FEST Writing Group

Musings on the Multigenerational Family as an Emotional Field of Consciousness

Erik Thompson

May 21, 2021

Have you ever experienced mysterious connectivity among the ancestral multi-generational family?

Decades ago, I called my father for our unplanned, random, somewhat monthly chat.  As the connection became audible on my end, I heard him talking to someone on his end, and then heard the sounds of him dialing.  When the dialing stopped, I said “Hello?”.  He said, “That is weird I didn’t hear your phone ring.”  I said, “Well I just called you.”  He said “What?  No, I just dialed your number to call you to chat.”  He had picked up my call before it rang.

This might have been chance, but did you ever have an experience of knowing something that you shouldn’t have been able to know?

Dr. Dean Radin has done decades of research on ESP, pre-cognition and other “anomalies” of consciousness. He works at the Institute for Noetic Science, founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had some striking experiences when returning from the moon. In this podcast interview Radin seems calm, clear and open minded. His sidekick Dr. Arnauld Delorme will present at our October conference on Spirituality and Family Health.  Check out Arno’s geeky mind mapping technology EEG Lab, that is being used by scientists internationally.  (This is his day job at UCSD.) Arno told me that pre-cognition seems to appear more readily among family members, particularly mothers. I want to ask Arno how he’d try and test the idea of a family field using ultra-modern tools.

Serious philosophers of science, and scientists of consciousness are proposing various theories of consciousness.  It’s a fertile field. Harvard physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that you can judge how little science understands something by the number of books and papers being published on the topic.  He said consciousness is among hot because it is so unknown.

Some propose consciousness as a product of the brain. While there is much evidence to support that idea, it sounds like individual thinking to me. Other propose that consciousness is an impersonal field, like the invisible field of radio waves that our car radios can access.  Many, like Dr. Ervin Laszlo, model the brain as a concrete receptor that interacts with this abstract field.  That sounds more like systems thinking to me.

Careful studies suggest that the majority of people, including scientists and engineers have had experiences of pre-cognition. I suspect Bowen did also.  Does anyone have confirming or disconfirming info on that? The family ESP data suggests a relationship between differentiation and ESP. The idea that belief in ESP is just an anxiety binder, a feature of low DOS seems narrow to me. Certainly belief in ESP could be a functional fantasy, as with naive lovers who think they can read each other’s minds, only to discover the dark side of their oneness, or a highly dependent spouse who goes to a self-deluded medium to talk to his wife weekly after her death. In these cases, the belief in ESP binds anxiety and softens the blow of low of differentiation.

But, as with mystical religious experiences, I don’t believe all ESP is fantasy. Perhaps genuine ESP is related to the togetherness force.  But there might be a range of how the togetherness force operates across the DOS spectrum. If higher DOS is better integration of the togetherness and individuality forces perhaps true ESP about other people is a feature of a highly refined togetherness, a refined cognitive integration.

Ever had an experience of pre-cognition, seeming to know something before it happened that you should not have been able to know? I’ve had many of these. They are hard to prove, but that doesn’t mean they are a fantasy. If pre-cognition exists, it poses a challenge to our linear view of time. Einstein’s theory of relativity challenges that linear view of time, with its theory of space/time curvature, which is well supported by measurements of the behavior of light from deep space. In the famous twin thought experiment, Einstein proposed that if two twins left earth in different spaceships, and one travelled at the speed of light, and they both returned a decade later, one would be younger than the other. If time is not linear, and precognition exists, perhaps it is only detectable by certain people now and remains hard to prove scientifically. Just like the concept of Differentiation of Self.

If the family is a field of consciousness that transcends the brains of its living individuals it may be possible to influence that field, just as it influences us. Bowen theory is consistent with a field view of consciousness in many ways. But it currently explores only a linear model of time.

The Bowen theory is different from the wonderful practices it has sprouted. Perhaps there are new technologies out there, consistent with Bowen theory, that would allow us to evolve our family emotional fields in new ways. Perhaps we could influence our ancestors in some strange way, and thereby influence our minds, our fears, our reactivity, our grandchildren, our DOS? When we visit their graves, do we influence our great-grandparents somehow? Do we touch the field? Does it touch us? Perhaps new models will help us understand the still mysterious power of multi-generational phenomenon, like the power of bridging cutoffs, and life altering visits to ancestral locations.

Have you ever experienced mysterious dimensions of the multi-generational family? What models are challenged by that data? What speculative new ideas and theories would help explain the experiences you had?