Kind, Kin, Genus and Care
The word kind, as in to be kind towards, friendly, etc., is completely related to greater care and inclusion of others into your circle of compassion, empathy, conscience and morality. The story of being kind (caring) is related to how we view what our kind is. This work developed from an inquiry, questioning, curiosity, doubt, on the accurate use of the word kind, what it really means and how people use it (similarly as I have done with other words, such as compassion and sympathy).
Skip to the explanation to read what the etymological story is telling us.
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Etymology
Kind (adj)
“friendly, deliberately doing good to others,” from Old English gecynde “natural, native, innate,” originally “with the feeling of relatives for each other,” from Proto-Germanic *kundi- “natural, native,” from *kunjam “family”
Kind (n.)
“class, sort, variety,” from Old English gecynd “kind, nature, race,” related to cynn “family“, from Proto-Germanic *kundjaz “family, race,” from PIE *gene– “to give birth, beget”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kind
Kin
from Old English cynn “family; race; kind, sort, rank; nature; gender, sex,” from Proto-Germanic *kunjam “family” (cognates: Old Frisian kenn, Old Saxon kunni, Old Norse kyn, Old High German chunni “kin, race;” Danish and Swedish kön, Middle Dutch, Dutch kunne “sex, gender;” Gothic kuni “family, race,” Old Norse kundr “son,” German Kind “child”), from PIE *gene– “to produce”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kin&allowed_in_frame=0
Genus
“kind or class of things”, from Latin genus (genitive generis) “race, stock, kind; family, birth, descent, origin,” cognate with Greek genos “race, kind,” and gonos “birth, offspring, stock,” from PIE root *gene- “produce, give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to family and tribal groups
(cognates: Sanskrit janati “begets, bears,” janah “race,” janman- “birth, origin,” jatah “born;” Avestan zizanenti “they bear;” Greek gignesthai “to become, happen;” Latin gignere “to beget,” gnasci “to be born,” genius “procreative divinity, inborn tutelary spirit, innate quality,” ingenium “inborn character,” germen “shoot, bud, embryo, germ;” Lithuanian gentis “kinsmen;” Gothic kuni “race;” Old English cennan “beget, create;” Old High German kind “child;” Old Irish ro-genar “I was born;” Welsh geni “to be born;” Armenian chanim “I bear, I am born”).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=genus&allowed_in_frame=0
ġe- (prefix)
forming nouns or adjectives of association or similarity
forming nouns and verbs with the sense of ‘result’ or ‘process’
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ge-
*ga- (prefix)
Indicates association or togetherness; co-.
Indicates completeness or wholeness. In verbs, also indicates perfectivity (a finished action).
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/ga-
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gi- (same thing, association, etc.)
Care
Old English caru, cearu “sorrow, anxiety, grief,” also “burdens of mind; serious mental attention,” from Proto-Germanic *karo (cognates: Old Saxon kara “sorrow;” Old High German chara “wail, lament;” Gothic kara “sorrow, trouble, care;” German Karfreitag “Good Friday”), from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream”
Meaning “charge, oversight, protection” is attested c.1400, the sense in care of in addressing. To take care of “take in hand, do” is from 1580s.
Positive senses, such as “have an inclination” (1550s); “have fondness for” (1520s) seem to have developed later as mirrors to the earlier negative ones.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=care
“close attention, concern or responsibility”, “worry”, “maintenance, upkeep”, “treatment of those in need”
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/care
King
Old English cyning “king, ruler,”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=king
Explanation
When first looking at the word kind as an adjective, in terms of friendly, doing good, feeling of relatives for each other, we can see that it comes from the word gecynde, which means natural, native, innate, kind, nature, race. The prefix ‘ge-‘ is used to form “nouns or adjectives of association or similarity” or to form “nouns and verbs with the sense of ‘result’ or ‘process’”.
The adj. kind comes from the same source the n. kind, from kin, and further kin comes from gene-, from where we get the words genus, generate, etc. Kind, as a noun, is related to class, sort, variety, nature, race, family.
Genus, which comes from gene-, means kind or class. Kind and genus mean the same thing. Why? Because they are the same word essentially. Kin is the same as gin or gen. K and G are interchangeable across languages because they have the same philological derivation in our throats/mouths, the same origin in vocalization. Other letters have similar relations. All vowels can essentially be replaced by any other vowel to possibly link words from different languages. Kind comes from gecynde, from gene. Gecynde is redundant in the use of letters, because ge- and cyn are used to mean the same thing. The former is a prefix, while the latter is actually a word, but they point to the same relationship in reality, of association and similarity from a resulting process.
From kind (adj.), we see the relation to greater care. The closest most identified kindness, the friendliness, doing good to others, feelings of relatives for each other, is that of our direct blood relations, most specifically our offspring. Family is the first identifier for reciprocal benefit in survival and attempt to live in harmony. You don’t harm your family or those you live with, because they will endanger your own survival. To harm another you care for, is to harm yourself.
Tracing etymology is similar to tracing root causal sources of problems to their foundation, or of tracing historical roots of probable occurrences to the most logical source. We can also trace a correspondence from the closer genera/universals to deeper genera/universals, finding greater expansive encompassing genera that enclose more of the many into a greater encompassing unity.
From the immediate identification and connection to our close family, there is the larger family, the clan. Next is the community, the tribe, then the village, race, the province, the state, country, nation, and then all of human beings. They are different levels of universal genera identification. A kind, is a genera, a universal. As we go up universals towards larger encompassing groupings, we can develop our heart-center, care, compassion, empathy, conscience and morality. Care and kindness can expand beyond the family only, tribe only, nation only, race only, and humanity only. Care and kindness can expand towards the next universal kind and genera we belong to, which is all animals. We animals all share feeling and thinking in being and existing, but to different degrees and levels. We can expand care from humans, to animals, to all of the universe in some way.
Care is also related to kind and genus, generate, ‘ge-‘. ‘Ge-‘, genus, kin, kyn, cyn, is about a similarity and association. We associate particular individual substances that share common universal genera. The root of genus, gene- itself, goes beyond this, and is about the generation itself, not just the similarly of what is generated within substances. Generation itself produces a result from a process, the process which has a beginning of generation and goes towards some end.
Care is from PIE root ‘*gar-‘. The etymology for kind (adj.) even shows the root relation to the “prefix *ga-“. ‘Ga-‘ indicates an association, togetherness, completeness or wholeness, just as ‘ge-‘ does as well. ‘Ge-‘ has the additional sense of result and process, which is what generation is about, a begetting from a process, the result it produces. The process of creating a child results in the birth of a new human being born, in completeness and wholeness.
Care is ‘gar’, from ‘ga’, which is related to ‘ge-‘ with an ‘r’ added, so it’s ‘gar-‘ instead of ‘gene-‘ (or kyn, cyn, etc.). ‘Gar-‘ is not ‘gene-‘, but they are similar in root meanings. We can see now that care is indeed related to generation, so that we can understand care also in a positive sense apart from the direct etymological roots that are shown as negatives.
Here is a quick word association list:
Kind – natural, needed, innate
Kin – race, sort, rank, gender, sex, family
Genus – race, stock, birth, dissent, origin, offspring, beget, bear, become, happened, create
Care – sorrow, anxiety, grief, burden, serious attention, lament, trouble, close attention, concern, responsibility, worry, maintenance, upkeep. Positive sense of charge, oversight, protection, take care, take in and, treatment of those in need, have an inclination, have fondness for.
Natural, needed, innate, race, sort, rank, stock, birth, origin, bear. What is innate, natural, needed is what is a part of us and cannot be separated from us. That is the substance we all are. We are animal life forms, sharing blood and bodies like others of our kind, natural predisposition, innate form, the sort and rank of life we are (animals), from the common kind of birth and origin, where we are born into the world with thoughts and feelings and an awareness of the surrounding reality because we are all animals. That is the substance we all are. We are animals, of blood, bone, muscle, etc. We think and feel. We are of the same kind, with a great degree of variation in this universal genus, but this is our greater family.
A tangent side-note, is related to king. In Old English, king was cyning, which is cyn/kin + ing. Again, we can see the relation of kin, kind, and family, and how it is used to manipulate our understanding of reality and our relative position in it. The king, is our kin, our kind, he is our “family” leader, just like a family household head, the “father” figure who takes “care” of their “family”, and watches over them, protects them, guards them… at least that is the illusory narrative they fabricate for us through their creation of stories, historical or not. They don’t “watch” over us in true guardianship and care, no, they “watch” “over us to make sure we stay under their thumb, enslaved and controlled, through a false proxy euphemism obfuscation mind-control, casting a spell on our minds, selling us the belief that they “care” for our well-being. The king is responsible for us, we don’t need to be, daddy will take of us.
When relating care to kind, we come to family and therefore ownership. Family was first a negative and become positive as well, just as we see with the definition of care. And like compassion and suffering where we can also have positive and negative understandings to apply this suffering in a good way, we can also do the same with the care of sorrow and grief to understand how it can be seen as the positive it became.
The negative association of care can be linked to the positive aspects of care that developed. The negative would be sorrow, anxiety, grief, burden, lament, trouble and then it starts to shift over into the dual meaning more clearly, with worry, concern, responsibility, maintenance, upkeep, and even more to the positive with charge, oversight, protection, take in those in need, fondness.
In care, we can have sorrow, anxiety, grief, burden, lament, trouble, worry, concern. Why? For what? Usually, something bad or evil happens. A generation of evil takes place. An evil process (behavior, force) culminates in the resulting manifestation (generated action) of evil. From this injustice, from this evil, we feel it. It creates a burden, worry and concern in us. From that burden, worry or concern, can come the True Care to generate our experience and reality in the Way and Path it should be, rather than the Way and Path it currently is in evil. This is where the responsibility needs to be developed. Now we can see how this concern, worry and burden turns into a care for others in the sense we are used to: kindness, of doing good. When we feel for others, we connect with them as our kind, our race, our class, our family. This can have us develop the greater responsibility. We can then care for other beings, and be concerned, worried and burdened with their conditions, and seek to maintain and upkeep their well-being (not their ill-being, not their harm), to do good to them, to be kind to them, because they are own kind, begotten and born of the same kind, class, genera and universal as we are.
Although care may seem to be negative, with sorrow, grief, anxiety, etc., those are the negative feelings again, that we must listen to (bearing it), in order to drive us in the right direction. We need to feel reality, feel the guilt, feel the shame, feel the judgment we put upon ourselves through the actions and behaviors we choose to engage in. We reap what we sow ourselves. Once we start to feel reality as it truly is, and see it for what it is, then we can change. We have to pay attention to ourselves and reality, to discern, decode and de-occult the reality we live in. Ignoring our actions and behaviors and the harm they produce does not evolve consciousness.
To further evolve consciousness, and to further develop the heart-center, care, compassion, empathy, conscience and morality, to be kind, we need to develop our identification, association and connectedness with others of our kind, others in our global family. We need to stop harming other beings, yes all animal beings, as much as we can, because we can, because it’s wrong, wholesale. They are innocent and have done us no harm, and they have the right to life and freedom just as we do, to be free from the harm we would impose upon them for our delusional beliefs in “taste” and “flesh for survival”.
Truth is Love – Care for Truth – Embrace Truth – Live Truth.
Integrate with Truth & Morality.
Live integrated & connected.
Truth is one way – go all the way.
Make the connection – go “vegan”.
Related:
– Family, Ownership and Slavery
– Bearing Good and Evil
– Sacred Feminine and Masculine – Ahimsa and Justice
– Foundational Living and True Unity (Source for image)
– Truth is Love