Ancestral Power / Obligation

One of the things which is hard to pin down and which is hard to accept into one’s life is that one should fulfill ancestral obligations. I remember some years ago when I lived at a Vaishnava community, where the leading sannyasin authority of the place, gave a lecture in which he ridiculed the ancient Chinese religious system which is mostly ancestral worship. This sannyasin felt that the Hare Krishna system was ideal and that it surpassed the ancestral worship of ancient and pre-modern Chinese who did not focused on a Supreme God but pull their all in superstitions about ancestors.

However it is a fact that the Vedic system, the Puranic approach accommodates ancestral influences in a formal way. In fact there are many death rites known as Pinda which even today are done by the Hindus.

Superficially devotees of Krishna may get this hair-brained idea that they have no obligations to their physical ancestors or that their service to Krishna is itself a more efficient way of dealing with the obligations but they forget that Arjuna had to deal with his ancestral obligations. When Arjuna wanted to step aside from those duties, Krishna objected. After the battle of Kurukshetra, Krishna along with King Yudhishthira lavishly indulged in the ancestral rites of the departed warriors. In fact Yudhishthira sponsored much of the expense involved.

One cannot delete the ancestors out of one’s life. They are part of the formation of one’s body. One cannot go back and uproot the past. We can handle some of the present and a little of the future but that is all we can do. The past is finished. Its equations are already laid out in history.

Sometimes when I explain how I have to service certain ancestral obligation, students get offended or they ridicule the idea. They think that I am an idiot or that I have fallen under a spell and give importance to what is trivial. This attitude is due to a lack of information about past lives and a lack of insight into how the equations of fate may be satisfactorily resolved.

It is also due to massive selfishness where a living being only thinks of itself and its own benefits and feel that others should be left in the dust. This is seen clearly when we are in the infant stage, where we feel at that time that our parents should tend to us day and night and that they should have nothing else to do with their time. If they fail to tend to us, we cry some nasty tones which are an annoyance to one and all. This innate selfishness is our undoing. It is a wonder if we will ever get this under control so that we can be patient and kind to one and all, so that our needs are greatly reduced and we are tolerant if we are not in the limelight.

Can I really appreciate if someone gets a tasty mango while I am starving to death? Am I capable of such munificence?

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When people say that service to their deity will take care of their ancestral obligations, that is like saying that if I work for the President of the United States, he will personally attend to my ailing parents. This whole idea is a joke. Why should the Supreme Lord take service from one in one way, while he goes and does menial service to my parents or grandparents? Why should he spare me the trouble just to get me to do something called devotional service to him? This only makes sense to a shallow brain.

Krishna did not tell Arjuna to a puja religious ceremony to Krishna, and that Krishna would take up arms and fight in place of Arjuna. Krishna did not tell Arjuna to go and sell religious books, while Krishna shot arrows on the battlefield on behalf of Arjun’s belligerent relatives.

The whole idea that if I do devotional service, God will fill in the missing gaps for me is hogwash. We do not need a shallow-brained God like that. The God we need is the one who could impart to us or teach us how to develop the insight so that we can take care of these social duties in an efficient and wherever possible, terminal way.

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I began this post because of an astral encounter on the night of June 30 2015, with my deceased mother. This lady was deceased since 1991. Mostly at first after being deprived of her physical body, she was living in Guyana, South America. And she did not leave her body, she was deprived of it by an aneurism which made it so that she could not operate that body any longer. She did not quit the body, the body quit her.

She used to stay mostly in Guyana on the astral side. But recently she has relocated to the astral side of Denver, Colorado where she spend some years of her life.

During the night there was this very strong pull for me to go there and my present mind tendency converted that into the need of taking a jet plane to Denver. While this idea of booking a flight was happening in the mind, my astral body instantly relocated itself to the astral side of Denver. There was my deceased mother in a transparent astral body living in an astral house which was similar to one of the houses she had mortgaged while she lived in Colorado around 1977.

She was there to reconfigure her history, she said to me. Mentally, she was busy trying to do that. She felt that if she could re-make some other decisions at certain points of her past life, things would be better and different for her and for all concerned.

I looked on in amazement one how the whole astral existence operates and how deceased person passed through so many mental states in the hereafter. These do not stop until the solid descent occurs where an embryo is formed as their self.