We are a goal-oriented society. We think in terms of moving forward in life: gaining success in our career; creating a strong and healthy family; achieving financial security and having great material comforts. And, of course, we want to be at peace with our Maker, and be cleared of all the sins that would otherwise keep us out of Heaven when that Day comes to pass.

What if all of this was backwards? What if our every breath, our every movement was being directed through us by something outside of us—something foreign, apart from our egotistical mind, and inherently devoid of any connection with this goal-oriented lifestyle that we so viciously adhere to?

What if our lives were a simply a result of unfinished business from the ancestors? What if that unfinished business was guiding our lives, moving us in ways we only thought we were directing in some ways? What if the spirit of the ancestors was behind this life we so preciously believe is ours?

Since our Western culture does not have a relationship with the ancestors, this idea is more foreign to us than the idea of UFO’s. Yet in Asian and African cultures, along with some in Central and South America, the idea of the ancestors playing a large part in the lives of moderns is a widely accepted—and rarely questioned—idea/fact/belief. It is their reality. It is understood. And it is known.

These other cultures believe the ancestors are present to help guide the people of today. These other cultures know that the ancestors have created the destiny of the modern people because of their own shortcomings. Unfinished business isn’t simply wiped off the map and forgotten—it, too, has karma of sorts. Someone must attend to it.

This doesn’t negate the importance of the work we are doing in this age—nor does it negate the influence of the future upon our lives. But our day-to-day activity, and these lives we are so assuredly creating, is not without influence from the past, as we believe in our modern, Industrialized culture. We are influenced by and through the ancestors.

I like to think that we are even reminded of this reality, whether we believe in these reminders or not. Our dreams are great examples of these reminders. Ancestors appear in many of our dreams, and with proper attunement to their presence, they have something to teach us. If we paid attention enough, we would notice the synchronicities in our lives that actually reveal this ancestral connection. And who knows in what other ways we could be reminded, if only we were paying attention.

The grandfather of African medicine man Malidoma Somé once told him, “the sweat of one person has significance only when it serves everybody.” We have yet to realize this truth in our culture, much in the same way we have refused to believe our relationship to our ancestors. To believe these things would mean reducing our Christian and self-centered ideologies to mere fantasies—and, Lord help us please, we certainly don’t want that kind of experience. It’s best we leave this fictionalized story of our existence in place, so that we don’t make everyone restless and attune to their true natures.

We are familiar with Halloween, and the Latin celebration of Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos. We don’t celebrate the ancestors on Halloween here in America, but all of the Latin countries honor their ancestors on Day of the Dead. “They are still as important to the living as they were before,” says Somé about his African ancestors. It would be a huge movement by us Westerners to take a moment and remember our ancestors during these celebrations.  It would be huge if we remembered them before bed tonight. For recognition of the ancestral influence in our lives would be a huge step in restoring this damaged connection in the Western world. There’d be healing, and a renewal of the sacred, and that’s something, I know, all of us could use.