The Dark Side of Each Human Heart Still Exists

Generations
“May the most Holy, most sacred, most adorable, most incomprehensible and ineffable Name of God be forever praised, blessed, loved, adored, honored, thanked and glorified in Heaven, on earth and in the hells by all the creatures of God, and by the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. – The Golden Arrow prayer of ‘Reparation’.
The Jewish and Catholic doctrine of ‘suffering souls’ has yet to come to full fruition as ‘common knowledge’ among the people.  At His death on the Cross Jesus descended into the depths, into the caverns of the past.  Other modalities in the world treat the depths of the soul of man in their non-sacramental cultural belief systems.  However, God is Creator of all things and He is Merciful and Loving and Patient.  Even the Christian and Jewish fountains of grace have long been neglected for other ‘cisterns’.  Again God has mercifully ‘carried’ ignorant souls from the beginning.  While there is God’s justice unto the third and fourth generation He set forth mercy unto the thousandth generation.  The answer to unresolved ‘sin issues’ is nailed to the Cross carried there by God Himself.  Our part in the Great Drama still has to be lived out in each one of our lives.
Jung, as much as I have come to mistrust his work overall, did find himself as the son of a doubting Protestant pastor in the uncomfortable position of dealing with the ‘unresolved sin issues’ in the souls of men.  More than anyone else Jung has brought light to bear on the reality that what is not dealt with properly is thrust into the dark and often morphs into aberrations to meet crucial, critical needs for reparation and healing in the souls and psyches of all people.

“Am I my brother’s keeper? ‘   You better believe it.  Absolutely.

But first we must know ourselves. 

        Soul Wounds

"Just as we seek a doctor without any delay and hasten to apply remedies if some blow or wound comes over our body; so we should act with regard to the wounds of our souls."  ~Saint Caesarius of Arles
Breaking the Chains
“The departed souls of our relatives need us as much as we need them. There is a unique power of healing that only our waking consciousness can generate. Some of us are plagued with psychological disturbances, which we have psychically inherited from those close to us who have died. Every unresolved trauma or other unresolved  (sin) psychic issue is passed on from one generation to the next, until the chain is broken. Breaking the chain means bringing the dark into light, making what has been unconscious conscious. That is the job of the living and only we can do that. That is our purpose in life.
Jung writes in the Red Book (RB) “If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never ending, the life of history and inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race”. Before we can become who we are meant to be, before we can live our own life, we must descend into the shadow left by those who have gone before us.
If we surrender to the natural movement of the soul, we can and must bring forth pieces of the personal and collective unconscious that need to come into the light. This is growth. This is healing. This is becoming.

But maybe we want to remember some of the old ways and honor the dead. As Jungian warriors we may want to sit quietly and reflect on what has died within us, what traumas have we inherited from our personal and collective ancestors. What is it in our lives that needs to be faced and owned? Who are the hungry ghosts in our soul? How can their energy be released and transform in the light of consciousness?

... This level of consciousness is usually hard-earned. It is life’s gift after much inner work, focused concentration and often much emotional suffering. It comes like an unexpected embrace by Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom. It is the relief of dew drops calming parched skin. Surely one gets there only on one of the roads less traveled. “Stop thinking and relax”. Be still.  Relax down into your bones, because without that deep relaxation one is not able to receive, not what is “out there” nor the images and guidance we all have available from within. ~ Exhale, relax, let go ~ that is a good start for all things.”         ~essay on Jung

―The Two-Sided Man ―a poem included in Kim summarizes the ambivalence and the co-equal admiration for God and Allah found in Kipling’s writing.  In the Greek it is Janus.  All of this now has developed into a penchant for the modality of ‘ambiguity’ in religion, philosophy and psychology.  It is the ‘point of battle’ pointed out by St. Paul.

The true battle is within.  St. Catherine of Siena and many saints lived and wrote of the spiritual combats.  Recognition does not justify rebellion and license.

If one reads of the experiences of St. Padre Pio or St. Faustina one soon sees the spiritual aspects in Creation.  Suffering souls in Purgatory have appeared to many believers to seek their aid in being released from unresolved sin issues. Jung rightly maintains that it is our responsibility to seek to obtain mercy for those who ask it. Within every cell of our body we ‘belong’ to the generations of the past which we pass on to every generation of the future.  It is the ‘garment’ we are given at Conception.  It is a sacred trust.

God is the Father of all the families of the earth it states in Scripture.

It is not only ‘in the land of the ancient ones’ but within our own immediate families that we encounter profound spiritual battles. The dark shadows assail our children whether we are religious or not.  R.D. Laing’s children reflect these torments well.  He was rarely at peace tormented with addictions from which he never freed himself.

 “ He was a pioneering psychiatrist who blamed parents for the psychological problems of their offspring. But as a father, RD Laing was depressed, alcoholic and often cruel. What would he have made of the latest tragedy to hit his own family - the death ...of his son, Adam?

... Before speaking, Adrian Laing takes a small, precise sip of his cappuccino and carefully wipes away the specks of froth from his top lip. 'When people ask me what it was like to be RD Laing's son,' he says, 'I tell them it was a crock of shit.' He laughs, shaking his head.
The question of what it was like to be the child of one of the 20th century's most influential psychotherapists has been playing on Adrian's mind of late. 'It was ironic that my father became well-known as a family psychiatrist,' he says, 'when, in the meantime, he had nothing to do with his own family.'

His background left Laing with an abiding antipathy towards the nuclear family. By the time of his death he had fathered six sons and four daughters with four women over a period of 36 years.

... Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.
The Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz puts it a different way. Laing, he wrote in 2004, displayed 'an avoidance of responsibility for his first family, indefensible since his line had been that the breakdown of children could be attributed to parents and families.'

'Dad solved other people's problems - but not his own'  ~Laing’s daughter

~Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley.  The Observer, 31 May 2008 Guardian UK

Back then, the dark side of the human heart took over most of Europe.  In the name of racial purity and absolute power, it turned hatred and violence into hungry gods eager for blood and death.  The Nazis changed the world forever, but as hard as they tried to stamp out Jewish life, they couldn’t.  ~Elie Wiesel

The Dark Side of Each Human Heart Still Exists

    More seriously still, our intergenerational workshops have revealed to us

graphically that children’s minds can be unwittingly imprinted by the Holocaust

experiences of prior generations. Such transmission is one of the most vexing aspects of

the Holocaust. Isn’t it bad enough for survivors to have been traumatized? Must they also

be unwilling vehicles for trauma to their offspring? But then trauma is not just; and its

unfairness is universal.

Transgenerational Trauma

    The unprecedented horrors of the vast demonic evil of the Holocaust, the Shoa, which clearly the demonstrated the evils residing in the heart of each person have brought to the surface the need for not only recognition of our own fragmented selves but its medusa-like nature in projection onto the many scapegoats in our families and society.  That each of our children do bear our unconscious evils is well known.  Unfortunately the dark heritage is too often required—like father like son...

“... The younger the child, the more vulnerable it is…They imbibe and respond to their parents’ physiological and behavioural responses and both become imprinted in the developing brain and its connections.

Between 3 and 7, language and thinking develop, but are not cohesive.

.. Children’s own physiologies, sensations, feelings, behaviours and attitudes alternate between imbibing and rebelling against parents’ over-silent or over-loud responses. In either case they are drawn into their parents’ traumas, and are secondarily traumatized by them.

They experience double trouble: not only are they required to adjust to their

parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they

must cope with their own automatic survival responses to their parents. They may not

understand either. Their own stories may be in untellable fragments.

And as happened with their parents, when thought glimmers beyond automatic

reactions in these children of survivors, they may feel guilt; for having brought on their

parents’ suffering, not having rescued their parents from their troubles, not enlivened

them sufficiently; not remembered or not forgotten the Holocaust enough, in accordance

with conflicting parental demands...”

Only God can provide the avenues of healing.

“...when people have unresolved, unhealed trauma, they often pass on their fears and anxiety, unconsciously, to their children and it's not unusual, under these circumstances to see transgenerational trauma...

"Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History"  ~Cathy Caruth

Caruth offers a framework for understanding history that is not based on linear empiricism, but on observation of delayed responses and "other intrusive phenomena". Through this observation, we can begin to fill in the gaps left behind in the wake of trauma, to better understand the trauma's place and its implications, and to orient the history around it, the same way we understand the nature of a trauma by observing the manifestations of the effects of the trauma on the victim, what triggers it, what hallucinations are suffered by victims. If the victim cannot cognitively grasp at the traumatic event himself, the event can still be understood peripherally.

... Michael Bernard-Donals writes in the case traumatic memories, that "testimony marks the absence of events, since they did not register on, let alone become integrated into, the victims' consciousness." So testimony is not about the history of the event, so much as it is about the effect of the event on the victim. Setting this within the framework Caruth has laid out, testimony is about the act of departure, of walking away, and what happens when one manages to walk away, what one can recover after walking away. Furthermore, testimony is an act of asking recognition for the fact that the testifier has managed to walk away, and acknowledgement of what it is they walked away from.
‘Delayed Manifestations”

God reminds us: ‘Their blood cries out from the earth...”

In the delayed manifestation of the generational mystery, we and they are paying for what has been done.  We pay for our own sins but justice requires reparation to the community that has been harmed by the evil.  From the beginning it is required of each person to ‘make things right’.  Serious wounding of a soul must be atoned and set right within society for ‘No man is an island.’  If the contagion were TB or any other disease the transmission would be understood with a society’s communal understanding, research, treatment methods and healing arts with ‘healing’ places.  This same philosophy and belief must be incorporated to include dealing with soul and psychological wounds and diseases.

...” Here is where the limits of psychoanalysis are revealed: even as it tries to get to the origins, it doesn't offer us a solution for the now. What are the measures to take in dealing with these manifestations? Can we, in effect, perform a kind of damage control? ‘

Yes.  Christ’s shed blood ‘atones’ for every sin of every person but we must accept it, come to understand it, and then help wash the feet of our brethren and serve them in shouldering the cross they carry.

Order from Confusion Sprung

     If you love ... you will perceive the divine mystery in things, and once perceived, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly.     ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

   The mirror which confronts us every morn…humbling ourselves to admit that ‘a struggle’ is taking place at all…~Eve Tushnet

Excerpt from The Kingdom of God by Jessica Powers
Not toward the stars, O beautiful naked runner,
not on the hills of the moon after a wild white deer,
seek not to discover afar the unspeakable wisdom,-
the quarry is here…

“What does it mean, ‘to remember’?  …It is to live in more than one world...~Elie Wiesel

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Dark lightning’s electric shock, l’malheur,

Je n'ai plus qu'un seul cri du cœur :

"J'aime pas l'malheur ! J'aime pas l'malheur !"

Laying bare Tree’s twisted roots, O Seigneur!

Ab los que tenan pura devocio, O Devot Christ,

entends ma voix qui t'appelle, sorrow’s tryst,

Nail-bruised, betrayal’s comely fist.

Le cri d'un aigle blessé, l'annonce de Baptiste!  ~3/1/11