Family
_AM: What are all the things that keep you close to your family? Is it love or need? Is it unconditional or conditional? What role do you play in this structure?
_I: Family… Those who are hungry… I remember when you explained it to me… Everyone gathers because they are hungry, around a table, to share food… Is the family really founded on love or on hunger?
_AM: Family comes from the Latin “fames”, to be hungry. In the ancient context, groups of people who came together to create a clan that allowed them to defend themselves and maintain themselves, did so with a single purpose and that was to survive, to feed themselves. The poor and without resources of their own were considered hungry, “famulus” (starving), and in most cases, these people survived by becoming lifelong servants of a Domus (household). For some cultures, these hopeless people were Servants, for others they were Slaves. Servant comes from “serve”, one who serves, who is at service. Slave is an Italic mispronunciation of the word “Slav,” a verb that identifies the people of Eastern Europe meaning “to speak,” who were subjugated by the Holy Roman Empire, for whom “everyone spoke the same.” Over time, the concept of servitude and slavery was related to hunger, and the Protector of the Domus became responsible for feeding these evicted or enslaved people. “Protector of Hungry Servants”, in Latin it would be said “Pater Familias”: Family Father.
_I: The Family is a bond of servitude and slavery between the parties... For the simple need to survive adversity. The emotional week of Capricorn is destroying step by step each of the foundations of our social culture...
_AM: That was the idea. Let's go to the original concept of all this. Before being cultural and thinking beings, humans were animals like any other, surviving by hunting and gathering, living in caves, burrows, and forests. The groups were small, but they knew that alone as individuals they could not survive. At least one or two women in the group ensured the continuity of the species, and had to be protected, because for 5 months (the months in which pregnancy was previously recognized), they were vulnerable. A guard had to protect them, usually the young man of the herd, while they collected plants and fruits near the burrow. The older ones, perhaps two or three, undertook their long walks to hunt and thus bring back many necessary elements: meat to live on for many days and even weeks, hides for coats, hair for fabrics, bones for tools. The herd describes a small group of individuals, since herd originates from the word hand, fist, with 5 fingers. In English, “herd” comes from the Greek “korthys” (heap). When the group grows larger, different interconnected packs are created, something called a “clan.” Clan is the malformation of the word “plan”, that is, flat, something extensive and branched, which originates the word Plant, and for this reason, they are all known as united in the concept of the Family Tree. This Tree is a Clan made up of different Packs that interact with each other, relating through food, hunger, that is, as a Family.
_I: Family is the group of individuals with whom you sit down to share a plate of food, at the same table. My family is Spanish-Italian, which means that every Sunday we all had to get together to eat and spend the day together. And sometimes, more days during the week, this ritual was repeated, passing from one house to the other. The Anglo-Saxons do not have this culture… Why?
_AM: Climate and geography. In the cold areas of Eurasia, there is a shortage of food and resources, which made it impossible to support a single family of many members. For this reason, they had to be spread throughout the territory, far from each other. The Norse clans dotted the fjord or wetland territories. However, in the Mediterranean areas, there were more resources for a longer time and for more people, which allowed them to share more. Furthermore, the heat led them to build the houses very close to each other to maintain a fair temperature both in winter and summer, which connected the houses almost under the same roof. Thus it was more normal for Mediterranean peoples to live in communities of many clans, while in the north the same clans protected large territories with scarce resources. The same thing happened in Asian, Indian and American peoples. As I said, the structure of a clan is given by the exchange of individuals to keep the lineage alive. It arises from the basic need to eat, to be nourished. Hunger makes humans slaves of whoever has the food, and for this reason every family member is a slave to the clan or pack that shares the food.
_I: Where does family love arise?
_AM: Love is an ancestral development shared by several species, not just humans. Many animals feel love for individuals in their own clan. Love is an evolutionary mechanism that keeps the pack together, that makes individuals feel part of a balanced network. Feeling love for each other ensures the continuity of the species. For this reason, in Indo-European languages, love is known as: “A-mors”, without death, that is, life continues, or as “love”, which comes from lust, sexual pleasure that is felt when interconnecting with another being. to reproduce creating a union to ensure continuity.
_I: Wow… You keep killing all the possible magic of the human soul.
_AM: Well... To understand what the soul really feels, you have to cleanse it of all biological concepts.
_I: So loving your family is almost a biological obligation rather than a freedom of the soul...
_AM: Yes. But remember, that love was designed by the soul, which in its pure state saw no need to survive, but to expand. We are going to do both routes. From the point of view of the Soul, of energy, matter is generated to allow the soul to create, manifest, and experience all its infinite capabilities on a plane of creativity and constant transformation. It cannot be created without modification, and eternal energy is not modified, so matter gives that opportunity to change. The construction of extensive networks gives the soul more options to know itself and create, and that expansion (do you remember yesterday: relationship?) is the pulse that leads to constant action, which never ceases (do you remember yesterday: need ?). And that need is eternal, what you call love. The soul does not see love as survival but as creative expansion. Now, in matter, this expansion is intertwined like a tree, a network, which connects all the points to each other, and makes them depend by resonance, which generates the condition. This is how the genetic path is built, that is, the evolutionary trace from the origin, in which the same point is repeated and conditions the next. Now, from the human point of view, the physical body is the result of all these links in the network, these ramifications, so its being is totally conditioned by hundreds of potentialities. From the human material point of view, love has become a need to survive, to belong, because the more I expand, the more nodes are generated to which I am linked.
_I: It's the same but from polarized extremes.
_AM: That's right. From a biological point of view, love is a hormonal development that allows the nodes to be kept united with each other so that the fabric of the networks remains in harmony. From the vision of the soul, love is the ability of that network to expand.
_I: How do I know when I love from the soul or from biology?
_AM: You will realize this when you are not hungry.
_I: Huh?
_AM: When you don't need your family to exist. When you find love in expanding to a larger family, and it is not limited to the home you come from, the house where you were born. When you see your mothers and sisters in many women. When you see your parents and brothers in many men. When you see your friends and partners in many people around the world. When without judgment you dare to share a plate of food with any culture in any language. When it doesn't affect you to move away from your family because you know that without them you are still alive, when you can love them without expecting anything in return. You can do it?
_I: There is only one person I still don't see myself being able to do it with.
_AM: Who?
_I: My mother. I can do it with everyone, in fact I have spent a long time without interacting with many people and it doesn't affect me. I have lost contact with part of my family, and it does not affect me, I have been without contact with my father for 27 years and it never affected me. Before I was very dependent on my family, a lot, for me it was everything. It must have been because of the Italian blood in me, I needed to make all my plans with them, every week. If we didn't get together on a Sunday, I got depressed. I needed them… But in 2019, everything changed. I thought it was because I felt frustrated, betrayed, hurt, I don't know... But no, it wasn't that, it was that I had changed. By connecting with you, from the AM, the way my ego depended on other people began to disappear. I feel emotion, but I stopped depending emotionally. And I no longer feel betrayal or frustration... I don't feel “anything”, that is, nothing negative, but not positive either, I feel that everything is fine as it is. I feel free. I realized that it is not necessary to be, to live together, to belong, in order to be part of the whole. I don't need a family, because I'm no longer emotionally hungry for other people. I feel free to choose. And the only reason why I continue to be linked to the concept of family with my mother is because I continue to dedicate my life to love for Mother Earth, and I do not see it as a burden, on the contrary, now I see it as an understanding, a reason. , a purpose. I think I can say that my clan is no longer De Stefano nor Bide, my clan is Life on Earth, and I choose the links to which I expand... I am no longer hungry.
_AM: What do you feel when you see your family in this photo?
_I: That I have chosen them all. And that I no longer feel indebted to any of them. The things I now choose to share with them are because I want to, not because I have to. And clearly, when we meet: we eat. And boy do we eat. Except when I'm with my mother, with my mother we drink tea. And there I realize that our heavy bond is due to the De Stefano Family and their clan, but since 2019 we became free from the clan, we have created a new story for ourselves.
_AM: What keeps you attached to them?
_I: In almost everyone, except my mother, I am united by fun, laughing, traveling, having a good time, common stories. With my mother we are united by the mission, the purpose.
_AM: Do you have fun with them out of love or necessity?
_I: Out of necessity. As a Moon in Sagittarius that I am, I really need to have fun, create plans, travel, laugh, I need it. I accept that there are conditions on these links, but you know what? I am free and aware that I choose that, because I could choose others if I wanted, but it is the love of my soul that chooses them.
_AM: So, are there conditions?
_I: Yes, there are conditions, at least with several of them, not with all of them. I recognize those emotional conditions that we have placed on ourselves. Willing to work on them, aware that they are what make me grow and know myself, not that they limit me.
_AM: What is your role in this clan?
_I: I am the one who drives, the one who generates options, paths, exits. I am the Way.
_AM: You're still hungry...
_I: Why?
_AM: Because you love them, you love them. You are not malnourished, you can choose what to eat, and when, but you are still hungry, you still belong to a family, you still depend on concepts of your clan and its conditions. Recognize, you still need family…
_I: …Yes… Now that you say it like that, I still need them, as if they were my pillars to feel good, to have like an axis…
_AM: Do you know what emotion worries me in you?
_I: Which one?
_AM: Believe that to be free you have to stop being hungry. How many times have you seen so many people fight to free themselves from family patterns, get out of the clan, break the ties of dependency with parents, ancestors...?
_I: Many…
_AM: And what have you always said about that?
_I: That eliminating patterns to free yourself from the family is like wanting to build a new house and throwing away the toolbox because it weighs you too much...
_AM: The goal is not to stop being hungry, it is to learn to eat. Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, and occasionally a Snack. Be aware that you are not here to be free from family, you are here to enjoy who you are by sharing a table every Sunday, without the dependence of doing so out of obligation.
_I: Expand without losing myself… Share the plate because I choose it.
_AM: Your questions are the hunger for my food, which are the answers…
_I: We are Family, well…
_AM: Because we are One.