Ancestral Memory

If you’re religious, you’re probably scanning through this with a skeptical dismissal of the topic in question. But if you’re a scientist or so inclined, your thoughts might be similar for different reasons because the fundamentals would be. If you’re the type that’s ‘gone or going back to their roots’ – your interest is likely piqued.

But someone like me will manage (not always) to see imaginary threads that link notions from the unlikeliest of places. I see impressions that capture the same essence from supposed stand-alone concepts – a gift of our modern times. A categorical chopping up of everything into individuation.

Coming across Dr Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance recently was quite by chance - I was glued to his lecture until the end. It sounds like a broad topic, which covered quite a few things. As he explained the science, as a biochemist, behind the patterns found in the nature of living creatures. It felt like listening to someone describing a puzzle I’ve always seen and sensed in my mind and life. I laughed when ‘ancestral memory’ made it to my eardrum. It sounded so incredulous that I hit the rewind button more than once.

Science was talking about the same thing my ancestors here in Africa have always known and passed along for generations. If you consider how long any system takes to develop and work, the interruption is quite recent. Of course, they didn’t possess ‘scientific’ papers for these teachings. But the education system we've adopted here has always looked and felt like a miserable failure to me. For presumably the same reason, by which I mean it's a relatively new way of learning for people in Africa.

Was science finally catching up to what our ancestors always knew?

A feeling of rage soon waged war within me. About the arrogance of the White man. How only ‘his’ civilisation was the only knowledge the entire world would operate within. And then, of course, I imagined the kind and intensity of the rage my not-so-distant ancestors must have gone through when they were beaten and broken into the absolute submission to the White man’s way of life.

That was a humbling enough thought for the rage to evaporate. A careful look at my relative modern comforts also did the trick. But it was in the discernment that I was actively perpetuating a pattern of rage and victimhood that made me instantly change those thoughts in their tracks.

Let’s get into what his Morphic Resonance Theory really sparked within and got the whirlpool of the mind going. But more specifically, of all the phenomena associated with Morphic Resonance, one chose to stick with me – ancestral memory.

All the italicised and quoted words are Dr Rupert Sheldrake's.

The idea that memory is inherent in nature is at the core of this theory.

“Each species has a kind of collective memory in which individuals contribute and in turn draw from. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is just the human aspect.”

The idea is based on similarity.

“Similar patterns of vibratory activity in self-organising systems influence subsequent similar systems across space and time. It doesn’t work independently of space and time.” (not exactly but we won’t digress into that.) 

The above, in his own words, sums up the hypothesis of fields found in all nature. And fields are explained as regions of influence.

About ancestral rituals, ceremonies and the like, I hardly know anything. Because of the people whom both my mother and father were, they knew nothing of it as well. It extended to my grandparents, although the paternal side could’ve been the exception. The reason I’m guessing here is the complex, dysfunctional relations between the two families. They could hardly all stay in one room together for five minutes. Bad blood, poison spewed with words, tensions that made my skin tingle with dread were what I grew up with.

But of course, as an African, I would encounter the concept of witchcraft. I first heard of it from my paternal aunt. With that came the explanation of ancestors as the real protectors of the ones still living in the world. It was just so fearfully confusing.

I would stay as far away as I could from that side of the family for most of my life. By the time I tried to integrate myself back into the fold, too much damage had been done by the adults who reared us, who in turn damaged us, and we are busy passing the hatred, suspicion, fear and what I have no names for into the younger generation.

One of the radical implications for our own lives as well is that memories are not stored in our brains.

“I’m suggesting in fact that they depend on a kind of resonance with our own past. The brain is like a TV receiver than a video recorder.”

By his own admission, these ideas are controversial. The attacks from the scientific community are scathing. Most of the internet is awash with articles of Dr Sheldrake’s pseudoscience that he passes off as the actual thing.

All I know is that families are fields, as are clans, tribes, communities under whatever banner, provinces, and nations. Just a look at the most intimate and longest field I’ve ever dealt with (even before myself) – the family was enough for something to finally click into place.

Even though I find it hard to explain the traditional understanding or knowledge of how the two arrive at the same essence, well, I prove my own resounding resonance as an individual within the collective.

From my own exposure and familiarity with patterns and how they perpetuate themselves, it’s easy to instinctively understand how my own grandmother bid me farewell weeks before her death in the form of a dream. She was comatose by then, but her message dawned loud and clear the morning the news of her passing reached me, thousands of kilometres away.

It’s just as it’s easy for me to see how wars start from small cyclical pools within families to vast ones between nations of the world. Or how some old-age conflicts within some regions of the world just refuse to go away.

How alcoholism or addiction, anger, violence, sexual abuse, incest, alienation, abandonment and the list goes on, fracture positive fields within living families, which can go unbroken for so long until somewhere a break does form, which then starts another chain of changes to form new patterns. What I know to mean generational curses.

Might the nature of memory explain why it is that sometimes letting go of a loved one can take what feels like forever? Grief changes over time, but there might be some freedom in knowing why I keep needing answers about who my own father was when he walked amongst us, the living. To close this inner chasm that borders on some sort of obsession because so many years have passed since his departure, could be within grasp. Could it be that the same patterns that he and I picked up are because of this morphic resonance? If so, then all I have to do is decide to be the one to break away from influences of the past.

"Things happen the way they do because they’ve happened that way before."

All I know is that I am alive at a time of a big shift. Where humanity is learning to look at and study wholeness. And because I can’t reconstruct the past of even my ancestors, let alone my own, there is a joy in the theory of Dr Rupert Sheldrake. It might take long, but changing patterns is doable. And I can begin with my own.

I even see the thread of his theory in what most faiths and religions teach. I see invisible thread all around me. What a wonderfully beautiful thing to personally know, at a frightful time, of such uncertainty in the world.

Yes, a type of picture emerges that sets into motion a yearning to return to what is known in the depths of one’s being. And that is – anything is possible, because by consciously choosing to change the patterns of fields around us, we can contribute to the formation of new ones.

It just makes perfect sense.

Photo Courtesy of- alex-moliski-dn54JYggRs8-unsplash.jpg- Many Thanks!