living relationship between the deceased and the living.

But to your larger point, I fully embrace that the rush to explain and "know" that what is which is axiomatic, primal, and intrinsically inexplicable can actually impede pathways to greater understanding.
 
Yes, I think it is but it troubles me as to just where this could lead us ...sceptics would want us slung into the nut house. Are we really meant to interact with these invisible entities on a daily basis, so to speak. Is it not enough to know that they are there and get on with our brief lives here. Dunno.

There's a strong correlation between "sceptics [church, science, government] would want us slung into the nut house [hell, burned at the stake, psychiatric hospital, revoked license, unemployment] and the reluctance of sensible people to interact with these invisible entities on a daily basis. In our group processes, women especially often feel a surging a deep fear or even panic when they make contact with their own intuitive capacities. Since Roman times, the indigenous people who practice various forms of ADC have been persecuted to near extinction. Consider the worldview of the indigenous cultures that previously populated lands where English is now the dominant language - Danu of Ireland, Scottish Druids, Native American, First Peoples of Canada, Australian Aboriginal, New Zealand Maori, Hawaiians, Zulu. All these peoples practice a form of ancestor reverence. The put that next to the Church, Science and Government authorities that put people holding these beliefs into the nut house or worse.

Interacting with these invisible entities risks punishment. Instead, 20% of all Americans take psychiatric medication. That's our remedy. In our experience, depression, anxiety and most other emotional and behavioral disturbances can be healed when we feel the embodied consciousness that inhabits and surrounds us. Characterizing our existence as "our brief lives here" is how Pfizer wants you to think.
 
In our experience, depression, anxiety and most other emotional and behavioral disturbances can be healed when we feel the embodied consciousness that inhabits and surrounds us.

Dr. Carl Wickland treated psychiatric patients with his wife who was a trance medium.
Thirty Years Among the Dead by Dr. Carl Wickland
https://web.archive.org/web/2014042...iritwritings.com/ThirtyYearsAmongTheDead.html

Dr. Edith Fiore uses hypnotism to contact the spirits causing her patients' psychological difficulties.
"The Unquiet Dead" by Dr. Edith Fiore
 
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I really like what you've written here and stand in agreement, with a couple of qualifications.

Admittedly, our evidence for after-death communication is circumstantial. There is a sensory veil between the living and the dead that obscures what is actually occurring. The lack of strong sensory signals combined with our human capacity of imagination and illusion casts doubts on whether we are literally communicating with the dead or perhaps having an inexplicable experience which we are contextualizing as an ADC. And with the disclaimer, it certainly appears to Emily and I that we are engaging in communication with the remnants of consciousness that survive death.

We "know" specific details and perceive life details with uncanny accuracy. For example, in one session we perceived that a client's great-grandmother was a mail-order bride from Germany. Her displacement from her homeland and family introduced a feeling of unsatisfied yearning that was felt by her great-granddaughter. This woman never felt "at home" with the contents of her life. She was overcome with sadness from out of nowhere and always felt drawn to be somewhere else no matter how many times she moved somewhere else. Our client had no data on her great-grandmother's life, but afterwards discovered through a cousin's Ancestry.com research that our tune-in was factually accurate.

That could certainly be an idea projected onto correlations. I cannot say with confidence how things work behind the veil. Only that people's longstanding sorrows and anxieties release when we make this contact and establish a living relationship between the deceased and the living.

But to your larger point, I fully embrace that the rush to explain and "know" that what is which is axiomatic, primal, and intrinsically inexplicable can actually impede pathways to greater understanding.

Thanks for your reply. Just to be clear, I'm not questioning the veridicality of your perceptions. If you say you perceived a client's great grandmother was a mail-order bride, and that subsequently turned out to be true, I'm happy to accept that. What I'm wondering about is the origin of that perception.

Does it come from the deceased person, or does it come from such traces of her life (the old idea of the "Akashic record", for example) as potentially remain perceptible to, or even influence, the living? Such traces wouldn't have any kind of ongoing "life" or ability to interact in their own right. They would simply exist in a final, irrevocable form and reveal their contents in different ways according to circumstance--which I hazard a guess might depend at least in part on the intention of the experiencer. This sort of thing could apply to a number of phenomena such as mediumship, ghosts, channelling, and so forth.

If reincarnation is true, then who knows, the great grandmother may have reincarnated by now (not to mention possibly many times previously) and currently be alive, though not necessarily as one of her own descendants. Would she too be subject to the constraints of her own past memories? Or, rather, subject to the constraints of the memories of the people in her new lineage? Or, for that matter, both?

On a different topic, do you ever deal with people who have FMS/CFS/ME-like symptoms? If so, in your experience are these sometimes down to past familial events? Are they treatable from that perspective? And what about the case where a person is the first in their lineage to experience something and is suffering from the consequences right now? Do you think you would be able to prevent its transmission to succeeding generations?
 
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I've often come across other germans of my own age who say, well that doesn't affect us any more, these were our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and we're not like them. Which I've always thought is a cop-out, but this would lend a whole new perspective to that. But I guess, what you're saying is not that these "ancestral spirits" are still around and holding the same grudges and prejudices as they did decades ago, but that what shows up in therapy is more like a personality aspect from the past? So we can at least hope they have realized their mistakes later (after death)?

Family Constellations originated in Germany. In the 1970s., German psychologists observed that young people coming into adulthood were frequently experiencing symptoms that were generally associated with war trauma. The standard approach, which was based on early childhood trauma, could not account for the symptoms, as the post-War generation was raised in an unparalleled period of peace, stability and prosperity. The doctors discovered that a student's panic attacks were more closely correlated to their grandparents' war experiences that the patient's own life experience. What grew from this was the realization that it was more fruitful to ask, "Who is your panic attacks?" rather than the more typical, "What happen to you that led to your panic attacks?"

Through some means which we cannot explain, the grandparent's war experience travels a pathway of consciousness that is outside of ordinary sensory communication.

2) In the example with the Irish participant, could it be confirmed that the ancestors did have this particular problem? Could it have been something that was known in the family and passed on orally?

Our client could not obtain certain factual records to support his subjective feeling that sexual abuse was rampant in his lineage. Sometimes, the facts can be confirmed with certainty and other times we validate feelings rather than facts.

3) If there really is verifiable information from the past or possibly from deceased people coming across in these constellations, to people who can't have had any prior knowledge, do you ask the participants if this could be documented as evidence, which could then be presented to the public or reported in scientific papers?

One runs into what Alex refers to as the Big Lie in this regard. We are clinicians first and the research evidence is secondary, It is a rather thankless occupation to try to convince the Steve Novella's and Jerry Coyne's of the world that there is more to consciousness than meets the eye.

That said, we have reams of evidence that representative perception is accurate and specific.
 
Thank you for your prompt reply.

Family Constellations originated in Germany. In the 1970s., German psychologists observed that young people coming into adulthood were frequently experiencing symptoms that were generally associated with war trauma. The standard approach, which was based on early childhood trauma, could not account for the symptoms, as the post-War generation was raised in an unparalleled period of peace, stability and prosperity. The doctors discovered that a student's panic attacks were more closely correlated to their grandparents' war experiences that the patient's own life experience. (...).

Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that at all. I'm a 1970s kid myself and looking back it was absolutely an unparalleled period of peace, stability and prosperity, but there was always this feeling of, well, paranoia and guilt, I guess. Although I've always been interested in psychology and the "fringes" of human experience, reading articles and books and watching documentaries, I've never come across a report about this phenomenon. I guess it demonstrates the general non-acceptance - maybe even suppression - of genuine anomalies in science and society (which to me seems to be even more pronounced here than in other countries).

Through some means which we cannot explain, the grandparent's war experience travels a pathway of consciousness that is outside of ordinary sensory communication..

I think the phenomenon Ian Stevenson was (and now Jim Tucker is) looking into, might be an explanation (only that it's not really explained itself, of course). I've had two cases of young relatives showing strange behaviours and talking about things that were "suggestive of reincarnation" in their first years (posted here). The second seems to imply very strongly that it wasn't only fragments of a former consciousness turning up randomly, but that the consciousness of a deceased person actually "came back" intentionally. The kid seemed to be remembering details of a complicated relationship with me and the "signs" to me were really unambiguous, in a way that felt totally natural (as opposed to super- or unnatural). So I guess I'm a little biased towards the possibilty that reincarnation might occur within families or "emotionally bonded" groups fairly often. But I know that often, cases occur that demonstrate it might not be as "simple" as that.

It is a rather thankless occupation to try to convince the Steve Novella's and Jerry Coyne's of the world that there is more to consciousness than meets the eye.

Yeah, I was afraid you'd say that. Even in forums like these, the agressiveness of this attitude is at times hard to bear. Just don't let it discourage your work to the point of staying away from publicity altogether.
 
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Yeah, I was afraid you'd say that. Even in forums like these, the agressiveness of this attitude is at times hard to bear. Just don't let it discourage your work to the point of staying away from publicity altogether.
I hope Skeptiko manages to give people the chance to criticise specific details, or specific experiments but without indulging in the scoffing and dismissive generalisations that are common on other forums. At least that is the aim :)

It is interesting that epigenetics seems to be turning up a vaguely related phenomenon - animals and humans who have undergone particular conditions such as near starvation, pass on certain temporary genetic changes to several subsequent generations. This is all supposed to be mediated by conventional means - small groups that attach themselves to the DNA that change it temporarily. Of course, this mechanism seems far too limited to explain the phenomena being discussed here.

David
 
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...but I doubt we can say that. ...and, depending on your perspective on these issues, there are also other ways to explain their results. The point being that we don't yet know how, or where this 'accurate factual information' is coming from.

I fully agree we don't know where this information comes from or how it is transmitted and received. What I can assert with confidence is that the insistence of the neuroscientists that it's all a product of brain function does not fit the data. We have spent decades and billions of dollars to confirm the materialist position that consciousness is generated in the brain and when the brain stops - like a depleted battery - there is nothing left. Still, in 2016, there is still not even a credible scientific theory of how the brain produces consciousness. There are correlates galore, but no answer to the hard problem of consciousness.

In our clinical work, Emily and I are able to tune in to information is not available to our brains through ordinary sensory input. It is entirely anecdotal and conducted under non-controlled conditions, but the consistency, specificity and accuracy of the information creates a compelling data set. An example that comes to mind is a session I did for a middle-aged women whose intention was to be relieved of the anxiety that she felt in her home. She was often panicked that disaster was imminent. In my representation of her paternal grandfather (whom she had told me nothing about), I had the distinct and very real sensation of the smell of burning flesh. When I report this, she said that when her grandfather was 10 and living in another country, his father's bed covers caught fire from smoking in bed. The father suffered extreme third-degree burns and died in the home 3 days later. This event occurred decades before the woman was born and was held in the family as a bit of family lore that hardly felt relevant to her adult life. We did a healing ritual for the grandfather and great-grandfather. Afterwards, the woman reported that her anxiety in the home evaporated.

This example in itself proves nothing and opens more questions that I can probably not satisfactorily answer. It is presented as one of countless examples where information that I had no way of knowing in an ordinary sense presented itself in the service of healing.

Although probably not so important for a short period of relationship talking therapy, I think I would have some concerns letting a therapist into my head who believed in things like "dark entities". :eek:

I am not too keen on things like "dark entities" either. Our therapeutic model maps consciousness in three dimensions: ordinary, biological lineage, beyond human scale. There are archetypes of violence, rape, aggression, enslavement, brutality, and murder that are ubiquitous in human experience. Whether you call these archetypes or entities, they exist amongst us and infect our dreams and waking lives. When we work with the trauma of rape, we have found that rape lives within many family lineages like it is its own presence. The archetype of "the rapist" can be represented in the field of a constellation and it often feels like an entity that is beyond the behaviors of any individuals who may have committed the act of rape. We do not bring it in gratuitously, but in service to those who come for a healing experience. When the dark entity of the rapist is seen with clear vision, an open heart and courage, even with love and compassion, its strength diminishes.
 
I'd be interested in knowing more about these experiences. Are these entities personified clusters of characteristics (I.e. a spirit of addiction or a spirit of rejection) or are they angry deceased humans or non-human? ...reptilian? ...Djinn?

Almost without exception, the consciousness of the biological lineage - what we call in our shorthand second dimension - is benign and loving towards their descendants. Many of them suffered terribly and lost everything, leaving behind only the life they created through reproduction. They seem to grieve when what was incomplete or unacknowledged in their lifetimes perpetuates in further generations.

Whereas, the dark entities appear to us to be archetypes or compilations of experience beyond human scale. These have been named and described in many indigenous wisdom traditions. We work phenomenologically, which means we are open to experience what comes into the field of our awareness without needing to create explanatory models for it all.

Cool. :) I presume meditation is a big part of this?

Yes. We open the heart as an organ of perception in meditation.

I know many cultures and religions especially shamanistic involved ancestor worship which included appeasing ancestors and praying to them. Seems like they actually understood a lot more about the importance and effects of deceased relatives and we've lost that in our culture. Maybe you guys can help restore some of that knowledge.

When Roman, or English or Spanish conquerors defeat a local population one of there first actions is to burn down the local temple and construct a church in its place. Rather than say we have lost indigenous wisdom in our culture, I say we eradicated it and continue to suppress it. Even today, some two-thirds of the worlds peoples live in non-modern places where the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany human beings in all their activities. The beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion.


I think my other half and I could really benefit from this kind of disentanglement... She's half Iranian. We do seem to be repeating the issues of our parents. Don't think she'd go for this sort of spiritualist approach though.

Our couple's intensives are our most gratifying work. In two days our intensive process work, we uncover and clear difficult patterns, release shame and unhealthy behaviors, relieve old traumas and emotional entanglements, and free the partners to open their hearts, minds and bodies to positive transformation.

Do you believe in the concepts of karmic debt or is that just another way of impersonally or mechanistically describing the same thing as dealing with ancestors' issues?

Personally, I do not gravitate to the Hindu philosophy of karma and reincarnation. I'm sure they have mapped these fields with far more understanding and accuracy than I have. It just doesn't have strong resonance for me.
 
I fully agree we don't know where this information comes from or how it is transmitted and received. What I can assert with confidence is that the insistence of the neuroscientists that it's all a product of brain function does not fit the data. We have spent decades and billions of dollars to confirm the materialist position that consciousness is generated in the brain and when the brain stops - like a depleted battery - there is nothing left. Still, in 2016, there is still not even a credible scientific theory of how the brain produces consciousness. There are correlates galore, but no answer to the hard problem of consciousness.

In our clinical work, Emily and I are able to tune in to information is not available to our brains through ordinary sensory input. It is entirely anecdotal and conducted under non-controlled conditions, but the consistency, specificity and accuracy of the information creates a compelling data set. An example that comes to mind is a session I did for a middle-aged women whose intention was to be relieved of the anxiety that she felt in her home. She was often panicked that disaster was imminent. In my representation of her paternal grandfather (whom she had told me nothing about), I had the distinct and very real sensation of the smell of burning flesh. When I report this, she said that when her grandfather was 10 and living in another country, his father's bed covers caught fire from smoking in bed. The father suffered extreme third-degree burns and died in the home 3 days later. This event occurred decades before the woman was born and was held in the family as a bit of family lore that hardly felt relevant to her adult life. We did a healing ritual for the grandfather and great-grandfather. Afterwards, the woman reported that her anxiety in the home evaporated.

This example in itself proves nothing and opens more questions that I can probably not satisfactorily answer. It is presented as one of countless examples where information that I had no way of knowing in an ordinary sense presented itself in the service of healing.

I understand what you're saying, but I think in the end my experience is probably somehow represented in/through my brain, it's just that it is my brain now, my brain in the past, my brain in the future, other peoples brains, other organisms etc. I speculate that similar space-like and time-like patterns seem able to become coherent, and interfere with each other outside of our perception of space-time, not that that will probably make any sense to you.

Anyway, I have no other issues with what you have said, I think it's great you have found a way to help people, and I have absolutely no reason to dispute anything else you have said there. Indeed all the good therapists I've worked with seemed intuitive, and each used many different ways of bringing this 'stuff' out, whether in dramas, role play, drawings, sand box, photographs, diaries, just talking/feeling, or pinned to the chair using orthodox transactional analysis etc... and invariably when 'we' got it, we both often felt it slot into place at precisely the same moment. All of them were very experienced, and over time, all of them had adopted a rounder, more expansive, open minded view of what might be going on.

In the example you gave, that feels very much the way I would expect a medium to work, but without any of your psychoanalytical training.
 
Personally, I do not gravitate to the Hindu philosophy of karma and reincarnation. I'm sure they have mapped these fields with far more understanding and accuracy than I have. It just doesn't have strong resonance for me.

Well karma was also an excuse to keep the caste system in place, and thus much like Christian notions of Heaven & Hell it's very suspect given how such ideas are to exploitation.

One of the reasons religious authority is best tamed by secularism, if we have any hope of getting to the truth of these matters.
 
Well karma was also an excuse to keep the caste system in place, and thus much like Christian notions of Heaven & Hell it's very suspect given how such ideas are to exploitation.

One of the reasons religious authority is best tamed by secularism, if we have any hope of getting to the truth of these matters.

The truth is in responding to that question I first wrote that I had difficulty with the concept of karma because whenever I felt into it, I bumped into the caste system. When I read it back before posting, I decided to delete that because it feels like I have opened up enough to chew on without bringing in more controversial views. I'm appreciative of your naming that aspect of karma in specific and the motivations of religious authority in general. I fully agree.
 
The truth is in responding to that question I first wrote that I had difficulty with the concept of karma because whenever I felt into it, I bumped into the caste system. When I read it back before posting, I decided to delete that because it feels like I have opened up enough to chew on without bringing in more controversial views. I'm appreciative of your naming that aspect of karma in specific and the motivations of religious authority in general. I fully agree.

Of course it seems actual research into reincarnation doesn't suggest anything like a caste system, just as the majority of NDEs don't (AFAIK) suggest Heaven and Hell work the way salvation/damnation mechanics ("believe in X or be damned forever") suggest.
 
An example that comes to mind is a session I did for a middle-aged women whose intention was to be relieved of the anxiety that she felt in her home. She was often panicked that disaster was imminent. In my representation of her paternal grandfather (whom she had told me nothing about), I had the distinct and very real sensation of the smell of burning flesh. When I report this, she said that when her grandfather was 10 and living in another country, his father's bed covers caught fire from smoking in bed. The father suffered extreme third-degree burns and died in the home 3 days later. This event occurred decades before the woman was born and was held in the family as a bit of family lore that hardly felt relevant to her adult life. We did a healing ritual for the grandfather and great-grandfather. Afterwards, the woman reported that her anxiety in the home evaporated.
wow... great story.


Our therapeutic model maps consciousness in three dimensions: ordinary, biological lineage, beyond human scale.
this is such a cool breakdown... seems to fit a lot of the data.
 
What I'm wondering about is the origin of that perception.

Does it come from the deceased person, or does it come from such traces of her life (the old idea of the "Akashic record", for example) as potentially remain perceptible to, or even influence, the living? Such traces wouldn't have any kind of ongoing "life" or ability to interact in their own right. They would simply exist in a final, irrevocable form and reveal their contents in different ways according to circumstance--which I hazard a guess might depend at least in part on the intention of the experiencer. This sort of thing could apply to a number of phenomena such as mediumship, ghosts, channelling, and so forth.

Our perceptions of all consciousness - on our map we divide them into ordinary, biological lineage and beyond human scale - are filtered through our brains and bodies. A metaphor is to think that you are blindly fed a taste a bowl of perfectly seasoned minestrone soup. Then, your priest, professor or government regulator punishes you if you claimed it's salted. You not only have to convinced them that it must be salted because you can taste the salt, but further, you must present data to prove that salt exists at all and explain how it got in the soup. Emily and I - among many others - are convinced (based on our tasting) that consciousness that originates from our biological lineage and beyond is an important ingredient in the soup we call "Health, Emotions, Behaviors and Relationships." Every taster's experience is going to be a little different. All attempts to explain where these elements of consciousness come from, how we perceive them and how we integrate them will be inaccurate and incomplete to a degree. The salt is lost in the soup. We know it's there, but we can't extract it with our intellect and determine it's origins.

And still, we all want to know and cannot help but make up explanations. Neither the Christian heaven nor the spiritualist cosmology that the deceased are all hanging out together with the dog happily awaiting our passing over nor the Hindu view that souls sequentially reincarnate into an array of human and other lifeforms are satisfying for me. And against that backdrop, I reluctant to invent a new cosmology based on my limited experience and my own salty brain.

The explanations that hold the most resonance with my experience come from Rupert Sheldrake and Robert Lanza's Biocentrism. Here's a link to Sheldrake speaking about morphic fields and Family Constellations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JydjryhEl5o

We are clinicians, not researchers. Our intention is to access the ordinary, ancestral and spiritual dimensions of consciousness to create healing processes that are illuminating and life-transforming. From within that container, using the heart as an organ of perception, we are able to identify specific traumas from past generations that continue to affect living descendants. Our therapeutic method reverses these effects and unties the binding knots to the past, so people can move forward without burden.

In some way we don't fully understand, consciousness survives death and remains in relationship with the living. The "Akashic record" seems to fit well with our understanding.

If reincarnation is true, then who knows, the great grandmother may have reincarnated by now (not to mention possibly many times previously) and currently be alive, though not necessarily as one of her own descendants. Would she too be subject to the constraints of her own past memories? Or, rather, subject to the constraints of the memories of the people in her new lineage? Or, for that matter, both?

We tend to follow biological pathways. That is not to dismiss or negate reincarnation. Just to emphasize that our intention is to help people with real-life difficulties and this is what works for us and our clients.

On a different topic, do you ever deal with people who have FMS/CFS/ME-like symptoms? If so, in your experience are these sometimes down to past familial events? Are they treatable from that perspective? And what about the case where a person is the first in their lineage to experience something and is suffering from the consequences right now? Do you think you would be able to prevent its transmission to succeeding generations?

Absolutely, yes. We are not medical professionals in any sense. From an ethical perspective, we need to be cautious not to promote Family Constellations as a medical modality. With that disclaimer, many people come to us with physical symptoms and diseases which are not being successfully treated otherwise. We have good success with people dealing with FMS/CFS. It is too soon to know whether we are promoting health in future generations, but extrapolating from our work with lineages, it would seem that clearing trauma works forward as well.
 
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