Ancestral Healing
When you look back, you can be concerned with the lineage that came before you in order to understand who you are today. There are knots in ourselves, but also knots in the line. If we look back at our ancestry, the thread has knots that distort the tapestry. Some think they have to go back through great-grandmothers and grandfathers, transforming the suffering they held in order to untie the tangles in the tapestry. However, if one truly realises pure presence right where they are, they can slowly untangle, unwind, and untwist the details of the lines before them because they do not lay outside of themselves but on the inner plains.
The catch is that in order to realise this pure primordial presence, one must relinquish the attachment to the idea that they are doing the work of untangling knots. There is no one in a realised state who has the arrogance to say, "I am healing my kin through my great presence." Presence doesn’t need to tell or be told of its greatness. If it did, it would not be great. It reminds me of the saying of Lao Tzu: “Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.” This knowing is self-knowing or self-luminous, like awareness that is a light unto itself, like a light that shines in the darkness naturally illuminates. It doesn’t have to declare its light; its light is self-evident.
Just as a shining light shakes the shadow, pure presence harmonises the time-bound mind with the timeless. From that space, all is your relative. There is no particular lineage work one must do, because every line is your line, every past is your past and every future is your future. Now you see why presence is the medicine. It grows as your understanding grows until it swallows your understanding, until it swallows all concepts. Once you have been swallowed, the essence that is non-dual spontaneously radiates in all directions. There is no one to choose how the wave rolls or lands or crashes.
If you look back at yourself, your parents, your society, and say, "I am healing my lineage," it is noble. If you yourself are healed through this purification of presence, then there is no agenda to take up that noble sword to cut the malignancy from the lines, and in that radiant presence, the lines are purified. Because it is you who carries the burden, and if you are clear of the idea of yourself carrying the burden, the load is lightened.
That is not to say that simply closing the story is all that is needed or that you need to just gaze at your own holier-than-thou navel and the world will be healed. It is the encouragement to hold all in duality lightly. It is to do the noble work while abandoning the results. Like Krishna says to Arjuna: "You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.”
What you do here today, in this moment right now, can clarify, cure, and heal the past and the future simultaneously. If you find that place inside of yourself where presence lives—then where is the problem? If you live from there and let that be your path and guide, with forgiveness at your side, then look at the past, and those who live there find their chains loosened from the grip of your spirit and thus their own. If you look forward to the future, then what is passed on is presence, and those future generations will reap the fruits of the seeds you have here sown.
| 1 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), chapter 56.
| 2 Eknath Easwaran, The Bhagavad Gita: Classics of Indian Spirituality (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2007).
