Ancestor Appreciation
“Part of our spiritual preparation…is as ancestors. It’s the challenge that all of us face who are alive on earth today. How do we prepare to be ancestors of future people?”(Parhuli, 2008)
And among the many important insights the ancients understood better than we do today was to properly honor their own ancestors, the sages of old whose voices carried forward the hard learned lessons of the past. And for this reason, the collective body of past wisdom did not escape the attention of those who came after – as it seems to for us today. For there is nothing of most of this in any of our educational practices today. We apparently think we have nothing to learn from these diverse ancient cultures, let alone from indigenous cultures still living today.
But true to these ancient ways, Socrates knew that “I ought certainly to hear what my elders have to say, and to learn of them, and if I have anything to add, then I may venture to give my opinion and advice.”[9]
“If humanity can learn to see through Indigenous eyes, and to hear in the land the voices of our natural ancestors – which continue to speak to us of dignity – then the hearts of all peoples will be healed.” (OI, Forest, 237)
And this responsibility falls to elders, most of all. For as we have more time for circumspection as life goes on, we also have more responsibility help make things that have gone wrong go right! For while we can’t change the actions of the past, we can change what we learn from them, and what we teach because of what we learned. And this is what brings responsibility with age.
Many ancient cultures (unlike some since) took seriously the responsibility to pass this practical wisdom on to their young (and just who dropped the ball, and why is itself a dialogue worth having…), Had they not, it would have had a chance of reaching us as a much younger age.
So we’re lucky if we get time to rediscover all this in our senior years. And so its especially important that we ultimately find our voice, pass it on, and teach it, so that we might thus help someone else, especially our own grandchildren, who are likely to learn it from no one else in their lives, if not us. For is little if anything that offers these big ideas and deep thoughts, great books and old souls, in what we these days call education.
So we should make it our conscientious practice to pass on the legacy of human creativity and the hard learned lessons to our young. Indeed, it is our responsibility to help those who follow along in our wake to learn the easy, rather than the hard way. But that chain has often been broken along the way, wisdom burned and buried instead of proliferated, and so it has to be found, again and again, each generation anew.
While the focus of my personal study has been on ancient Greek thought, the Greeks themselves were not far removed from those oral, pre-literate cultures that Smith calls primal. They held strong ties with many folk religions and traditions that fed into the so-called golden age as literacy began to take its foothold in ancient Athens.
Indeed, it is no stretch to see the origins of what the Greeks called dialectic thinking in this regular practice of daily dialogue around the fire that many primal peoples still enjoy – a method that both compelled and gave them the means by which to consider the logical implications of what it means to really know something.
For this reason, the notion that our intellectual heritage had strictly western origins is one we must work to dispel. We can and must trace these seminal ideas back further than the Greeks, who drew on many diverse cultures that were already ancient in their own time. And they were more willing than many since to give proper credit to those many traditions from which they took inspiration. Indeed, Socrates tells us repeatedly that and how he learned the dialectic method from women and children, slaves and foreigners.[10] But we tend to miss his point, for reasons we might both recognize and remedy by way of this method which holds the secret to better ways to educate our young and ourselves.
It’s important to note that, unlike many today, they did not argue over which of these ancestors to simply ‘believe’ in order to deny the rest; rather, they listened to them all in proper proportion, as they spoke to the infinite variety of changing concerns that all human face as they go about resolving the problems of their lives. Seeing and discussing at a young age the many predictable challenges that every person will be compelled to face in one form or another throughout the course of a lifetime, those who learn this way are better prepared to deal with life’s struggles as they arise.
For our part though, the modern mind has little that resembles any of this in its education. The closest thing American students come to ancestor appreciation is in the rhetoric of the ‘founding fathers.’ Christians might think back two thousand years to the life of Jesus -- but even then they would miss most of human history in this nearsighted appraisal – including most of what Jesus had in his sites. Even those who follow their religious heritage back further, as Smith points out, miss much, for while “these religions now pretty much blanket the earth, but chronologically they form only the tip of the religious iceberg, for they span a scant four thousand years as compared with the three million years or so of the religions that preceded them.”(p.232)
We tend offer what we call ‘world history’ somewhere around middle school, but seldom so much as touch on the history of ideas that gave those ancient cultures their significance. Nor have most teachers had any of this in their own education. For the most part, we are quite content to ignore most of the thousands of years of literate history in our schools – and consequently, in our lives – let alone the millions of years of pre-literate history that preceded it.
It might even be argued that in our democratic efforts to separate church from state so to be fair to everyone (which has kept ‘religion’ out of public school classrooms, for the most part), we have ended up being fair to no one, since it insures that our young learn nothing of these diverse wisdom traditions in their youth, except what they might pick up in their homes and churches from those who see and judge them, if at all, only from a distance and outside-looking-in – making us all very poor judges of what we don’t know, and particularly vulnerable to wiles of wolves who wear religion like sheep’s clothing, from whom we sometimes get our education. Add to this the wiles of marketing and conditioned want that undermine all spiritual awareness in our culture, and what hope have our young got of so much as remembering, let alone understanding, or aiming to develop their better selves, as the ancients would encourage.
As any can see who will look, ancient wisdom is healing wisdom, and given the unhealthy state of our world, our overall aim in academia (if only because we ‘academics’ took our name from Plato’s Academy) ought arguably to be to explore these ancient ideas from which we still and always have so much to learn, and thus facilitate the needed dialogue between cultures, between religions, and between the world's diverse wisdom traditions – which we need now more than ever, given the ubiquitous conflict in our world. The inspired voices of our intellectual ancestors might come to our rescue and our pervasive mutual-misunderstanding might be resolved by offering our young the study of these ancient wisdom traditions before their lesser habits set in, when it might do them so real and permanent good.
I’ve learned by bringing the inspired methods of so many ancient wisdom traditions into the classroom that if we listen for the “well defined themes”[11] that run throughout the great teachings of the worlds’ “enduring religions at their best,”[12] as Smith puts it, “they begin to look like the winnowed wisdom of the human race.”[13] At which point we may be able to “single out their conclusions about reality and how life should be lived.”[14]
What we might hope to find here is the foundation of understanding that has grown from a multiplicity of cultures in many different times and places – a fact that, by itself, speaks volumes about what all humans have in common. Thus our intent might be, as Smith puts it, “To throw bridges from those worlds to the readers world” so that we can “see their adherents as men and women who face problems much like our own.”
And so, "We listen," Smith says. And, "If one of the wisdom traditions claims us, we begin by listening to it… But in addition to our own traditions, we listen to the faith of others, including the secularists…”(p.249)
“If we are to be true to the wisdom traditions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope that they will attend to us. For as Thomas Merton once noted, ‘God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.”[15]
By searching into each tradition, asking what is important here, what are its essential lessons, what are its fundamental tenets, we can discover for ourselves the secrets that can be found deep inside each of them – if we can see though so much nonsense that has grown up around the sense.
In this way, Smith argues, we might achieve a kind of “world understanding“[16] – an appreciation of how all people in all thoughtful cultures find and share answers to the same problems, serve the same needs, search for and find together solutions to the same practical concerns of surviving and living well that all human beings face.
[1]Among the most endearing and enduring of these still living primal traditions are what the Hawaiians call huna. You might learn if you explore the following website that the meaning of the word Aloha captures the whole of this primal philosophy in a single word. http://www.ancienthuna.com/hoopuka.htm. Read on about ho-oponopono, and you will see how much we have to learn from them about resolving conflict, or better yet, not causing it to begin with: http://www.ancienthuna.com/ho-oponopono.htm.
“Part of our spiritual preparation…is as ancestors. It’s the challenge that all of us face who are alive on earth today. How do we prepare to be ancestors of future people?”(Parhuli, 2008)
And among the many important insights the ancients understood better than we do today was to properly honor their own ancestors, the sages of old whose voices carried forward the hard learned lessons of the past. And for this reason, the collective body of past wisdom did not escape the attention of those who came after – as it seems to for us today. For there is nothing of most of this in any of our educational practices today. We apparently think we have nothing to learn from these diverse ancient cultures, let alone from indigenous cultures still living today.
But true to these ancient ways, Socrates knew that “I ought certainly to hear what my elders have to say, and to learn of them, and if I have anything to add, then I may venture to give my opinion and advice.”[9]
“If humanity can learn to see through Indigenous eyes, and to hear in the land the voices of our natural ancestors – which continue to speak to us of dignity – then the hearts of all peoples will be healed.” (OI, Forest, 237)
And this responsibility falls to elders, most of all. For as we have more time for circumspection as life goes on, we also have more responsibility help make things that have gone wrong go right! For while we can’t change the actions of the past, we can change what we learn from them, and what we teach because of what we learned. And this is what brings responsibility with age.
Many ancient cultures (unlike some since) took seriously the responsibility to pass this practical wisdom on to their young (and just who dropped the ball, and why is itself a dialogue worth having…), Had they not, it would have had a chance of reaching us as a much younger age.
So we’re lucky if we get time to rediscover all this in our senior years. And so its especially important that we ultimately find our voice, pass it on, and teach it, so that we might thus help someone else, especially our own grandchildren, who are likely to learn it from no one else in their lives, if not us. For is little if anything that offers these big ideas and deep thoughts, great books and old souls, in what we these days call education.
So we should make it our conscientious practice to pass on the legacy of human creativity and the hard learned lessons to our young. Indeed, it is our responsibility to help those who follow along in our wake to learn the easy, rather than the hard way. But that chain has often been broken along the way, wisdom burned and buried instead of proliferated, and so it has to be found, again and again, each generation anew.
While the focus of my personal study has been on ancient Greek thought, the Greeks themselves were not far removed from those oral, pre-literate cultures that Smith calls primal. They held strong ties with many folk religions and traditions that fed into the so-called golden age as literacy began to take its foothold in ancient Athens.
Indeed, it is no stretch to see the origins of what the Greeks called dialectic thinking in this regular practice of daily dialogue around the fire that many primal peoples still enjoy – a method that both compelled and gave them the means by which to consider the logical implications of what it means to really know something.
For this reason, the notion that our intellectual heritage had strictly western origins is one we must work to dispel. We can and must trace these seminal ideas back further than the Greeks, who drew on many diverse cultures that were already ancient in their own time. And they were more willing than many since to give proper credit to those many traditions from which they took inspiration. Indeed, Socrates tells us repeatedly that and how he learned the dialectic method from women and children, slaves and foreigners.[10] But we tend to miss his point, for reasons we might both recognize and remedy by way of this method which holds the secret to better ways to educate our young and ourselves.
It’s important to note that, unlike many today, they did not argue over which of these ancestors to simply ‘believe’ in order to deny the rest; rather, they listened to them all in proper proportion, as they spoke to the infinite variety of changing concerns that all human face as they go about resolving the problems of their lives. Seeing and discussing at a young age the many predictable challenges that every person will be compelled to face in one form or another throughout the course of a lifetime, those who learn this way are better prepared to deal with life’s struggles as they arise.
For our part though, the modern mind has little that resembles any of this in its education. The closest thing American students come to ancestor appreciation is in the rhetoric of the ‘founding fathers.’ Christians might think back two thousand years to the life of Jesus -- but even then they would miss most of human history in this nearsighted appraisal – including most of what Jesus had in his sites. Even those who follow their religious heritage back further, as Smith points out, miss much, for while “these religions now pretty much blanket the earth, but chronologically they form only the tip of the religious iceberg, for they span a scant four thousand years as compared with the three million years or so of the religions that preceded them.”(p.232)
We tend offer what we call ‘world history’ somewhere around middle school, but seldom so much as touch on the history of ideas that gave those ancient cultures their significance. Nor have most teachers had any of this in their own education. For the most part, we are quite content to ignore most of the thousands of years of literate history in our schools – and consequently, in our lives – let alone the millions of years of pre-literate history that preceded it.
It might even be argued that in our democratic efforts to separate church from state so to be fair to everyone (which has kept ‘religion’ out of public school classrooms, for the most part), we have ended up being fair to no one, since it insures that our young learn nothing of these diverse wisdom traditions in their youth, except what they might pick up in their homes and churches from those who see and judge them, if at all, only from a distance and outside-looking-in – making us all very poor judges of what we don’t know, and particularly vulnerable to wiles of wolves who wear religion like sheep’s clothing, from whom we sometimes get our education. Add to this the wiles of marketing and conditioned want that undermine all spiritual awareness in our culture, and what hope have our young got of so much as remembering, let alone understanding, or aiming to develop their better selves, as the ancients would encourage.
As any can see who will look, ancient wisdom is healing wisdom, and given the unhealthy state of our world, our overall aim in academia (if only because we ‘academics’ took our name from Plato’s Academy) ought arguably to be to explore these ancient ideas from which we still and always have so much to learn, and thus facilitate the needed dialogue between cultures, between religions, and between the world's diverse wisdom traditions – which we need now more than ever, given the ubiquitous conflict in our world. The inspired voices of our intellectual ancestors might come to our rescue and our pervasive mutual-misunderstanding might be resolved by offering our young the study of these ancient wisdom traditions before their lesser habits set in, when it might do them so real and permanent good.
I’ve learned by bringing the inspired methods of so many ancient wisdom traditions into the classroom that if we listen for the “well defined themes”[11] that run throughout the great teachings of the worlds’ “enduring religions at their best,”[12] as Smith puts it, “they begin to look like the winnowed wisdom of the human race.”[13] At which point we may be able to “single out their conclusions about reality and how life should be lived.”[14]
What we might hope to find here is the foundation of understanding that has grown from a multiplicity of cultures in many different times and places – a fact that, by itself, speaks volumes about what all humans have in common. Thus our intent might be, as Smith puts it, “To throw bridges from those worlds to the readers world” so that we can “see their adherents as men and women who face problems much like our own.”
And so, "We listen," Smith says. And, "If one of the wisdom traditions claims us, we begin by listening to it… But in addition to our own traditions, we listen to the faith of others, including the secularists…”(p.249)
“If we are to be true to the wisdom traditions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope that they will attend to us. For as Thomas Merton once noted, ‘God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.”[15]
By searching into each tradition, asking what is important here, what are its essential lessons, what are its fundamental tenets, we can discover for ourselves the secrets that can be found deep inside each of them – if we can see though so much nonsense that has grown up around the sense.
In this way, Smith argues, we might achieve a kind of “world understanding“[16] – an appreciation of how all people in all thoughtful cultures find and share answers to the same problems, serve the same needs, search for and find together solutions to the same practical concerns of surviving and living well that all human beings face.
[1]Among the most endearing and enduring of these still living primal traditions are what the Hawaiians call huna. You might learn if you explore the following website that the meaning of the word Aloha captures the whole of this primal philosophy in a single word. http://www.ancienthuna.com/hoopuka.htm. Read on about ho-oponopono, and you will see how much we have to learn from them about resolving conflict, or better yet, not causing it to begin with: http://www.ancienthuna.com/ho-oponopono.htm.