NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

A Call to Heal: Recovering Ancestral Memory
by Mother Maya

Let there be no neglect of the duties to the Gods
and the forebears. Be one to whom the mother is God.
Be one to whom the father is God.
--Krishna Yajur Veda
(Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11.2)

Appeasing the Ancestors

It is no coincidence that this horrific act on September 11th, 2001 occurred during the Vedic observance for ancestors called Pitri Paksha. The practice involves two weeks of reciting special prayers prior to the actual day of celebration, as well as offerings of grain, water, and milk to appease the ancestors. These offerings are said to give nourishment and strength to the subtle or etheric body of the ancestors and to ensure their safe travel (and ours when the time comes) to the blissful abode among the Petris, or divine fathers. A portion of the food offering is also given to the cows and crows, animal friends we connect with the ancestral spirit. This ritual practice is observed each year to help revive within us the memory of our people and to keep their spirits happy. This cosmic obligation must be tended so that the influence of the ancestral spirits will grace our lives and purpose.

Disparate cultures such as the Vedic seers, the native American shamans, African tribes, and the Guyanese Amerindian people share similar beliefs about the tremendous problems we face today: terrorism; pandemic illnesses; pollution; genocide; violence, poverty, and crime are all due to the unhappiness of our ancestors' spirits, and the loss of their protection. If we allow such conditions to continue unchecked, they will bring about a devastating loss of human memory and, ultimately, the destruction of the earth.

As fate would have it, exactly six years ago at Pitri Paksha I was in Katmandu, Nepal, observing my last hours of a six-month silent retreat. The events of that day triggered the same visceral feeling in my gut that our ancestral spirits were deeply wounded. Early that morning, I heard gleeful shouts coming from the Agni Temple across the street. One of my neighbors came to my door to tell me that the temple's statue of the elephant-headed god, Ganesha, was drinking milk. Eager to witness this miracle with my own eyes, I joined the excited throng that had gathered in the temple and slowly made my way through the crowd toward the statue. Indeed, Ganesha did appear to be absorbing the cups of milk held up to his trunk by his eager devotees. Some days later, Hinduism Today estimated that some million gallons of milk had been absorbed by a billion Ganesha statues all over the world.

As I sought the deeper meaning of this "miracle", I met a Brahmin priest at Pashupati Temple who quoted me a passage from the Dharma Sastra, which states that from time to time the gods and goddesses make known their presence on earth through the medium of the statues, which are imbued by the daily rituals of the priests with prana, or life force. However, according to the Dharma Sastra, when these manifestations occur during Pitri Paksha they portend an inauspicious sign, a stern warning from the celestials that the earth's dharma is being violated. My own interpretation of the milk miracle came to me in a meditation when my ancestors appeared and told me that Shiva was very unhappy because we humans had forgotten our sacred duty to our ancestors. Once more, it is the time of Pitri Paksha and we are sternly reminded of our long-forgotten obligation to our ancestors.

The Vedas inform us that one of the highest universal laws is Pitri Rina, repaying our debt to the ancestors, who include parents, grandparents, and spiritual teachers. But our ancestral lineages are not limited to those with whom we share a genetic heritage. Teachers, mentors, and older friends, and indeed, all citizens of the world who help to inspire and shape our lives may be included in the ritual honoring of the ancestors. This ritual and other practices I describe strengthen the link to those who sustain us with their spirit and energy.

Pitri Paksha is observed each year during the dark moon phase of the lunar month, Ashvina. In the Western calendar, this coincides with the dark cycle of the moon that comes at the end of September or early October. The last and most significant day of Pitri Paksha falls on the new moon, when prayers and offerings are deemed most necessary. In the present year, Pitri Paksha occurs October 3rd through October 13th.

According to Vedic tradition, birth and its resulting shock cause us to lose our memory of our extensive past. We must overcome whatever stands in the way of our remembering. When our ancestral memories are blocked, we forget who we are. Part of our psyche is also blocked, and we therefore lose our ability to tap into the innate intuitive guidance that keeps us on our life's path and that safeguards our profound journey after death. We forget our sacred purpose in life and lose our protection in the hereafter.

Honoring your ancestors is the first step in reclaiming your spiritual heritage and center of calm within. As you begin to recover your ancestral memories, you will move ever closer to discovering the unconscious, troubled memories that prevent you from knowing the truth of who you are. You will strengthen ties to your ancestors. We are the only species that has evolved the power of intuition. Yet we too easily forfeit our sacred birthright--the ability to change and grow, create and strive for inner freedom and oneness with the greater energies.

As we wrongly invest our spiritual prowess in the strife for material, political, and religious domination, we have largely forgotten the joy, love, and wellness that are intrinsic to human nature. The tragedy we face speaks to the impoverishment of our spirit.

Our modern culture is so preoccupied with the pursuit of wealth and power and health that we seem to function from the debilitating premise that something is wrong with us. We must shift the false image of ourselves as pursuers of wellness, inheritors of disease. We are wellness. We are consciousness. This is our natural state. Disease is an impostor, a force that thrives on loss of memory. A crisis such as the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 provides us both the urgency and spiritual juncture to explore our past, but we do not have to wait for devastation or death to occur before we undertake to recall and honor our innate ancestral memories.

A Call to Heal

On September 11, 2001, the unthinkable happened. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were targets of vicious terrorism. Thousands of lives were lost. Thousands more suffer indescribable loss. The world is stunned by this horrific act of destruction. As fate would have it, only two weeks prior to the horrific act, my office was scheduling my travel and book tour events in the United Kingdom. I was scheduled to return to New York on September 11th, 2001 via United Airlines, Flight number 957. Acting on an intuition and a profound desire to return home early, I instructed my assistant to cancel my last scheduled appearance in Brighton, England and to bring me back home at the Wise Earth School in Candler, North Carolina on September 8th.

In the early morning of September 9th, I had a dream of the World Trade twin towers. They stood poised in the morning light. Eerily quiet and empty, the surrounding buildings had all been moved farther away toward the Hudson river. At one point in the dream, I was speaking to Bill White, a family friend who was one of the Red Cross Disaster service men who had participated in the clean up efforts at the WTC after the 1993 bombing. The next morning on September 10th, in keeping with Vedic monastic tradition, we chant the Rudra... invocation to God Shiva in the form of Rudra -- destroyer of evil. In the meditation that followed I saw the faces of my female ancestors. Directly after chanting, my neck froze. I couldn't move it. Minutes later, I regained some movement in it. At 9:15 am on September 11th, I was having my neck adjusted by a Wise Earth sadhaka who was visiting the School. Suddenly, I felt a humongous sonic shift through my inner ears that literally shook my entire body. The sadhaka was standing still with her arms slightly raised in the air. She, too, had felt the shift. The unthinkable horrific was happening at that very moment.

A stunning silence pervaded the mind of the cosmos that entire day. At dusk I was barely able to utter the necessary Shantipathas--mantras for peace and healing. I struggled to penetrate the heavy, dark cloud that hung over the world's psyche. At dawn the next day, the dense mask took the form of thousands of faceless souls hovering over New York City. As before, the spirit of my female ancestors had appeared earlier that week to warn me of some impending disaster. Suddenly, I understood. The souls were trapped in the ether, unable to move onward to their destinations in the subtle realm. This paralysis of energy permeated the ether to the same degree whether you were one mile away from the epicenter in the New York City, a thousand miles away here in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina or a million of miles away in the greater etheric field.

Indeed, while attending the Kumbhamela in Allahabad, India earlier this year, I had experienced the same pervasive hovering of the souls' energy after the earthquake in Bhuj, Gujarat had claimed thousands of lives. At that time, a profound insight came to me. The souls needed the energy of prayer to move on. The appropriate energy of the ancestral emissaries who receive the souls needed to be invoked and awakened. My mind became immediately present, my prayers focused and strong. I invited the Wise Earth network of students worldwide to join me in contemplation as I chanted the Rudra over and over and felt its sonic powers penetrating the dense fog of souls. By the third day of chanting the souls had begun to move on.

What contributed to the stuckness of the souls' energy in the lower ethers? Was their inability to move on caused by the sudden trauma of the death of their bodies? Are there not celestial forces and ancestral emissaries at work after life to gather souls and guide their journey to their appropriate destinations in the higher ethers? As I discovered many years ago in the winter of Vermont when I was on the brink of death with cancer, our lives are invariably connected to the greater energies of the universe and our ancestors play the most significant role in how we respond to these energies both on the earthly and etheric planes. It is the spirits of our ancestors who come to guide our shed bodies onto their journeys as we begin our ascent into deep space. We humans have forgotten our ancestors. We do not honor them. We do not remember them. We have severed our ties to these precious guides.

Compassion for All

In the present time of crisis, we must shift our thinking from hunger for violence, revenge, and death to the thirst for equanimity, harmony, and life among all peoples of all ancestral origins. We have every right to be horrified by the death of the innocents in New York and Washington and the tens of thousands who would survive only to live through years of anguish. Life is precious. Why then, for instance, do we not feel the same compassion for the nearly half a million children who perished in Iraq as a result of US policies there?

As our President calls for a crusade of good against evil and a fierce military response to terrorism, it is obvious that we remember very little about our history as Americans far less the history of the last century. To quote Tom Mayer, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, "the bombing of the World Trade Center emerges from more than five decades of history, a history which most Americans do not know about or would prefer to forget. During the last twenty years alone, the United States bombed Libya, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. These direct applications of American military force are only the tip of the interventionist iceberg."

Has any policy for violence ever succeeded? Can we heal by taking an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Must not the blissful freedom we seek for ourselves be a freedom protected for all? This is a time for each one of us to return to our ancestral well to replenish our innate human memory for healing. As part of the law of karma, we all carry memories of pain and conflict passed down from our immediate family who inherited their life imprints from their ancestors. As long as we do not face these memories we cannot embark on our own individual path of resolve and healing. The open and honest acknowledgment of our people's spiritual, emotional, and physical trials and trespasses allows for forgiveness, healing and resolution. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We may begin to remember our past by honoring the ancestors. First though, each of us must take responsibility for restoring peace among all people through serving our earthly community.

Oneness of Spirit

The Vedic people understand that none of us exists as an independent being, that we are all linked to the universe through our ancestry. They believe that the act of selfless service and sacrifice keeps us in harmony with our society and lineage. The Rig-Veda's "Hymn of the Longhair" speaks about the munis, ascetics from India's shamanic culture, who rode the winds (the internal life force) to benefit their fellow beings. Although we may be beginners in learning to ride the inner breath, we can all honor our ancestral spirits by giving of ourselves. As my brother, a Brahmin priest and pundit, has said, "Appease the ancestors so that we may live happily".

In ancient India, royal sage Bhagiratha stood on one foot for a thousand years as penance for having liberated his ancestors from the netherworld. He held both arms high toward the heavens for another thousand years. He performed these sacrifices, called tapas, as a prayer to the gods to release the waters and revive the drought-ridden earth. The gods finally were placated and responded by sending rains of such force that Lord Shiva had to break the torrential flow of the river by catching it in his hair. This outpouring formed the Himalayan river and its estuary, the Ganges.

Indian ascetics commonly performed rituals similar to Bhagiratha's sacrifice as a way to show respect for their ancestors and to serve the earthly community. These ancient shamans had one purpose in life--to develop and refine their inner consciousness through disciplined spiritual practice. In so doing, they influenced the community around them and all of humanity with their beneficent energy and vibration. It was in this tradition of spiritual service that my grandfather fasted to bring the rains one hundred years ago in Guyana. The Shatapatha Brahmana tells us: "Sacrifice has only one sure foundation, only one destination, the heavenly realm!"

The Yajur Veda instructs us in this regard: "To you most luminous God, we pray now for the happiness of our ancestors and friends. Listen attentively to our call and protect us from those who go against the cosmic order." As I see it, the collective grief of the modern world is due to the loss of our ancestral memory. This loss is the most basic cause for the breakdown of dharma (which means cosmic laws and life values besides life purpose) in relation to our family, global community, and nature.

Sir James George Frazer, the noted British anthropologist, wrote in The Golden Bough that human evolution has gone through three stages: the age of magic, the age of religion, and the age of service. According to Vedic thought, we have arrived at a fourth and final stage, the age of understanding, called kali yuga (darkness time). During this time, we will see a breakdown of everything that runs counter to the cosmic order. This breakdown will allow a spiritual breakthrough-an opportunity to ignite the light of unity and understanding among all people. We can begin to unite by embracing our ancestors and honoring the earth.

We start this process by remembering our indelible link to our past. When we fail to recall these sacred ties, we lose touch with the onrushing stream of consciousness that flows through memory from generation to generation. Without memory, we cannot hope to sustain our present or know our purpose as human beings. Meditation teaches us to live in the present moment, but my father also taught me that "the past and the future are in our present".

We can begin our personal practice of honoring and appeasing our ancestors by making small personal sacrifices on a daily basis. Offer your seat to an elderly or disadvantaged person on the bus or train. Devote an hour a week or month to community service. Say a prayer to alleviate suffering. Offer a pound of rice to a homeless shelter. Visit a nursing home. Fast one day a year for world peace. Make a conscious effort not to injure, pollute, or otherwise compromise the earth, her rivers, animals, plants, and environment. The highest personal sacrifice we can make is to embrace a spirit of reverence for nature and work toward healing the indescribable damage we humans have wreaked upon our planet. In the words of the great American naturalist, John Muir, who originated the concept of our national parks system, "When a man plants a tree, he plants himself." Likewise, when he uproots it, he uproots himself.

With a personal sacrifice, we give something of ourselves--our attention, time, money. The Vedic seers teach that, "Sacrifices are the actions through which we receive sustenance from the earth and by which we return equal nourishment back to her." They tell us that giving back to nature not only pleases our ancestors' spirits but helps us develop inner consciousness. As we awaken to our ancestral memories, we remember the meaning and purpose of our lives.