Ancestral Spirits and the Physical Heart (Part 1)

★Life exists because of your ancestors

Not just because it’s the Obon season, when the spirits of ancestors are remembered, but today let’s talk about the relationship between you and the ancestral spirits who are your ancestors and your past lives.

As you know, you exist now precisely because your ancestors existed, right?

If there had been no ancestors, you wouldn’t exist, and there would be no humanity left on Earth now. But that isn’t how it is, is it?

The fact that you are alive right there now means that you have inherited, in an unbroken line, the blood of your ancestors.

Within you flows, without a break, the blood of countless ancestors, and all of their information is engraved in your genes.

Some of that is also a scene from your own past lives.

So even people who don’t acknowledge the existence of an afterlife, or who consider themselves to have no religious feeling, sometimes find gratitude toward their ancestors welling up out of nowhere from deep in a heart swept along by daily busyness. That is an extremely natural expression of the heart as a human being, and there’s nothing strange about it at all.

When we talk about this, some people occasionally dislike it, saying it smells of incense or it’s gloomy. That comes from their image of “death” being stuck in old, habitual ideas.

If people understood the fact that, for many, “death” is truly a shining departure—”a flight into complete freedom” at the completion of one’s physical life—they could become far more serious about living, and thoughts facing truth would well up. But in reality, they can’t easily shed their habitual thoughts, so they just keep going round and round in the same place within the whirlpool of old habits of thought.

★The experiential knowledge and experiential value of your ancestors flowing in your blood

By the way, in Japanese the word chi, which we used just now for “blood,” can also mean “knowledge” and “value.”

In your heart, the experiential knowledge and experiential value of your ancestors are gathered.

As proof, there are people who one day suddenly start painting amazing pictures, suddenly become able to play the piano, or suddenly show superhuman intelligence or athletic ability, aren’t there?

For such people, the experiential knowledge and value in their genes were switched ON and came to the surface, and that’s why they suddenly show ability in things they had no experience of, or were complete outsiders to, in this life.

On the other hand, unfinished homework of the soul left by your ancestors, including your own past lives, also flows in your blood, and it can come to the surface when it meets the right combination of time, place, and people.

For example, a person who latently carries the karma of lashing out at those around them when things don’t go their way can keep a calm face without showing the slightest hint of that nature while spending ordinary, uneventful days. But when time, place, and people line up like a planetary alignment, they may lose themselves in an explosion of emotional thought—not only verbal abuse and violence, but even to the point of injury or killing.

Even if it’s nothing that sudden, there are people everywhere who are usually nice but become different people when they drink and keep causing trouble for those around them, aren’t there?

For you to achieve the evolution of consciousness in your own generation means clearing up all the homework left by your ancestors and your own past lives, and letting a clean soul shine forth.

And what happens when a person lets their original, clean soul shine forth? Divine consciousness comes to the surface, and the evolution of consciousness is achieved. (To be continued next time)