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Issue 13, January 2009

£ 12.00

Contents

  • Barbara Morgan: Editorial

  • Don Opatrny: The Knowing Field Forum

POLITICAL ISSUES

  • B.H. Yael Interview with Bert Hellinger: Reconciliation in Palestine

  • Ty Francis Interview with Albrecht Mahr: ‘Intentionless Silence’

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  • Jennifer Altman In Conversation with Hunter Beaumont

  • Barbara Morgan In Conversation with Gunthard Weber & Judith Hemming

  • Jane Peterson In Conversation with Jakob & Sieglinde Schneider

SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY

  • Bert Terpstra: Conquest of Abundance

  • Werner Krieglstein: How Philosophy can help us understand Constellation Work

NEW SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVES

  • Jeremy Thres: Our Ancestors wear our tears like Jade Beads

  • Berthold Schmidt: The Art of Haiku

  • Jennifer Altman: Remembering Dead Children

  • Tomás Kohn: The Magic Mirror

CONSTELLATION WORK

  • Cheng Lap Fung: The Healing Power of ‘Future’ – Part II

  • David Mathes: Where is the Constellation Boundary?

  • J. Edward Lynch: The Curse of the Paedophile

  • J. Edward Lynch: Grieving for Grandmother

  • Jay Ramsay: (Poem) Driving Home Christmas Day

BOOK REVIEW

  • Ty Francis: ‘Fields of Connection’ by Jan Jacob Stam

NEWS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

  • Various Contributors

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

  • Various Contributors

Extracts

B.H. Yael: Reconciliation in Palestine – Interview with Bert Hellinger

I have discovered some laws operating in cultures and in families and in nations. One of them is a law of priority. That means: those who came first take first place. Those who came second take second place. Whenever somebody who is in second place wants to take first place, conflict is unavoidable.

The history of the Jewish people starts with a breach of that law. Abraham had a first son and a first wife and he expelled her. Isaac, the second took first place. This conflict has continued to this day: Israel still takes first place. If Israel and the Jewish people would understand that Ishmael has first place and the Arabs have first place and that they come second, then peace would be possible….

We see that also with Christianity. The Christians come second; the Jews come first. All the conflicts between the Christians and the Jewish people arise from not respecting the law of priority.

Ty Francis: Intentionless Silence – Interview with Albrecht Mahr

TF: Clients often feel overwhelmed by the complexity of their situation. With this in mind, how does it help the client to witness the degree of chaos that can sometimes be revealed in a Political Constellation?

AM: I don’t try to avoid the chaos any more. Some constellations – and this is especially true of Political Constellations – contain the danger that the client feels invited or tempted to be accountable for many, many things. There can be a certain grandiosity in attempts to change huge systems. ..What I have learned is that just helping clients see the complexity and say: “I am in a very complex field – that is how it is” without feeling the need to resolve it all, has a clarifying, even relieving effect. We need to support them to withdraw their attention and focus more on their specific area of influence, with modesty. This re-focusing has a calming effect.

Jen Altman: In the Spotlight: In conversation with Hunter Beaumont

My dream for ISCA is that it will become a network of people working to achieve excellence in this kind of work; and that through ISCA we will find a way to negotiate the difficult terrain of conflict between different institutes, different individuals, different interests. I see ISCA as one attempt to protect the excellence in the work that we all love by developing clarity and the ability to differentiate what really helps in which contexts, rather than creating rules or standards that limit creativity. And I hope that we will figure out how to talk to one another about differences without falling into destructive conflict.

Bert Terpstra: Conquest of Abundance

Without an implicit worldview and an ontology telling us what is real and what illusion, what is true and what false, what exists and what does not exist, we would have little footing to make any sense of the complex, confusing and often contradictory impressions that we get from the world around us. That is why, according to Feyerabend, people in all cultures tend to simplify reality by subsuming all phenomena into simple categories, abstractions and descriptions. Thus, an abundance of subtle phenomena is reduced to a simplified projection on to a flat framework. That framework also works a s a filter: anything that falls outside we can no longer observe. This is what Feyerabend means by ‘conquest of abundance’: filtering the abundance of available pheonomena to reduce it into a simplified world.