Viktoria Raidos - The Cult of Ancestors. The Power of Our Blood

For example, in the case of criminal behaviour in a bloodline, a compromise of this kind might be to not be silent and critical of the past, but aware of the character weaknesses and lack of will of an ancestor who became a criminal and the difficult circumstances of their life – thereby, in the end, showing pity and sympathy towards them.

This is why an individual needs to know what has happened in their bloodline in order to understand what affects them and why.

The strength of the family spirit is fed by the attention and memories of its living relatives. It is therefore a good idea to keep your ancestors’ photographs and to know your family tree. The strength of a bloodline increases when members of one family – even distant ones – maintain good relationships, are ready to help each other and know the history of the previous generations.

Ancestors only exist for as long as they are remembered. If you do not remember them and do not arrange memorial meals and ceremonies, this connection will gradually be lost. Then the bloodline itself will weaken.

Here I need to make a small digression to tell you about the connection of the Cult of Ancestors and teachings on reincarnation.

I see it as follows.

There is some kind of Higher Mind, God or Absolute – I prefer to call it ‘Source’ or ‘Arche’ (‘arche’ is a term from Ancient Greek mythology that means beginning, source, main principle, primacy or root cause). It is a certain field where everything is and is not. All we know about it is that it is something fundamentally unimaginable and incomprehensible. For everything existing it is Perfection, Truth, Bliss, Law, Energy Centre, Eternal Life and so on. But, because it is something incomprehensible for us, all these characteristics are conditional. We can call it ‘Mind’, but in fact it does not have a mind in the way that we understand – that we have – because it does not have a human mind. We can call it ‘Bliss’, but it cannot be the bliss that we can experience living our lives on Earth. We can call it ‘Eternal Life’, but it is not life that also includes death. Therefore, we must understand that our ideas about the ‘Source’ of life and another world are in many ways our fantasies based on the image of ourselves. And not because we are stupid, but simply because we are absolutley unable to think about this ‘Other’. There is nothing onto which our consciousness and feelings can grasp, because consciousness and feelings do not exist there – at least, not in our understanding.

There are bundles of energy that come out of Source or Arche, which carry a particle within them. This is a spirit. Each spirit has a divine spark – that is, its message, its own and unique contribution to the overall picture of the Universe, a note that is interwoven with the global symphony. At the same time, it has a desire to return to Arche, to merge with it, for which one needs to improve, to develop in order to turn this spark into a flame. The spirit itself is nothing more than this.

In that world where spirits come from – where there is everything and nothing at the same time – everything is arranged completely differently to our world. Our physical laws do not apply there; space and time are arranged alternatively there. Therefore, spirits in that world cannot develop: there are no conditions for this, no difficulties that need to be overcome or mistakes that can be learned from. In fact, it is even impossible to change there, because there is no time in our understanding of it. How can you change if you constantly exist in one instant?!

Therefore, the physical world and the very possibility of being born here are so important to spirits. Since there is time and matter, evolution is also possible, and as such the spirit can be improved here. On the physical level, this is evolution; on the spiritual level, this is karma.

The development of the spirit begins with simple forms of life, such as crystals. Gradually, a spirit, life after life, masters new stages and moves up the evolutionary ladder to plants, animals, man and so on. Spiritsand soulsare not the same thing. The soul is that which the spirit inhabits in the world of the living, as its shell. A soul is connected with the very personality of a living creature, its emotions, feelings, thoughts, and can change. A spirit is that divine spark that is present in all living things, that unknown particle of Eternity, which we can barely influence. We can only help it improve and develop; as a woman’s womb carries a foetus, so the soul carries the spirit.

Just as that world is Other for us, for the spirit the physical world is Other. The spirit goes into the physical body in much the same way as the living go into death.

On Earth, the spirit is only a guest. We can say that it is like a student who is receiving their required experience here.

After each life, the spirit returns to another world a little different. Changed, ideally, it is now one step closer to perfection, although the inverse can also happen. But – and this is crucial – the spirit itself, being in another world, cannot grasp the experience it received on Earth. The spirit is energy, and energy does not have consciousness as such (nor a brain). The spirit receives experience energetically and unconsciously, so it cannot comprehend when its energy state has become worse because in the physical world it has made some specific mistakes. Theoretically, in the next incarnation it can do the same, further worsening its condition and moving away from perfection. On a purely biological level, this is regulated by evolution, with the energy of the spirit manifesting itself as a tendency inherent in all living things to continue, survive and leave offspring – that is, the impulse of life is largely automatic. If an individual behaves inappropriately, it is rejected. Otherwise, its entire bloodline will die out. Of course, at levels below the human, ‘wrong’ behaviour of a spirit is not ‘hatred of one’s neighbour’ or ‘disrespect of the Divine’, but simply behaviour that does not correspond to its position. For example, for the spirit in the body of a wolf, it would be a mistake to consider oneself a hare and behave accordingly. The wolf pack and the whole world around will quickly explain that it is mistaken. So this spirit will have to live the next life a level lower down (in the body of a hare, perhaps).

But the transition of a spirit into human existence is already a fundamentally different level, and so the situation becomes more complicated. A person has a spiritual dimension, for which karma (the causes and consequences of actions) and the state of a soul begin to play a big role. The development of the spirit, among other things, is the development of free-will and responsibility for itself. It is clear that a stone or a flower can answer very little, but a person does have such a possibility. The purely biological in a person fades into the background, with the development of a human spirit being influenced by its actions, relating little to its biology and instincts.

The mechanism of transmitting a purely human experience is not so much biology or genetics, as much as culture.

Perhaps you know that the tale of Mowgli is based on reality: in history, there have been quite a few cases when a child from infancy was raised by wild animals as their own cubs. In reality, such stories tend to have a sadder ending than in literature. As a result, even if they are taken away from animals in childhood or adolescence and there have been efforts to educate them as people for many years, such people always remain inwardly animals. That is, in these cases the child has the vital energy to survive in the world, but loses out on all the genuine human experience. And so the soul will most likely no longer remain human. At the same time, he or she retains all the genes and evolutionary experience accumulated by their ancestors, but which cannot be used since the necessary tools for this are not automatically transmitted.