karma from progenitors?

[Ivone]

I'm asking myself is there is a thing like karma which can influence on our life from our progenitors? If our fathers, grandfathers, grandgrandfathers (and so on) did bad things in the past, can that influence on us today? Sometimes I feel it can. My life is full of bad luck, problems, and sad things, and I don't understand why 'cause I really didn't do anythig so wrong in my life. But, as I heard, some of my progenitors did. Does it mean something for me, in this life? If it does, what can I do about it? Does someone can tell me something about that? Thanks, Ivone.

 

[Kisito]

Hello Ivone, I think that everybody here will say to you that the karma concerns only the soul. You cannot undergo the karmiques faults of your ancestors. Unless one of your ancestor it is reincarnated in you. Then you will undergo the consequences of its errors. But your new life gives you the opportunity to improve you.
Then I think that you should not confuse with the genetic influences. It is as the series of cars that has the same defect, but the drivers are different.

 

[Mal7]

Theories of karma often come parcelled with the idea of reincarnation, on which understanding bad things in one life could be paying off karmic debts from a previous incarnation.

Also within the karmic interpretation of a situation, while bad things might be bad in themselves, it could also be considered good that they are happening, as karmic debts are being repaid.

 

[Laura]

On the other hand, there is a sort of "karma" that is passed on from parents to children in epigenetics. Perhaps there is something similar on the soul level? You know, as in "as above, so below" and vice versa?

 

[Mal7]

I had quite a bad flare-up of eczema about a dozen years ago, and thought I would try Chinese Medicine, so I went along to a Chinese Medicine place who gave me 1 acupuncture session, and some plants to boil up and drink, and some white cream to put on it.

They surprised me somewhat by asking if either of my parents had eczema, I said my father had had some.

They advised one course of treatment for clearing up my eczema temporarily, using just the herbs and white cream, and a longer and more expensive course to clear it up permanently and, as far as I understood, to stop me passing on a disposition for eczema to any children I might have.

 

[anart]

I had quite a bad flare-up of eczema about a dozen years ago, and thought I would try Chinese Medicine, so I went along to a Chinese Medicine place who gave me 1 acupuncture session, and some plants to boil up and drink, and some white cream to put on it.

They surprised me somewhat by asking if either of my parents had eczema, I said my father had had some.

They advised one course of treatment for clearing up my eczema temporarily, using just the herbs and white cream, and a longer and more expensive course to clear it up permanently and, as far as I understood, to stop me passing on a disposition for eczema to any children I might have.

It would make sense for any type of doctor to ask if your parents or family has eczema since eczema is directly linked to gut permeability issues which are usually brought about by food sensitivities (gluten/dairy/sugar/etc.) - which, of course, are genetic. Of course, gluten sensitivity is pretty much pandemic now. If you'd like more information on that, the diet and health section is filled with it!

 

[Gaby]

It seems that Gurdjieff is quoted as saying the following:

“You know “Justice” is a big word - it is a big thing in the world. Objective things are not small things like microbae, they go according to law, as the law has accustomed them to go. Remember; as you sow, so you will reap. Not only people reap, but also families and nations. It is often that that which happens on earth comes from something which was done by a father or a grandfather. The results converge on you, the son or the grandson, it is you who have to regulate them. This is not injustice, it is a very great honor for you; it will be a means for you to regulate the past of your father, grandfather, great-grandfather. If misfortune come to you in the youth, it means that someone has brought them – for this you must reap. He is dead, it is another who reaps. You must not look at yourself egotistically. You are a link in the share of your blood. Be proud of it, it is an honor to be this link. The more you are obliged to repair the past, the more you will have remorse of conscience. You will succeed in remembering all that which you have not done as you should in the past. Those things which you have done contrary to "JUSTICE“ have mortified your grandfather. Thus you can have ten times more remorse of conscience and your worth will augment in proportion. You are not the tail of a donkey. You have responsibilities, a family. All your family, past and future, depends on you. Your entire family depends on the way how you repair the past. If you repair for everyone, it is good. If you do not repair for everyone, it is bad. You see your situation. Logically, do you see what "Justice“ is? Justice is not occupied with your little affairs, unredeemed pledges, it is preoccupied with big things. It is idiotic to believe God thinks of small things. It is the same with Justice. Justice does not touch all that, and at the same time nothing is done on earth without it. Search for the reasons. You are obliged to have a position of responsibility in the line of your blood; you must work more to repair the past. It is difficult to understand all at once.”

Which can be tricky to say the least as it depends on each situation and context.

 

[momo]

Hello!
Regarding Epigenetics, I found Bert Hellinger very interesting, though quite controversial.

Here's a quote about the Theoretical Concepts summarized by an Article in the "Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy"
_http://www.anzjft.com/pages/sample_articles.php?oldcommand=article_search&id=395&searchtext=stiefel&category=&page=1

Theoretical Concepts

Hellinger’s approach is based on several theoretical concepts. These are well outlined in Weber’s book Zweierlei Glück [Second Chance] (Weber, 1994), in the English re-working of the book by Hellinger, Beaumont and Weber (Hellinger, 1998) and in Zawidowski’s Family Staging (Zawidowski, 1999). These concepts explain processes that lead to either smooth family functioning or to an unbalancing of the family equilibrium and resulting symptom development.

1. The Family ‘Clan’: The Right to Belong to a System of Love
According to Hellinger’s model, family members are connected by a deep bond of love. Every person born or brought into the system by marriage has the right to belong. The completeness of the system is important and no one should be excluded. A family system in Hellinger’s model is multigenerational, including children, their parents and grandparents, the parents’ siblings, and sometimes great-grandparents and anybody who has made space for someone else. A previous spouse, a deceased child, or a stillborn baby may belong to the system. Every member must have his or her special place. Deceased people belong to the system as long as a current family member has a significant memory of that person. Since family members have a right to be part of the system, exclusions disrupt the family. They unbalance the family equilibrium and a member of a subsequent generation may try to rectify the imbalance (see further below.)

2. Hierarchical Order: One’s Special Place
Family groups organise themselves according to a specific hierarchical order, following a chronological hierarchy within an immediate family and a generational hierarchy in relation to the wider family system. In a new family the first born child, alive or deceased, occupies the first place, the second born the second place, and so forth. If there have been previous partners, the first spouse takes the first position, followed by the second spouse, etc. These hierarchies are ‘natural’. However, within the intergenerational context, the order is reversed. When a new family is founded, the previous generation allows the new family to take precedence. The hierarchical order must not be violated. When the family system is ‘in order’ and everyone belonging to the system has his or her honoured and respected place in mind and heart, family members will experience a sense of joy, harmony, completeness and contentment (Hellinger, 1998).

3. The Group Conscience: Systemic Equilibrium
Hellinger assumes that extended family groups have a group conscience. The group conscience is governed by principles of fairness and loyalty. The rules of the conscience bind family members to the group in the form of ‘moral’ obligations. The group conscience acts in the service of the group but the processes remain largely outside people’s conscious awareness. The conscience judges whether or not the actions of family members are in accordance with the rules of the system, and if rule violation has occurred, will press for retribution. We believe the concept of the group conscience overlaps with Boszormenyi-Nagi’s concept of Relational Ethics. Relational Ethics can be understood as an unspoken systemic contract, which is based on the principles of transgenerational solidarity and fairness (Boszormenyi-Nagi, 1987: 309).

4. Symptom Development: The Violation of Rules
The violation of rules can take the form of an exclusion of a family member or may result from an imbalance between giving and taking.

Here's another (very critical) article, explaining how he found his work connecting with Rupert Sheldrakes work:
_http://skepdic.com/hellinger.html

According to Hellinger, we have "unconscious connections with the fates of family ancestors" that must be revealed if psychotherapy is to be effective. He thinks that Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphic resonance best explains how we get "entangled" in the fates of our ancestors. "Fields of energy" have "memory and influence" that connect us in the present with people, places, and animals from the past. In short, Hellinger's "unconscious connections" are not genetic influences, nor are they repressed memories. They are thought of as psychic fields of energy. Like many New Age therapies, this one hypothesizes a psychic energy that must be in harmony to function properly, whose imbalance is the cause of physical and mental ill health, and whose structure is somehow related to quantum physics. One of Hellinger's models, Dr. Albrecht Mahr calls this field of energy "the knowing field."

Hellinger as a person seems to be very deep in the Catholic problem - according to the above article, he states having "cured" someone from homosexuality...

Thought you might find this interesting.

Personally, I have experienced and felt the family connection and would not be surprised if there was really a mechanism on the (quantum??)physical level.
I have also noticed that if I get into the role of a friends family member - like being present at my friends parents house - I can practically feel the different energy.

But I really don't know much about this - it just seems very logical, since the substance in the center of our being has been past on physically by those who are our ancestors. From cell to cell, from system to system - from generation to generation, and additionally, the behavioral patterns should have an influence, too, at least from the mother's side, because even if you do not grow up with your parents, you would have spent 9 months inside of your mum.

Greetings,
momo

 

[Gertrudes]

Interesting question Ivone, I have been pondering about this lately myself.

While a few years ago I would see Karma as more confined to the individual, my view changed when I first read Gurdjieff's quote linked by Psyche (thanks for that Psyche!).
At this stage I see us all as embedded within two levels of what you may call Karma, one more personal, relating to the individual soul's history, and another that involves us all, as part of a whole that is the humankind. It isn't as black and white as saying that because my father killed a man, I am directly responsible for it, or that I am as much of a killer as my father. But it is rather that I am the result of all that is behind me, and therefore a link between the past and what will be through me defined as the future. I, and all of us, have, therefore, an incredible power in our hands, since we are shaping the future, conditioned by what happened before.

It would also partly explain why history repeats itself, it's as if lessons unlearned keep presenting themselves to us, sometimes in an increasingly challenging way. I see it as being trapped in a loop of something we haven't yet, as a species, learned, the same way we find ourselves trapped in personal loops. Our personal history reflecting in some ways the whole of history of mankind. I don't think that the rules of learning and history itself change between individual and group, if that makes sense. As above so below, as they say :)

Justice is not occupied with your little affairs, unredeemed pledges, it is preoccupied with big things.

Adding to the above, when reading on how life develops and evolves from a biological perspective, we come to see that nature isn't concerned with the individual, or even with one individual species, but rather with it's own survival as nature itself. An interconnected whole of many species and varieties of materials that interact towards the sustainment of that whole. In this context, we could perhaps see men as a subgroup of that greater whole whose path follows similar rules, in that each individual man is part of the intricate web that is mankind, with all it's history.

This isn't to say that we're doing a great job at understanding our role within the group and taking personal responsibility for it, but rather that where we are at now, is the direct result of what went before, and will directly affect what is ahead.

Well, this is just my working hypothesis at the moment :)

Thought you might find this interesting.

Thanks for sharing momo.

 

[Ivone]

Thank you all, especially Psyche for Gurdjeff's quota. I found all your comments very helpful and interesting, but still remains the question: how one can repair the past? What can you do to help your family, how you can repair the damaged blood line? Recent I have found a Hawaian prayer for that problem. It goes something like this: "Oh, Creator, Father, Mother and Son all in One, If I or any member of my family, relatives or progentors EVER, from begining of our creation until today had offended You and Your family at any possible way, please forgive. I'm sorry. Let that cleans and take away all negative karma, all negative energy or influece on me and my family. Let it cleans and transform it in a pure light. Let it be so. Thank you. Love you."
I'm not sure if it's enough, but maybe is good to try. What do you think about it?

 

[mkrnhr]

Hi Ivone,
"Repair" is achieved through life, how we respond to its lessons and how we participate to the universe. There are certain lessons that keep repeating in under different aspects until we learn them. That's why knowledge helps to take the rational decisions when possible and avoid the traps of irrational reactions, and make a shift. It is only through doing (The conscious work) that we achieve something, and that is achieved through working on the self, how we think, feel, act, react, etc. OSIT

 

[Gaby]

I'm not sure if it's enough, but maybe is good to try.

I think forgiveness can help in the sense that if you dwell on self-pity patterns then a letting go can help break the vicious cycle of the narcissistic wound. I guess it depends on each context and family dynamics. Working in favor of your destiny might help heal the family's wounds in the great scheme of things. Working in favor of one's destiny might not necessarily come across as subjectively desirable to some family members, nevertheless it might be the right thing to do for every single individual who is member of that family unit, past, present and future.

 

[Mal7]

Am I far off the mark in thinking part of the nature of 3rd density beings is a kind of illusory sense of the separate nature of their own individual consciousnesses? If our consciousnesses are not really entirely discrete units, but connected with a more universal consciousness, then karma could be operating on all sorts of levels from the individual upwards. People sometimes talk for example of the karma of a nation, or the karma of a conquering tribe that displaced an indigenous tribe etc.

On a practical level, the ways of karma are probably always going to be somewhat mysterious. If we knew everything about why everything happened, then we wouldn't be in the kind of position we are in, learning the lessons we are learning. Hence pragmatically, it is possibly better to start with the here and now, and look at our present situation, rather than assuming that a bad blood-line or mis-deeds of family members from several generations ago are what is weighing on our present existence.

Bad things happened to Job in the bible because God wanted to test his faith. A somewhat silly story perhaps, but perhaps it is an example of bad things being opportunities to test our values.

If for some reason you consider patience a virtue, and want to practise it, but everyone around you is always very nice and co-operative with you, then you don't have many opportunities to practise being patient. On the other hand, if you have some very annoying people in your life, that may be a bad thing, but it provides a good opportunity for practising being patient.

 

[obyvatel]

On both my father's and mother's sides of the family, I have observed some patterns that have been repeating at least for 3 generations. One painful example is the broken relationship between two siblings who were at one time so close to each other that people knowing them at the time would not believe that a day would come when they would not even see each other's faces ever again. Happened to my maternal grandfather (A) and his brother (B). In the next generation both A's two children AA and AB(my mother and her brother) as well as B's two children BA and BB suffered the same fate. In the third generation, BA's two children BAA and BAB had the same fate. The precipitating events leading to this outcome haven't been that serious - not any of the usual stuff like property disputes and the like. Also it didn't look like a cumulative effect of small disagreements boiling over. So overall, I do not know how to explain this in any way other than some type of "family karma" to be understood in the sense that Gurdjieff used the term.

I agree with Momo's point about Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields being applicable in this general context of "family karma" - at least morphogenetic fields seem to provide a viable explanation. I also think that this is related to the points about the importance of history that Laura has made in the "Comets and the Horns of Moses".

The general saying "history tends to repeat itself" could likely be related to such "fields" at different levels. We can clearly see this at the personal level - where our own habits repeatedly lead us to certain types of situations and outcomes. At the family level, "family karma" derived from family history seems to exert similar influence on the behavior of individuals in their mutual relationships as well as tie in to the personal habits. At the wider social level, similar dynamics are described in the Horns of Moses.

All this has some parallels to mathematical modeling of non-linear dynamics of complex systems. An interesting aspect there is the concept of "attractors" which Laura has referred to. In maths, "attractors" can be described as "equilibrium solutions" - which are solutions to which differential equation(s) tend to converge on for some given range of parameters or starting conditions. Applied to systems, there are some more likely states that systems evolve (in the sense of varying in time) to. An analogy could be like rolling a ball into a field which is full of tracks and pot-holes. The ball would likely fall into a track and come to rest at a pothole. The wider the track or the hole, bigger is the associated "basin of attraction" that attracts the ball in that hole. History has a role in forging such tracks through repetition which makes it more likely for it to repeat itself unless one recognizes such tracks and holes they lead to and work consciously to avoid them.

 

[Kisito]

Difficult to be made a precise idea in spite of the skills of each.
We are all on this forum thanks to Laura's books. In his writings it seems indicated well that, when the man dies, his soul (3 D) leaves its body and goes 5D there before to be reincarnated a new body which will help its soul to evolve.
So, what is the genetic link?.
I well want to emit the hypothesis that individuals can undergo the same traumas or the events as their ancestors, but it could be bound to two things.
1-genetic programs could be transmitted from generation to generation.
2- An individual can continually reincarnated in his own family as he has not evacuate his trauma.

Otherwise, the alternative hypothesis would that the soul would nested stuck or trapped in the genetic material since his fall 309,000 years ago! This corroborates the fact that even death doesn't liberate the soul. The soul 5D would be effectively connected with the genetic bodies human being.
It could be the fact that the soul is reincarnated through a conduit almost similar genetic (family) and available. So souls would be reincarnated first of all through their own family, as far as the availability of body, then through their own people, then through their own race. It would thus be more difficult that a soul is reincarnated in another race. For the soul, the genetic mixing help this by opening highways genetic. Souls would circulate more easily in the genetic conduits which are familiar and close to them.
The human soul would be trapped through its genetic affinity.