WHO ARE THE ANCESTORS?

It's the Festival of Samhain on Oct 31st. The Festival of the Dead. The time when we honour and celebrate our ancestors. What does that mean? The ancestors are very important in traditional cultures, but we have lost this sense.

Those who came before have helped make us what we are. We live in a culture where the importance of the individual is stressed, the individual who is supposed to make it big on their own. The sense of being enmeshed in, and supported by a community of both the living and the dead is downplayed. The rights of the individual, rather than the needs of the community, are what matters.

When we become sensitive to Spirit in our lives, the emphasis is less on the Will and the ego and more on being receptive. More feminine, if you like. And that includes receptivity and gratitude to that which came before.

It can be difficult with parents, our primary ancestors. We often have issues with them. We are also taught to blame them for our psychological woes. DNA research is increasingly showing that who we are is much less a product of our environment than we thought. Maybe that will take some of the blame off the parents?

At any rate, our parents gave us the power to live. Once we can stop wanting our parents to be anything other than the half-formed people that we all are, that frees us to be more comfortable with who we are. It's simple, we just need to stop. And that frees us to feel the power of life that they gave us, and that still runs through us.

More than that, we are the product of a long line of parents, each supporting the next generation. And it is good to feel that.

And more than that, we are also a product of the gifted people of the past and the influence they have had. I might sound old-fashioned here, but it is where education in its best sense matters. It gives us that connection to the ancestors, an appreciation of where we come from.

Shakespeare

If you have British roots, then Henry VIII, for example, was our ancestor, and he helped free us from the medieval religious outlook, and gave the possibility of each person having their own relationship to the Divine. Then there are all those great Victorian novelists - Eliot, the Brontes, Dickens. And the poets and the painters. And the scientists. And so on. All these great teachers. And from other cultures and the distant past, too: they are also influences.

If we immerse ourselves in these people, we learn to think and observe and to feel and to imagine more widely and deeply. And we come to know our story. And our story is now the story of the world, and it goes back thousands of years. More than that, Evolution (if you go with that story) and DNA research show the thousands of life-forms that are also our distant ancestors, who gave us most of what we are.

This idea of educating ourselves is not an idea that is usually bandied about in the world of Shamanism. But I think it is fundamental. Just to repeat, we need to know our story, like any traditional person would.

These are great gifts from the past. Samhain is a time to celebrate the richness of the people and life-forms who have come before, because they have given us the power to live and made us who we are.