Here we are again, sitting around the fire and retelling the story of who we are as human beings. Let’s talk about our ancestors.
First of all, let’s note that we are the ancestors for the future. We are creating this world for what comes next. This is a huge responsibility. Looking at that honestly takes us out of our narcissism, out of thinking that everything needs to be just about ourselves, and broadens our perspective. You can’t create the future by yourself; I can’t create the future by myself. This is something that we’re all doing together, and all the steps that we take through our lives are creating and creating and creating what’s going to come.
We have many ancestors not that long ago who knew this, who lived this as their daily reality. They were taught this from the day they were born, to always be thinking of how they are contributing towards what’s coming next. These ancestors were not that long ago for us. For many people, for the indigenous people that are left on the planet who still have bits of their community left, it’s a living reality for them every day.
There are people alive today who their ancestors that they can speak to. They have living elders who can bring forth the wisdom that came from their elders, and their elders, and their elders, and their elders. Many of us, what we would commonly refer to as white people, the Europeans who conquered the world, don’t have immediate access to ancestors who were in touch with who they were and how they fit in the world.
But we all do still have those ancestors! If we believe in what nonduality is telling us then we know that wisdom isn’t in thought. Wisdom and the wise person are the same thing. The human being is built for wisdom; it’s literally in our DNA. When we calm down, calm, calm, calm the mind down, and reach the state that has been termed enlightenment, then we are in a state where this DNA wisdom the natural human being can come up.
Everyone has it. You don’t have to be full-blown enlightened to start accessing your inner wisdom. There’s so many things that you just naturally know.
Like, if you see a baby, what happens? You don’t have to try, your heart just opens. You see a puppy and your heart opens up. The cuteness of it grabs you, right? Your desire to care for this young being arises naturally… no thought needed.
That’s the aliveness of our inner DNA. It’s the connection to the universe bursting forth within us.
All of us know that being nice to people has a better result than just being mean, right? You know when you hear something that’s true, that’s just true. You know it.
Like the idea of cleaning up your garbage. It just takes a little tiny bit of awareness to realize, yes, of course… clean up your garbage. If everybody throws the garbage around, we know what’s going to happen. Clean up your garbage, clean up somebody else’s garbage. You simply know, out of the most basic wisdom, that cleaning garbage is a good thing to do.
That’s how to be a human being in the good way.
What’s a good human being? How do we be in this good way? We know, right?
There’s this ancient, ancient human truth that lives in us all. This comes to us from our ancestors, because you and I literally would not be here if this was not baked into our human reality.
These days many people think that human beings are a horrible creature that does nothing but destroy the Earth, because, well, that’s kind of what’s happening right now, right? But if you just really broaden your vision to human beings on the planet for 100,000 years, you’ll see that this literally cannot be true. The truth is that we naturally interweave and cooperate with each other. That’s the natural human being. That’s how to be a human being in the good way.
It’s easier if we were taught this from wise elders, but we don’t allow that. We have taken our elders and stuck them in old folks’ homes. We really don’t want anything to do with them.
And particularly women, right? Older women, we disappear them before they are even old. They don’t exist anymore.
So we miss this natural, ongoing knowledge that we used to get. But it’s even worse than that. Because our society is growing so fast, we think of our elders as stupid. They can’t use a cell phone, they can’t use a computer, they don’t know what LOL means.
We turn our elders into stupid idiots and the elders allow it! I can tell you, from knowing quite a few people my own age, that we allow that. We allow ourselves to be stupefied as we get older.
Nah… stop it!
We are human beings! We know how to gain knowledge. Anyone who sits and looks at themselves for a few minutes will see the knowledge that you’ve gained and your brilliance. This used to be the full human story.
We can start touching our ancestors in this way. If we know that we come from a world where all of our ancestors were fully awake, living ripe spiritual lives, completely in touch with the Earth and in harmony with the Earth, then we start seeing ourselves in a different way. We can raise ourselves up to becoming this real human being. We don’t have to have enlightened people right with us, because every one of us can access this inside of our own beings. That’s what all enlightenment teachings are about, how to get rid of the false mind, the false face, and access this true self.