As time slips by we realise that one day we will be faced with the inevitable moment when life as we know it will come to an end. Our body will return to the earth.
According to the modern zeitgeist that is it. The end. Journey over. We dive into the abyss and are annihilated. Our deceased great-grandparents and their parents seldom, if ever, come to mind. When it’s someone we know, in order to adjust to our new world, we mourn for some years, but as time passes they too slip into oblivion, rarely even recalled. The mourning is for our benefit, after all our loved one is no longer here – it is we who have been left behind, alone, abandoned.
This attitude does nothing to foster a sense of belonging or of identity. It doesn’t remind us that we are part of a great web of life, connected first and foremost to our ancestors, standing at the end of a long line of brave and courageous people who have been through every conceivable suffering and joy. It doesn’t remind us that our time will come. It doesn’t make us think about our actions in the context of time, in the context of the next generations. Perhaps this fatal adjustment in beliefs has caused this crazy hedonistic paradigm that we find ourselves in? Our lack of foresight means the environment doesn’t matter, apart from what can we extract from it. This lack of foresight means governmental policy is set in terms of 4 years and not 400. And perhaps our lack of connectedness to our personal heritage has been part of the reason our family structures have been eroded, leaving a generation of lonely, disconnected adults who place less and less value on family and on the lessons that our ancestors learned, deeming them archaic and having nothing to do with this modern and superior era.
What happens when we die? Where do the dead go? For all of us who have experienced the death of someone close to us these are questions that surely must have crossed our minds. Of course no one can really know what happens, but the countless people who have near death experiences all seem to have similar stories, we don’t actually die. We leave our bodies and are met by beautiful benevolent beings, these beings guide us towards the light and we experience a life review of some sort. Time passes in another world and then we are born again. Most spiritual traditions around the world have beliefs that correlate with these accounts, they might differ to some extent on what exactly happens but they all agree the soul, or something continues it’s journey after death. Only science says when the body dies, we die, it might call belief in an afterlife a fanciful coping strategy but perhaps we might regard these views, held for countless generations and by all ancient cultures, with a little more respect and at least hold our minds open to the possibility that they had a point. I know for myself, when my mother died, I could feel her presence in the room days after she’d died, it was palpable, not subtle, her body was dead but she was still there somewhere, I could feel her and it felt like the deepest transcendent peace.
We forget that the collective experiences of our forefathers and mothers are vast. If we could see all our direct ancestors – our parents, their parents and so on back only 10 generations we’d be talking about over 2000 people. If we keep going back 2000 years the number after taking into account family members marrying each other is in the order of thousands to millions. We exist because of them, if one thing had happened differently for any of those countless people we would not be here to read this. Quite a thought! One bullet that hit instead of missed, one failed harvest, one quarrel that went the wrong way, one illness that didn’t get better, one trip on the mountain path, one miscarriage and the whole world would be different. How incredible that our existence depends so intimately on the countless events of the past. It is astounding to think about, and yet we rarely do. How often do we thank our ancestors for our lives? For the miracle that we are here? For all that they endured so that we could stand here and buy a burger at macdonalds? How often do we thank them for our prosperity? For our genes? How often do we ponder their long and interesting lives? How many of their stories do we even know? Do we even know their names?
Are we also destined to disappear into the abyss of nameless, forgotten ancestors after a few generations?
We need to feel that connection to people passed in order to get a sense of who we are. Cut off from that knowledge – we feel less empowered. If you know you come from a long line of stone masons, you will carry a certain pride and deep confidence about you and your profession that isn’t given by a degree or technical college certificate. Your family will resonate with that pride and sense of being. Every time you lift the mallet and chisel you will feel a visceral connection to your great grandfather, and a confidence in what you do. But because you don’t even know what your great great grandmother and her mother did you will never feel that. Perhaps there is something that you love doing that your ancestors also enjoyed and that is the reason you love it, how will you ever know? Stories shape our lives, the story we tell about ourselves makes us who we are. Knowing my ancestors were farmers helps me to understand why I enjoy being in the garden, looking at the plants and reaping the harvest. Knowing my ancestors were practical devoted people helps me to understand myself. Not knowing about our heritage leaves us totally at the mercy of modern culture and it’s endless tirade of distractions away from what is important.
We are lost. Our homelands have been lost, countless generations have been moved away from their land, to the cities, displaced. Migration and movement have become the norm. We share no common place with our ancestors. With their homelands, we also lost their stories and their beliefs. We don’t know their professions or their interests and as they moved these also had to change, farmers, became cobblers, slaves, factory workers, servants, journalists, soldiers. We have no deep connection to place and we have no connection to their beliefs, stories and professions. The past has been erased and we are in the constant process of reinventing ourselves, our location changes ever faster, our jobs change, and the spiritual traditions that our forefathers had are disappearing and we find ourselves wondering who we are and what we truly believe.
Research shows that people who have a strong sense of family, culture, religion, and community have greater resilience and well-being. They feel connected to their families, they have a sense of belonging, they have social support, a greater sense of meaning through their traditions and culture, they have a sense of continuity, their traditions provide them with coping methods when times are tough and they have a sense of identity that I see are deeply lacking in our modern society.
In an age of unprecedented mobility, families are more dispersed than ever. A society that offers inadequate family support places enormous pressure on the family unit, contributing to its fragmentation. As a result, our sense of family identity is gradually dissolving—or, at the very least, carries far less significance than it may have a few centuries ago. Our main connections are with our friends who likely share very different experiences of the world, communication can be superficial leaving us feeling alone. Or might at times be deep and more meaningful than the connections we have with our family but that ultimately do not stand the test of time. Depression and Anxiety are the norm, stress related illnesses are rife, our society is sick.
We have abandoned our religious beliefs because of the corruption and harm that we have seen happen in it’s name, following instead the new religion of science, which grants us every technological advance imaginable, whilst leaving us feeling hollow inside. The internet provides us more and more ways to connect with each other, but we actually feel more and more isolated, stuck in our rooms consuming media. We crave real genuine connection to each other and to a bigger purpose. We crave a cultural identity that isn’t in a constant state of flux. We want to know who we are, we want to feel like we belong. We need support when times are tough and we need the tools to help us through those times.
Our ancestors weren’t perfect, the family relationships they had may have been very abusive, the communities they lived in may have been very hierarchical and corrupt, the religions they followed may have also been abusing their power and authority. There is a lot to heal! Perhaps this is another one of the reasons we have turned away from them towards the scientific.
However in order to heal, we need to foster personal relationships in our community, heal our relationships with our family, find new tools to help us though difficult times, find ways to connect to the bigger picture and to the earth, whether that be through religion or spiritual traditions, we need to find our place in our families, in our communities, in our society and in the universe. No small task!
Whilst our ancestors may have had their faults, they also had many good qualities, and after all it was their devotion, love and hard work that ultimately brought us into the world. Can we forgive them for their transgressions knowing that they are still on their journey, where ever they are? They have very likely by now realised their mistakes in life and are evolving as we are. By rekindling that relationship, by pondering who these people were, by spending some time imagining their lives, perhaps we can bring more meaning to ours? They made every mistake there is to make, can we not implore them to help us to avoid those pitfalls on the path? That stored wealth of knowledge exists somewhere and surely we can tap into it if only we are willing to try.
Studies have shown that imagining that you know how to do something already actually makes you better at it. What if we imagined, felt, that we had mountains of life experience behind us and the support of countless ancestors in our everyday lives? Would we not be more confident, more relaxed, more able to cope in any situation? Just that belief is incredibly empowering. Jung, Assagioli, Grof, Glauberman and other transpersonal psychologists have shown that just imagining a conversation with a wise person who loves us can bring us insights we didn’t have in our lives, and that by doing so we are accessing the transpersonal realm, beyond the ego consciousness. What if our ancestors, from beyond, could actually help us? Send us love, guidance and peace? How much more connected would we feel? How much more of a sense of purpose might we have? How much easier would life be, knowing we had a team of helpers from beyond, desperate to connect with us, to help us and shower us with their love. Perhaps seeing the world in this way might make us more surrendered and peaceful, more able to accept what ever comes to us.
Perhaps the more we empower this relationship the more we we’re able to access the help they can bring, to bring us closer to our true life purpose, to show us what really matters. Perhaps they might guide us in ways we didn’t think of, to help the environment and the people around us. Perhaps we might begin to trust in them more and more and we might even place rituals connecting to them in higher and higher importance in our lives. We might honour them at every meal, we might place altars for them in our houses, as do the practitioners of the Shinto religion and some African tribes. We might make them a part of our lives, we might think of them throughout the day and wonder what they would think of the decision we just made. Perhaps they might help us see there was another way.
Our connection to them might help us see where we fit in the bigger picture, our acknowledgement of them might soothe our own fears of death. Thinking our own children may remember us in this way might provide a strong antidote to the fear of annihilation. Our realisation of our interdependence with them and all beings might cause us to be a little more humble and grateful for what we have. We might feel happier and more hopeful with our eyes on the bigger horizon. That sense of them being there might give us the confidence to listen to our soul’s calling and act in the world.
I guess admitting that we are profoundly lost means that we might at least begin the process of finding ourselves. Yes, we’ve lost our way, we have lost our traditions and culture, but the mental and emotional spaces that our ancestors accessed though their traditions and culture are still available to us now, we just need to invent new, or discover old ways of accessing them. The place of feeling connected to our communities is available, we need to put energy into it. The love of our family is available, if we spend time to heal. The connection to the earth is available when we realise our inter-dependance. The transcendental spaces our ancestors accessed through ritual are still there, we need to acknowledge their importance and develop our own rituals to access these spaces. When this bridge to spirit is rebuilt all the answers will flood down from above, through a humanity ready to act on their inspirations and rebuild the paradise that we were given to take care of.