AeonLux: March 2017

ARE WE OUR OWN ANCESTORS?
Lon Milo DuQuette
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 once a 5 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 in 1950s Long Beach 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 that start and stop..
As the result of a series of crib-memories and child-hood 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 straight forward textbook example of reincarnation (Move over Bridey Murphy!). But in my later years I’ve come to see that reincarnation is more simple and elegant than that – a slight 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 Super-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 we have to work with.
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 of life is that you are the single and supreme consciousness …and that for an eternity you’ve been pretending to be everyone and everything?
It may be true that existence doesn’t require belief to exist. Perhaps it only requires an observer.