People experiencing extreme states of consciousness, sometimes labeled psychosis, often wonder why they have content in their minds that doesn’t seem to belong to them. These might include fears, anxieties, grief and anger.
An adage taken from Christian scripture notes that the sins of the fathers are passed down to the sons and on down the line. I’ve thought that means if a man does not take care of healing from his emotional baggage and spiritual ignorance, these very same inclinations will be passed on to his offspring and become part of their emotional and spiritual baggage. Thus, we “inherit” issues and memories that our fore-fathers and fore-mothers dealt with but did not have the skills to metabolize fully. They didn’t complete their emotional homework. The highly-respected journal, Nature, has reported on what is being called “Transgenerational Memory“. Could it be speaking to the the same phenomenon?–Emma Bragdon
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New research from Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.
During the tests they learned that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.
According to the Telegraph, Dr Brian Dias, from the department of psychiatry at Emory University, said: ”From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.
“Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
This suggests that experiences are somehow transferred from the brain into the genome, allowing them to be passed on to later generations.
The researchers now hope to carry out further work to understand how the information comes to be stored on the DNA in the first place. They also want to explore whether similar effects can be seen in the genes of humans.
‘Professor Marcus Pembrey, a paediatric geneticist at University College London, said the work provided“compelling evidence” for the biological transmission of memory.
He added: “It addresses constitutional fearfulness that is highly relevant to phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, plus the controversial subject of transmission of the ‘memory’ of ancestral experience down the generations.
“It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously.”
“I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”
Professor Wolf Reik, head of epigenetics at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said, however, further work was needed before such results could be applied to humans.
He said: “These types of results are encouraging as they suggest that transgenerational inheritance exists and is mediated by epigenetics, but more careful mechanistic study of animal models is needed before extrapolating such findings to humans.”
May our DNA also carry spiritual and cosmic memories passed down in genes from our ancestors?
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Research link- http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html.’