Ep. 56 – Ancestors

On this episode of the podcast, I'm going to be talking about ancestors and our relationship to them.

For most modern people, there is no relationship with ancestors, other than for those people who've pursued genealogy as a hobby.

all too often grief is a very private affair, and once you're dead, you're simply gone.

In traditional cultures, however, the ancestors are not really gone.

They're certainly not passive.

They actively remain participants in the lives of their descendants.

They can help.

They can also hinder.

Indian tradition has a very precise, rather technical, and practically applicable practically applicable understanding of who the ancestors are, where they are, what they need, and what happens when they're ignored.

I've been aware of my ancestors since childhood.

I became more aware of ancestors in general after I joined the Pokot tribe in Kenya.

And in the ensuing years, particularly after living in India and working with Vimalananda, I have been paying a lot more attention to ancestors and observing the ancestral patterns in the lives of people that I've interacted with, been related to, and worked with.

It is of course the case that many people do not believe that it is possible for intelligences to remain intact after death.

But even if you don't believe that it's possible for an ancestor to be contactable as an ancestor, Our ancestors absolutely influence us very strongly, and for some people, overwhelmingly strongly.

They do this via our genetics, of course, via the genes and chromosomes that we inherit from them.

Also by our epigenetics, by which genes are turned on or turned off according to the environment in which we find ourselves.

in particular by whoever raises us.

So, when we think of ancestors, we have to think of blood ancestors who are influencing particularly by genetics and epigenetics, but also by who actually is controlling our upbringing and childhood.

In infancy, And in early childhood, in infancy of course, before children are verbal at all, they are picking up things still.

They're learning through emotional bonding.

They're learning through learning how to move and how people either resist or impede their movements.

And as they get older, they're still strongly connected to the Russas of the emotions.

as they attempt to find ways to understand and interact with their environments.

And they are imitating much of the time what's going on right around them.

So we can think, if we want to, of ancestral influences as being completely internalized Whereas most cultures, particularly in the past, believed that they were substantially externalized and some cultures believed they were completely or wholly externalized.