How to Create an Inner Family Meditation Despite Rationalistic Doubts (an Hommage á Strauss-Howe and to the Freudian inner “multiple personality” concept)
The problem for me with inner-family meditation which dr. Margaret Paul calls “innerbonding” at the same named site of her is that she says ( in itself rightly) that the inner Loving Adult or the Higher Power can be named randomly.
“Some may call it Jesus others Allah or Buddha or Nature or anything.” (Interestingly she omits to mention in her videos the “Eternal” which was the first Biblical god-name from which others originated. But she does mention this age old name in her books.) She quotes the Jungian originated 12 Steps of different abstinent addict groups. The goal in NA and in dr Margaret Paul’s system is to develop further the Freudian ego-superego (etc.) concepts which became proven ego states in Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis among others. Jung added a 4th layer the Collective Archetypes ( which can be called differently in each subculture). It is a wonderful tool of integration ( to heal) if we try to conduct inner dialogues.
My problem is that if I use randomized names my ego state starts to whisper “it is a fake”. Then I encountered the Generational Theory of Strauss-Howe . They refer to Karl Mannheim ( a founder of UNESCO) as the originator of the Cyclical Theory of generations where 4 Attitudes reappear by Centuries. They call it Innovative and Reactive and Nurturing and Adaptive generations. In a simpler language (originated in Kabbalah several thousands of years ago) it can be called “Brother Father Mother and Sister” attitudes or ego states in each Generation. Or as we need in the healing process a dialogue of the Wounded Self and a Loving Adult Self and a Wounded Child vs a Recovering one we may see the Father as a Strict Father the Mother as a Nurturing intent and the Sister as an Addict Demanding one and the Brother as the Recovering one.( They have Body Part correspondences — because the body contains our painful feelings — like Father as goal setting Eye; Mother as listening Ear; Sister as burdened Back and legs; Brother as relieved Chest and arms.) The Higher Power is Jesus or any other Saviour Heroe.
Here Swedenborg’s Vision from 1745 can help us. He met Jesus ( he writes) who told him to glance into Eternity where he prepares Kings to become angelic beings from each century. The method begins by learning Hebrew to read the Bible Weekly Legend of the date of their biggest regret ( trauma). Because each week the legend has a different melody. So these theories together led me to try to imagine a body-less Being ( Like the Eternal as the Bible calls its main Voice) who wants to incarnate and needs body parts.
Their legends will give us the Body Parts — so we can know exactly the weekly healing part that need our attention. (And maybe our humming of the weekly melody that can be found in operas and even popular songs. The most frequent 4 biblical melodies appear in Obladi of the Beatles — Last Time of The Stones and Bowie’s Star Man and Elvis’ My Way.
( In this short summary I omit the empathy- evolution ideas of Max Weber and today Lloyd deMause as they are debated : claiming that the 4 Centuries correspond to different superego states — Schizoid 1500s and Border 1600 then Narcissist 1700 and Compulsive Neurotic 1800s. )
For me it helps to solve the “doubting problem” , that excepting the Swedenborg dream (of Kings with the Eternal Saviour ) all the other structural elements are real inner events.
The Brother (Innovative) Generations of the 1800s Century begins with the the birth of Queen Victoria (in a Strict Father Generation)in 1819, who had serious questions about the possible veracity of Jesus.
The Next Century it was in a Strict Father (Reactive) Generation where Jesus was mentioned /in a jealous way — remembered since 2 thousand yars while the Emperor will be forgotten/( generations later: Napoleon,) b 1769.
The Next Century (Nurturing Mother) Generational Ikon who had Jesus visons was Swedenborg (b. 1688).
And the Sister (Adaptive) generation belongs to Marie de Medici who allegedly hired a Jesus-fundamentalist to murder her husband, Henri the IVth.
/The Zapolyas had been related to the Arpad House Kings of early Hungary who were married into the Byzantine Emperors, the Palaiologos family which married into the Davidic House of the Exilarchs in Babylon — to be related to the Saviour „Jesus” or originally „Yeshuah” in Hebrew./
So the Vision of Swedenborg (also described by Proust) where all past Kings are learning the Bible Melodies with the Mashiah (in Greek the Christ) may be just have some kernel of real truth: If the Mannheimian (today “Strauss-Howeian” generational Clusters are true we may see that the Symbolic Heroes of Father Generations and Mother Generations and Sister Generations all have some imbalance in their idolizing „love” fantasies — and only the Brother (or recovery) Generations have found an antidote — an acceptance of being in a self-fulfilling life while missing partnerships and some of them using music for inner healing. They have been fated to live alone as widows or estranged wifes (Victoria and Sisi ) or had no sex most of their life.(Frederic II and Louis XIII.)
I am glad Strauss-Howe do mention in their book (in the preface ) Karl Mannheim who first invented this cyclic patterns — and he had a 25 years patterns. Mannheim was my great-grand-uncle so I am interested in the real proofs that might appear in science about the real psychological difference between generations. (Because he was criticized about the “hunch” he had about generations having “common experiences” like an assassination or a war or some scandal…If a generation lasts 20 or 25 years the people who were 5–9 years old or 15 -19 years olds at the “generational event” will have quite different perspectives…
So I was trying to find some more secure way of showing real differences.
I have found an interesting Ph.D thesis (on Sorbonne) by Suzanne Mpouli that has researched by computer statistical methods (using thousands of books texts and searching for favorite colours). it turns ot that each ten years a different colour is the Most Frequently Used Colour — hence we have some regularity here that apllies to 20 or 25 years periods too. Also some grammatical structures change (the useage of “albeit” or “but” and other such logical interjection words do change also by decades or also by two-decades.
TLDR: The main 4 Biblical melodies change weekly so we can know each week the greatest Ancestral Trauma of that week and which ancestral era’s — among the 4 cyclical Generations of the last 4 centuries — contemporary Messianic leaders dealt with which Body Part’s painful feelings. All that may help us imagining a Caring Loving Higher Power or a helping adult self state (alterego defense) — staying in the atheist materialist psychological world view (our mainstream collective trance, from which it is exhausting to turn away during a cosmic self-guru meditation).