When we are stuck in bad situations, experiencing dark emotions, or feeling broken and alone, we take for granted that it is “I” who suffers. The many thousands of Constellations done around the world suggest this psychological model is incomplete.
There is more to us than a unique human body, personal history and mind. Yes, we are our individual selves, but we are also the sum of experiences and memories that comprise our biological lineage. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and the countless ancestors behind them literally live on in our minds and bodies.
If you are dealing with a painful circumstance or emotion that refuses to improve, it is very likely to be much older than you. Instead of dissecting the actor’s brain, we need to understand the play.
Many scientists working at the edges of knowledge acknowledge the limitations of explaining the mind in terms of classical physics. Steve Grand in his book Creation: Life and How to Make It, writes, “To understand life, mind, consciousness, and soul, I believe we have to turn our intuitive interpretation of the world inside out.”
His analysis is consistent with the body of evidence I am gathering from Constellations. Human life is a persistent phenomenon, with an enduring memory and consciousness. While I cannot do justice to his ideas in this newsletter, he convincingly asserts that intelligence, mind, and memory are a wave in motion.
We cannot define our identity though the physical matter that comprises our brains. “Recall the story of the old craftsman who was very proud of his tools, ‘I’ve had this hammer forty years,’ he’d say. ‘Of course, in its time it has had two new heads and three new handles,’”
Is it the same hammer? Are you the same person you were at age 10? Not a single atom in your body today was there two decades ago. What survives in you that breathed and loved a century ago? What parts of your creation will live on in the hearts and memories of those you touch?
We may very well be a surviving life form that grows new heads and bodies as the old parts wear out. The practical meaning of this is that if you have a problem, situation, or feeling that refuses to get better, it may not be yours. It may be a remnant of an archaic memory that is much older than you. Gaining clarity about what happened and to whom makes problems evaporate or become much lighter.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
How Constellations Work: Personal & Continuous Consciousness
Experience tells us that quick fixes and near miraculous healings are illusory or patently false. Do Constellations really provide profound and lasting benefits in only one or two sessions? If they do, what is a plausible explanation for how they work?
Constellations open a portal to a domain of consciousness that is well described in First People’s traditions, but nearly eradicated within the cosmology of science and technology. Everyone who accesses the Internet lives in an electronic universe. Here, the scientific consensus is humans perceive, transmit and receive information exclusively through the senses. Within this model, mind, memory, and behavior are individually unique. Consciousness = Brain.
Tens of thousands of Constellations worldwide suggest that this model is incomplete. There is another dimension of mind, memory, and behavior that is not our personal history. We cannot access it with the thinking mind, so we are easily convinced it doesn’t exist. However, when we open up the Constellation process, we clearly perceive another layer of being.
Beside our personal history and learned consciousness, we contain a continuous history and consciousness. We are not purely individuals, but also receptacles of genetic memories. Imagine a set of nesting dolls where the large outer shell is the newest incarnation containing your personal history, memory, and personality. Imbedded within are your parents, their parents, and their parents. Also resident are traces of traumatic events. The facts and stories may be lost, but the effects echo for many, many generations. The outer layer of personal identity struggles with problems, fears, and difficult relationships. Beyond your personal history, ask the question, “Who is there with me when I feel this way?” The answer is difficult to discover by talking or thinking. With courage and focus, it can be felt in the stillness and silence of the Constellation.
Once the nested individuals are perceived and their stories are felt in the body, the problems they were causing relax, release, and slowly dissolve. Freed from the burden of theGhost in Your Genes, the outer layer of personal identity moves towards positive resolution.Are Constellations Paranormal? With Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Rupert Sheldrake
Our technological culture straddles a great philosophical chasm between world views. One embraces spiritual visions of universal connection and the other subscribes to strict materialism.
Is it possible to bridge the gap between proponents of collective consciousness and critics who insist the mind is only brain function?
I recently exchanged e-mails about Constellations, representative perception, and non-local communication with the preeminent astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I asked whether the non-local information I perceive in Constellations has a plausible explanation. For example:
What seems commonplace to me, is far fetched or even delusional to others, including many of those engaged in the sciences. How is it possible for me simply standing and feeling for "mother" to gain awareness of her long deceased older brother?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson responded that my understanding of this phenomenon was probably faulty, i.e., these hits were gleaned from subtle cues, educated guesses, or were in normal proportion to the number of misses which I dismiss or ignore.
According to Tyson, the hypothesis that someone's detailed personal data - not resident in my brain -can be perceived or discerned in silence amounts to a claim of supernatural powers. "The laws of physics compellingly argue that we know all the ways that information can move from one point in time and space to another."
He added that in all eras, certain humans have claimed the ability to ascertain information that is not presented to the 5 senses. "The history of such claims over the past two thousand years is one of abject failure. People who claimed non-materialist accounts of the natural world have routinely failed in the face of properly conducted experiments."
The lack of credible supportive experimental data along with a well establish set of theoretical laws, lead him to be extremely skeptical that my examples are normal qualities of human perception.
How can I argue my subjective personal experience against conclusive experimental research? As he notes, "The methods and tools of science have wholly replaced our feeble five senses as tools of inquiry to the natural world. So what something looks like to your senses is no longer the measure of what is true in the physical world."
Being a left-handed, colorblind, Jewish heretic makes me well accustomed to standing 3 standard deviations from the norm. However, that means eclectic, not endowed with super powers. While these occurrences are incidental to the Constellation process, Tyson's responses give me much to weigh and consider.
I reported my exchange to another scientist whose work I respect, Rupert Sheldrake. Over the last 30 years, Sheldrake has built a large experimental database of tests of psi phenomenon that produce positive results.
He responded, "I think it’s ridiculous to pin the argument down to the well-understood laws of physics. We have no explanation even of biological morphogenesis in terms of the known laws of physics, and less understanding of consciousness. To assume that all these things will eventually be understood in terms of laws of physics is an example of promissory materialism. It’s essentially a faith position and not one you can ever refute by argument."
Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Gary Schwartz, and many other clinicians and scientists are engaged in experimentation and theory building to create the ground for these Constellation experiences to stand. An excellent source of news and debate on these questions is Skeptiko.com
I fall back to an observation from Stephen Jay Gould, "Each of us has to have a personal metaphysics. There are questions that are formally unanswerable on which nonetheless every individual must take a position in order to integrate various pieces of his life."
Science wrought to its uttermost becomes myth.
Is it possible to bridge the gap between proponents of collective consciousness and critics who insist the mind is only brain function?
I recently exchanged e-mails about Constellations, representative perception, and non-local communication with the preeminent astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I asked whether the non-local information I perceive in Constellations has a plausible explanation. For example:
- Standing as a client's mother, I felt the presence of an older brother who died in infancy. The client insisted his mother had only a younger brother, but a phone call with her afterward confirmed my perception.
- Representing a client's sister, I said an obscure idiom. Shocked, the client said it was her sister's signature phrase.
What seems commonplace to me, is far fetched or even delusional to others, including many of those engaged in the sciences. How is it possible for me simply standing and feeling for "mother" to gain awareness of her long deceased older brother?
Neil DeGrasse Tyson responded that my understanding of this phenomenon was probably faulty, i.e., these hits were gleaned from subtle cues, educated guesses, or were in normal proportion to the number of misses which I dismiss or ignore.
According to Tyson, the hypothesis that someone's detailed personal data - not resident in my brain -can be perceived or discerned in silence amounts to a claim of supernatural powers. "The laws of physics compellingly argue that we know all the ways that information can move from one point in time and space to another."
He added that in all eras, certain humans have claimed the ability to ascertain information that is not presented to the 5 senses. "The history of such claims over the past two thousand years is one of abject failure. People who claimed non-materialist accounts of the natural world have routinely failed in the face of properly conducted experiments."
The lack of credible supportive experimental data along with a well establish set of theoretical laws, lead him to be extremely skeptical that my examples are normal qualities of human perception.
How can I argue my subjective personal experience against conclusive experimental research? As he notes, "The methods and tools of science have wholly replaced our feeble five senses as tools of inquiry to the natural world. So what something looks like to your senses is no longer the measure of what is true in the physical world."
Being a left-handed, colorblind, Jewish heretic makes me well accustomed to standing 3 standard deviations from the norm. However, that means eclectic, not endowed with super powers. While these occurrences are incidental to the Constellation process, Tyson's responses give me much to weigh and consider.
I reported my exchange to another scientist whose work I respect, Rupert Sheldrake. Over the last 30 years, Sheldrake has built a large experimental database of tests of psi phenomenon that produce positive results.
He responded, "I think it’s ridiculous to pin the argument down to the well-understood laws of physics. We have no explanation even of biological morphogenesis in terms of the known laws of physics, and less understanding of consciousness. To assume that all these things will eventually be understood in terms of laws of physics is an example of promissory materialism. It’s essentially a faith position and not one you can ever refute by argument."
Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Gary Schwartz, and many other clinicians and scientists are engaged in experimentation and theory building to create the ground for these Constellation experiences to stand. An excellent source of news and debate on these questions is Skeptiko.com
I fall back to an observation from Stephen Jay Gould, "Each of us has to have a personal metaphysics. There are questions that are formally unanswerable on which nonetheless every individual must take a position in order to integrate various pieces of his life."
Science wrought to its uttermost becomes myth.
Are Constellations Alchemy?
In 1975, I studied with Prof. Betty Jo Dobbs at Northwestern University. Formerly a high school science teacher in rural Arkansas, she shocked her family by moving to Cambridge University, England, where she became a scholar of Newton's alchemy. Newton's occult papers were suppressed for 200 years until unearthed by the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes. After cataloging them, he wrote, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians."
Professor Dobbs taught that alchemy was the quest for material/spiritual transformation. Prior to Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, no one conceived these aspects could split apart and be studied separately.
After 1700, science and spirit divorced. Science became heartlessly materialistic; spiritualism devolved into superstitious naiveté.
Einstein and quantum physics solved the material side of alchemy, the transformation of elements through nuclear reactions. Dr. Dobbs believed the compelling task for humanity was to find the solution to alchemy's other side, the transformation of the human heart.
For 25 years I created and ran conflict resolution and violence prevention programs. This is how I came to Germany and the Constellation process ten years ago.
Today, I see every Constellation as an alchemical transformation. You present a problem that robs your life of joy. The Constellation reveals how the traumas that befell your grandparents weigh on your heart like lead. Transformation comes when you hear the ancestors. They mourn when you carry their burdens and rejoice when you receive their gifts.
A century after Einstein discovered the formula to build an atom bomb, in a world of unimaginable suffering, growing numbers of humans are learning to turn lead into gold. Your heart is the instrument of transformation. It absorbs your elders' sorrows and returns kindness, love, and compassion to those in your care. That is alchemy.
Professor Dobbs taught that alchemy was the quest for material/spiritual transformation. Prior to Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, no one conceived these aspects could split apart and be studied separately.
After 1700, science and spirit divorced. Science became heartlessly materialistic; spiritualism devolved into superstitious naiveté.
Einstein and quantum physics solved the material side of alchemy, the transformation of elements through nuclear reactions. Dr. Dobbs believed the compelling task for humanity was to find the solution to alchemy's other side, the transformation of the human heart.
For 25 years I created and ran conflict resolution and violence prevention programs. This is how I came to Germany and the Constellation process ten years ago.
Today, I see every Constellation as an alchemical transformation. You present a problem that robs your life of joy. The Constellation reveals how the traumas that befell your grandparents weigh on your heart like lead. Transformation comes when you hear the ancestors. They mourn when you carry their burdens and rejoice when you receive their gifts.
A century after Einstein discovered the formula to build an atom bomb, in a world of unimaginable suffering, growing numbers of humans are learning to turn lead into gold. Your heart is the instrument of transformation. It absorbs your elders' sorrows and returns kindness, love, and compassion to those in your care. That is alchemy.
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