Count on yourself, count on the intentions you make for yourself, the promises you make to yourself, and although they can change, which is fine, while you’re still holding to a promise, a particular promise, while you’re still holding to a particular intention, be true to that.
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The purpose of this shamanic journey is to travel to the Spirit realm of the Upper world and ask the benevolent, compassionate Spirits for guidance on the topic of connecting with one’s benevolent ancestors.
I’m standing on the mountain ledge, waiting for a way of going up to the Upper world to show itself, and I find myself with the pole, like a totem pole that I’ve climbed before.
Quite an animated pole with carvings of faces and colors, and many easy handholds and footholds for me to start climbing up, and I’m feeling quite energetic and strong as I put my feet onto the various parts that protrude and my hands onto the hand grip, almost like a climbing wall, except it’s a round totem pole shape.
And I soon find myself quite far up, and I’m continuing to climb and putting out my intention to the Spirit realm, to travel to the Upper world, the Spirit realm of the Upper world, and to meet my own compassionate Spirit Teachers and ask them for guidance around connecting with benevolent ancestors.
And I’m going up and up, and unusually the surroundings around me are not just the darkness and emptiness of space, but there are green sheets of trees or growth around me, almost as if I’m ascending through a jungle forest, even though this is my way up to the Upper world.
And I’m going up and up, and the protrusions of footholds and handholds continue to be animated, and then this way of ascending, this pole, this animated totem pole comes up through a clearing in the Upper world that I’ve been to many times before, and it’s like a portal opens in the Upper world.
I get off, and then the pole subsides, and the portal seals, and I immediately get a message from the Spirit world up here, the Upper world, to just listen to the drums and be, find a quietness inside myself, let myself become more calm and receptive to Spirit guidance, to not bring my own tension and anxiety into this journey.
And I breathe.
And I’m seeing a sort of archetypal, wise old man.
He’s dressed in white, and he’s got a white beard and a smiling face.
I haven’t met this Spirit before, and he’s like an archetypal symbol of a wise guide, a wise Teacher.
And he takes me to another clearing where there are, it’s almost like a little circle of stone benches, and he’s sitting there, and I’m sitting in front of him on one of the benches, and he says, “Statewide, why are you here?”
And he says, “I want to get, I please want to get guidance on this topic of the benefit, the advantages, the value of connecting with one’s ancestors, one’s benevolent ancestors.”
And he says, “Yes, that’s a very good topic.”
And I say that in my own training, it was emphasized by my Teacher, Michael Harner, that when one does a journey of connection with ancestors, one should preface with wanting to meet and interact with benevolent ancestors.
And the Spirit Teacher says, “Yes, of course. Why would you want to spend your valuable time other than connecting with ancestors who love you and want to help you?”
And he shows me an ancestor that I’ve connected with before, one that’s from many, many hundreds of years ago, not an immediate ancestor like a parent or a grandparent or great-grandparent, but much further back in quite a simple, you could say, by our standards, impoverished setting where there was a lot of manual labour.
And he says an important message, an important teaching from the ancestors.
And he’s speaking generally here is to appreciate just how good our lives are in this modern time, that at least on the material level, in terms of shelter and food and safety, we’re pretty well off compared to many of our distant ancestors lived.
So it’s a message of appreciate what you are experiencing.
Realize how good it is.
And also appreciate the ancestors and that they lived and survived and procreated.
And now you, the future generation, have been born and are alive thanks to them.
So there’s a very, very basic appreciation apart from the fact of realising that we are actually leading very comfortable lives for the most part compared to our ancestors.
And that is to acknowledge that we wouldn’t be here without the courage and perseverance of our ancestors.
Thanks to them we exist.
Very basic appreciations.
And this old man symbol, Spirit Teacher, is also saying, and now of course there’s the particular wisdom and guidance that one’s ancestors can provide.
And he says before he forgets to add and before I get to hear and appreciate.
And I must remember before I forget what he was just about to tell me before I get distracted.
Which I have.
That thought vanished as I was trying to access it or that teaching vanished.
This is a different idea now that he’s communicating.
And that is that we have a responsibility to our future generations.
The ones that will look back on us as being their ancestors.
But we are both descendants and at least for some of us we are ancestors.
If we have directly had children and they’ve had children and they have children and they have children, we’re going to be, we will be ancestors.
And he says but it’s an interesting situation if there are absolutely no, in the unlikely event that there are absolutely no family members, even distant ones who produce descendants, that we will still be ancestors.
Maybe not direct as in parent, child, parent, child, parent, child, etc.
But it could be uncle once removed, aunt once removed, a less direct ancestry but nevertheless an ancestry.
And he says the primary duty or responsibility we have is to lead a good life that anybody, any future descendants looking back on, will say what a good example of leading a good life that ancestor was and in what ways did they lead a good life that have got teachings and wisdom.
And he says so that’s the way we should include connecting with our own benevolent ancestors is to inquire what kind of good lives did they lead and what kind of teachings and wisdom and guidance do they have to pass on to us.
And so he says for example try that out with this ancestor of yours that you were describing the one from probably many hundreds of years ago, whom I have visited and had guidance from but right at this very moment I don’t remember what that was.
And so I ask and intentionalised to go down closer to that ancestor.
And the first thing I’m wondering about is, is this ancestor a a man or a woman?
And my Spirit Teacher although as I said I have never connected with this particular Spirit with the long white beard before says you know those specific gender identities are not necessarily that important.
So if it’s if it’s obvious that it was a man or a woman that’s fine.
But the important thing is that you had a wise ancestor because the the premise of connecting with ancestors is to only connect with benevolent compassionate ancestors.
That’s important.
And I guess I’m uncertain here about whether this ancestor that I’m close to is actually male or female because they’re they’re old and they’re in a sense weather-beaten.
They’re worn by their existence which had a lot of physicality to it.
And they laugh and say sit down, sit down.
We’re in a we were outside but now they call me to come inside.
I guess it’s a it’s a hut.
It’s a very simple dwelling that I would describe as a hut.
And I go in and there’s a it’s actually a raised bed.
I was wondering whether I would see a bed and then I thought no it’s more probably going to be something on the floor but it’s actually some sort of raised bed area.
And the Spirit says being a good person, which one wants to pass on as an example to future generations, is primarily or largely being authentic to yourself.
That you don’t fool or trick yourself.
And they mentioned that statement by some Teacher, know thyself.
I’ll have to look up after this journey who is supposed to be the originator of that guiding wisdom, know thyself.
And they laugh and say although they’re from this time many hundreds of years ago there’s a favorite phrase or stick or word that artificial intelligence uses a lot these days in and that is of coherent or coherence.
And they say it’s a modern word but it’s very, very powerful as this instruction of be coherent.
Don’t have inner conflict in what you do and what you think or work through your inner conflict and don’t let your inner conflict manifest in coherent action.
I think that’s the essence of it, is that there is inner conflict which of course we do want to reduce.
And the Spirit is saying listen to me clearly now, don’t drift off.
And he’s giving a friendly admonishment wagging his finger.
It’s just for emphasis.
Don’t let inner conflict manifest in behavior that’s not coherent.
You do it for your children, you do it for your grandchildren, you do it for all your descendants.
They will benefit, however you do it for yourself.
We’re talking about, this is him saying, we’re talking about you leading a good life and what does it mean for you to lead a good life?
And then he says, which is something that has come up on many journeys before, is that another point to learn from, another message from the benevolent ancestors is to be kind, to be kind to other people.
There’s so much difficulty and hardship and pain in life, there can be and there is, that just be kind.
Be a kind person, help, help other people as much as you can in their lives.
Says be reliable.
If you say you’re going to do something, then do it.
Be a person of your word.
If other people can’t count on you, it’s like you can’t count on yourself, which is a huge inner incoherence, coming back to that word.
Count on yourself, count on the intentions you make for yourself, the promises you make to yourself, and although they can change, which is fine, while you’re still holding to a promise, a particular promise, while you’re still holding to a particular intention, be true to that.
Be true to your word to others and be true to your words to yourself and be kind.
And then this ancestral Spirit shows me some situation where he or she, I still don’t know the specific gender, is dancing.
And although I was seeing her, I’m just going to call it her a her for now, rather than saying him/her the whole time, and this has got nothing to do with wokeness, this is just that I cannot specifically identify, so for convenience I’m going to call this ancestral Spirit of her.
And although I saw her in a very, very isolated situation, I’m seeing her in a situation where there’s a maypole, is what I would have called it, and there’s some kind of small gathering of other people who presumably live within walking distance, and they’re dancing around this pole, but I’m understanding that it’s actually not a maypole, and I don’t know much or anything about maypoles, but it’s actually much more like the Spirit totem pole that I used to come up here to the Upper world, and that this is a Spirit pole, it should be called, not a maypole, but something even more significant, that the ancestors, at least the ones I’m seeing, this particular one, rejoiced in their connection to the Spirit world as represented by this, what I’m calling a Spirit pole, an animated Spirit pole, and they’re dancing around it, and to modern ignorant eyes this might look quite primitive.
And actually there are, they’re dressed up in animal skins, and I think what I’m seeing here is that I’ve gone even further back in time, that what I’m, the scene that I’m showing, being shown here of people dancing around the Spirit pole is way, way earlier than the Spirit of, as I said a few hundred years ago, that I had visited, because now these are people from a much more primitive time, dressed in animal skins.
I’ve got no idea whether this is or years ago, I just cannot tell, but the point that’s been communicated to me is that the ancestors were very, very connected with the Spirit world, and that too is their message to me, and their message to, in answer to this question about the benefit of connecting with benevolent ancestors, and that is that they do emphasize how we should, how we can and should, connect with the Spirit realm, and also they say don’t forget the fun aspect of it, that that yes, the main part is the deep Spirit connection, but also that people came together and enjoyed themselves, and they showed me on the sideline a, we would call it a barbecue, but there are fires and wrecks, I’m not sure what they made out of with food cooking, and they say remember life is short, by the time one gets to even an old age, it will feel like life’s been very short, and you don’t want to not include enjoyment and connection with other people if possible, and the drums have changed while I’ve been talking, so it’s time for me to return, and they, they, before I go back they say I must go over to one of these racks, and I, I wasn’t sure what I was going to eat, whether there was going to be a piece of meat, but actually it’s a, a piece of corn, it’s, it’s recognizable as corn, and they say eat some of that before you go, and they say corn represents the sun, and represents energy and replenishment, and they say that’s a sort of a final message is, is remember to replenish your energy, which is really a very biological fact, that we need energy, and we use energy, and we should quite deliberately replenish energy, and not just by food, but in other ways that we can think about too, and I, I find myself going up into the sky away from the scene, and I, I wave goodbye as I rise up, and I also see the ancestor who was from not as far back, and I wave to her and I say goodbye, and I find myself back in that clearing, and the Spirit pole has re-emerged, and I climb onto it and start climbing back down, and down, the drums are silent, I’m climbing back down, and down, it’s quite an intense journey, and the animated Spirit pole has calmed down now, and it’s as if the, the animation has ceased as I go down, and I’m just going down handholds and footholds, and arrive back on the mountain ledge, and wish to be back in the middle world, where I am now, I know where I am, back in the middle world, the journey is over, and I say thank you Spirits, thank you
