Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web

What remains unlived, unresolved, unredeemed and unanswered will be passed on to future generations.

It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the persona

By the time Jung writes his autobiography, his observations have led him to conclude that the figures of the unconscious are often indistinguishable from the “spirits of the departed.”

The psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.

For example, at the personal level the image of mother is formed out of our personal experiences of mother. At the familial level, she is the long line of mothers in our ancestral lineage. At the cultural level, she is depicted in movies, art, and literature in a variety of forms.

Destiny, according to Meade, is the “divine errand set deeply within us.”

Developing a relationship with the historical family which is inherent in each individual, the contents of the unconscious, the mythic land of the dead and the ancestors, is the work of individuation and the way in which psyche is developed or transformed. Jung’s psychology rests on this foundation.

“Fate appears as whatever limits, restricts or even imprisons us; yet fate is the territory where we must go if we are to awaken to our inner destiny.”

what Jung called the “central fire,” the pure archetypal energy that provides the patterning for all of its varied expressions through the levels.

Jung concludes, “are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain knowledge.”