Ancestors of Awakening
Wes Nisker, Buddhist teacher, author, performer,
http://wesnisker.com17 August 2012, Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wes-nisker/ancestors-of-awakening_b_1772981.html"Our task in the coming era is to relocate ourselves in the cosmos and to renew our kinship with all of earth life. It is time to join again in the dance-drama of biological and cosmic evolution." --D. H. Lawrence
Reflecting on the scientific story of evolution we find a lineage of bodhisattvas, saints of compassion, stretching back millions of years through epochs of geological time. We owe our existence to the struggles and sacrifices of uncountable numbers of beings; creatures who had to shape-shift to meet the ever-changing demands of natural forces; who suffered horribly through atmospheric upheavals, ice ages, comets crashing into earth, continents colliding, volcanoes erupting, floods and vicious plagues. Through their fierce determination to live, all those beings have brought us to this present moment of semi-awakened consciousness.
In order to honor those who made our life possible, I suggest that we go back to some form of ancestor worship. By ancestor worship I don't mean just keeping a daguerreotype of Grandpa on the mantel. I'm talking about deep ancestor worship, which requires that we dig into our evolutionary past and evoke the spirit of those who made it possible for us to become the brilliantly befuddled humans we are today. We want to bring all the ancestors into our circle of reverence, and we can start by telling their stories. Here are a few.
We'll begin, appropriately, with an acknowledgment of the very first living being, a single-celled organism that scientists have named LUCA, an acronym for the "last universal common ancestor." Perhaps we should make a grand statue of this life form and place a replica in all the major plazas and malls of the world. Every living being on earth can trace its ancestry back to LUCA, the androgynous progenitor of us all.
The story is magical and inspiring. Just imagine the stormy beginnings on this fiery ball of cooling earth magma, out on the roiling, broiling seas, when a precision bolt of supercharged lightning hits a fecund blob of chemical scum and SHAZAM! -- those newly energized elements begin bouncing around in a wild molecular dance, bonding with each other to create the first organic molecules that eventually, mysteriously, weave themselves into the complex spirals of DNA. The initial expression of all this mixing and matching of matter turns out to be LUCA, a determined little membrane-enclosed child of the mud. Suddenly, some of the substance of earth acquires a strange new condition -- life. ...
Alex's comment: 拜祖先！ Ancestor worship has been a take-it-for-granted Chinese traditional religious practice for thousands of years. But this is an advanced version, tracing back all the way to the first life form.
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