When I think of my ancestors, I tend to think of people like my grandparents, but depicted in blurry, sepia-toned vignettes: quaint figures clad in the antiquated garb of bygone eras. More than three or four generations back, the details fade. Family stories about these forebears are few. My connection to those who walked the earth four or five generations prior is tenuous at best. Names blur into obscurity, and tales of their existence become elusive whispers, fading into the tapestry of time along with the reality of their personalities, virtues and vices.
I know some facts about my ancestry. The tapestry of my lineage reveals a diverse assembly – a panorama of individuals representing the entire spectrum of human experience: laborers, clerics, craftsmen, soldiers; orthodox, heretic and pagan, learned and ignorant; and the long line of women working in domestic servitude, voluntarily or not, who lived and died having with little choice in shaping the events and circumstances of their existence.
Despite the multitude of roles and characters they embody, my mental tableau renders them in humble numbers. Yet they are a host: four centuries ago, roughly a million human beings bore the genetic alchemy that serendipitously converged to create the entity that is me.
This statistic might seem trivial, but the implications are profound. The world population in 1600 CE is estimated at 554 million. Of all the human beings alive four hundred years ago, one fifth of one percent were my ancestors. As I journey further back in time, my ancestors represent an increasingly large portion of humanity. At some point in the ancient world, every person alive was an ancestor of mine – and of yours as well. Each individual today represents a distillation of humanity in its entirety.
The annals of our shared heritage, stretching across the vast expanse of time, encapsulate not only the luminous acts of virtue, kindness, and compassion but also the shadows of atrocity and malice. While I acknowledge this mentally, it is terrible to imagine my ancestors as taking part in atrocities. Surely this heritage cannot be mine! But the evil done by my lineage pulls at my soul like a gigantic weight beneath the surface of my consciousness.
Likewise, the acts of virtue, kindness and compassion running back through history are mine by inheritance. The small and great deeds of righteousness and compassion provide the counterweight against evil, holding me in a precarious state of balance. Each moment of my life brings a choice that can tip the scales in either direction, but there is enormous gravity exerting an irresistible pull in both directions.
All of it is mine: the worst and the best, the saintly and the diabolical and the wide range of human conditions in between. I bear their heritage within my nature. The cosmic struggle between good and evil is my struggle. My intentions and my actions are minuscule contributions to the greater conflict – but we who are alive today possess a power that few of our ancestors had.
Each of us today is more connected to the rest of humanity, both past and present, than our forebears. In contrast to those who traversed the corridors of time before us, we are intricately linked to each other through the tendrils of knowledge and communication. Unlike them, we are uniquely empowered to understand the complexities and contradictions of our own nature, to act with intention and awareness, and through our newfound power to communicate in the technological ether, to nudge the balance of humanity ever so slightly in the direction of our choosing.
Each of us here and now have more opportunity for consciousness than any of our ancestors. This opportunity comes with responsibility. We are free to be our best possible selves – and we owe it to our descendants to move the world forward for our descendants by accepting that challenge. They will receive our legacy in the world outside, and also within themselves. They will remember us for the good or the evil we leave in our wake.In the crucible of awareness, we are called upon to act consciously, cognizant of the power each individual holds to tip the scales between good and evil on the social spectrum. As custodians together of this moment in time, we have the capacity to shape the narrative of future humanity with intentional actions and enlightened choices. Let us not be passive observers but active participants in this grand cosmic drama, steering the ship of humanity towards the shores of enlightenment, compassion, and virtue.