By don Oscar Miro-Quesada
Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.
~Thich Nhat Hanh
Our world’s Original Peoples understand that clues to our identity may not lay solely in the past but as much in the present, in awareness of the infinite spaces known to our immortal soul, to our universal shamanic Self. All of time and all ancestors are found within this eternal present and infinitely unitive dimensionality. I have begun to consider not so much who my human ancestors were but what kind of ancestor I am. The worldly self we cultivate and the actions that live beyond us are the pedigree that surpasses mere physical heredity. What we pass to the future is no longer simply genetic but a trans-genetic legacy that we safeguard and generate as ancestors into the future. So the most virtuous existential question we should seek to answer in service to our seven generations is: Who’s ancestor am I right now in this exact moment of awareness?
Any action guided by compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness, in however small a way, heals the past. In shamanic practice, healing the past means being willing to see without looking away. We must again learn to perform love-inspired rituals to feed the hungry ghosts, all those beings that society rejects, and the denied aspects of ourselves we’ve chosen to abandon or unconsciously suppress, for as the Buddha taught, all beings are heirs to their karma; we cannot escape our individual or collective past deeds. We are more than what happens to us and what we have done out of ignorance, fear, or unhealthy attachments to certain people, places, and possessions. We are also innately capable of compassionate awareness and love-suffused understanding. Being fully human depends on discovering within ourselves a state of awareness and level of consciousness more significant than our conditioning, inherited beliefs, and reactive functioning.
I’ve made a remarkable discovery about ancestors: you can adopt whoever you want as an ancestor. Even if you don’t get to choose your biological parents and grandparents, as most Western acculturated people believe, when you’re adopting ancestors, you get to invite people you admire into your experience of being human—the teachers, historical figures, writers, and artists who have influenced you and encouraged you—to be your ancestors.
Perhaps one day, “ancestor” will become a verb: to ancestor, meaning ‘to cultivate the ground of the self for the future.’ The eternal ancestor of the Present is continuously generative, expansive, and evolutionary. What we receive from the past, we can give to the future. And yet, what we give to the future, we are also giving back. Akin to the Andean spiritual principle of Sacred Reciprocity known as Ayni—or ‘Law of Right Returns’—best understood as an altruistically generous, non-transactional balanced exchange of material and spiritual goods in communal service to the wellbeing of All Our Relations. A life inspired by Ayni has been honored by Quechua-speaking Andean people since pre-Columbian times. More than a conditioned cultural expectation or inherited behavioral pre-disposition, Ayni is a lived ethos based on heartfelt reverence, caring partnerships, and sacred reciprocity between humans, Pachamama’s sublime interdependent web of life, and our originating Cosmos. Engaging in sacred reciprocity is a re-creation of our origins, an act when you must acknowledge that you are both back there and here, creating the future with every thought, word, and action. Yesterday is today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.
Hence, from the perspective of our universal shamanic Self, today exists to repair yesterday and prepare tomorrow. We don’t have to wait for some prophetic utopian future wherein humankind is finally united in loving purpose and guided by love for Mother Earth. What awaits us is an eternal flow of present moments, countless experiences of being here and now, prompting us to live as humans are meant to, in defiance of all the seemingly bad surrounding us. In essence, this alone is itself a tremendous victory, a feat worthy of shamanic celebration and praise to be freely shared in the form of communal storytelling, song, dance, earth-honoring ceremonial artistry, and any other forms of ancestoring yourself as a love-suffused gift of seven-generation healing light in service to cherished Gaia Pachamama’s species-wide magnificence.
For in our imaginations, where does childhood end and adulthood begin?
Aho Mitakuye Oyasin!