Are We Our Own Ancestors?

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Lon Milo DuQuette, author of Low Magick: It’s All In Your Head … You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is and the forthcoming Homemade Magick: The Musings & Mischief of a Do-It-Yourself Magus (August 2014).

Do you believe in reincarnation?

I do.

Perhaps the word “believe” is not quite the right term to use. Existence doesn’t demand belief to exist. Is it a matter of belief that I was a five-year-old child in 1953 kindergarten? Did that little Lonnie DuQuette die to become high school Lon or adult Lon?

If we are thinking in terms of linear time, we might be obliged to answer with a qualified, “Yes! Little Lonnie is dead and gone. His tiny body has passed away; the DuQuette home no longer rings with his laughter or the patter of his little feet. Every cell in his childhood body is now gone—dust, lost in dust.”

But when exactly did little Lonnie die? Where did my consciousness go in the mysterious “time” between my childhood incarnation and my adult incarnation? The reasons these questions are unanswerable is because time itself (as we are accustomed to thinking about it) does not exist. It is always NOW. Little Lonnie did not die…his NOW just continued to shift. When we remove the non-existent and illusionary factor of linear time from the equation, there is no previous life, no future life … only a continuous now life.

The fact that we are conscious of the perpetual now-ness of life should be our first big clue that the nature of the cosmos—the nature of reality—the nature of existence itself is consciousness. Every new revelation of quantum physics reinforces this assertion. But in order for us to wrap our meat brains around this most self-evident (yet frustratingly abstract) reality we must invent for ourselves a flickering hide-and-seek game of consciousness we call “Life and Death”—and pretend the great continuous consciousness experience is a series of sequential episodes.

As the result of a number of crib-memories and childhood visions and experiences too personal and complex to itemize here, I am reasonably certain that I am my own great uncle who died a few years before I was born. At first this realization seemed like a straightforward textbook example of reincarnation (move over Bridey Murphy!). But in my later years I’ve come to see that reincarnation is more complex and elegant than that—a sleight of hand illusion of genetic memory and quantum physics. (After all, if two particles can be in two places at the same time, then it follows that one particle can be simultaneously in two times.) In other words, all our incarnations are happening simultaneously within one Supreme Now, and that what we do to change our individual now changes both the past and the future.

In any case, now will always be the only time with which we have to work.

Every culture and civilization, from prehistoric times to the present day, engages in some form of ancestor worship. It seems that as human beings we are just hard-wired to recognize and honor our ancestors. The idea I will leave with you in my little blog today is this:

What if we are our own ancestors?

What if our present efforts at self-perfection are serving to correct, repair, and redeem mistakes and missteps of our past and improving our condition in the future?

What if the plot of the hilariously profound movie Groundhog Day is at least in part an accurate view of the nature of time and our incarnational duties?

Is it possible that we will all wake up one day to the realization that we are our own ancestors?

Is it possible that the final great revelation is that we are a single and supreme consciousness …and that for an eternity we’ve been each other all the time?

Our thanks to Lon for his guest post! Visit Lon Milo DuQuette’s author page for more information, including his books.