The Family Spirit

Every bloodline has its own energetic-informational field in which it holds all its memories. It is a ‘database’ with all the information about one’s ancestors: about their biography, their acts, thoughts, feelings and hopes. It is not reality itself, but the way it was lived or experienced. Tragic events that were experienced painfully and the same event lived through more calmly are recorded in different ways.

Every one of us can ‘connect’ to this database in order to receive some advice or help from relatives. This often happens subconsciously: we just do something without even realising that this was the exact way that one of our ancestors acted in a similar situation. Of course, if an individual understands what is happening, then they can use this information from the bloodline in a more effective way.

This database is ‘The Family Spirit’.

This is one example of what is called ‘Egregore’ in esoteric theories.

An egregore is an energetic-informational essence that is created from the thoughts and feelings of a united group of people that can influence each of those individuals in the future. It can be called a collective psyche or spirit, which is fed by people’s thoughts, emotions and feelings. There are many egregores, both global (for example, ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Life’ and ‘Death’) and on smaller scales. An individual can be a part of many various egregores. What is forbidden by one egregore might be demanded by another, so that an individual who is getting several contradictory instructions simultaneously can experience ‘bifurcation’ and inconsistency of action. One of the tasks of individuals is to correlate the wishes of different egregores and to harmonize them.

Every egregore has its own goal that it tries to achieve through the people that enter it. For this, an egregore gives an individual opportunities to achieve this: resources, abilities, luck, material and emotional rewards, protection and so on. If someone does not act for an egregore’s profit, that egregore can take these opportunities away from the individual. A person can change an egregore, but for that they must achieve a higher position in this egregore, as well as get some support – for example, from a stronger egregore.

The connection between an individual and the egregore (SPIRIT) of their family is one of the strongest, protecting an individual from other alien egregores that can be fatal for a human – they can take away strength without returning anything. But if this family connection is very weak or absent, an individual becomes defenseless to it.

If an individual does not feel part of their bloodline, most probably they will feel like an orphan for their whole life and will be trying to substitute this ‘psychological orphanhood’ for something else. Because every living creature has a need to belong, a need to have a safe space where they can be themselves.

Every spirit has its own character that differs it from all others. This is the culture of the bloodline that has been developing from one generation to another: family traditions, rules, rituals and so on. The experience and information that members of a bloodline receive by living their lives is something that connects a family and helps to keep its unity. The specific character of this spirit is contributed by every individual who has ever been part of this bloodline. Its strength depends on their work and on the age of the bloodline’s existence. The spirit of the bloodline affects every member of the family. If a specific bloodline has its own strong character, it probably means that there is a specific programme or aim for that bloodline. The members of this family know their direction and tasks to work on intuitively from the very beginning. A bloodline primarily forms protection, so it does not support any drastic changes or innovations. The spirit of a bloodline takes any individual walking into it as one detail of a mosaic that creates the whole picture.

From the beginning, a family is a collision of different egregores: egregores from the family lines of the wife’s and husband’s sides, the family egregore itself and the personal egregores of the individuals (the egregores of their professions, for example). Larger egregores, such as egregores of a country, religious tradition and humanity, also influence the family.

Even if a husband and wife are very similar to each other, belong to the same race and social system and share the same profession, hobbies and interests, they still come from different bloodlines, each of which has its own features and traditions. In some cases, they will even have to reconcile their behaviour with contradicting demands of different egregores. For example, a wife might have to make a choice – to make ‘borscht’^[4] according to the traditions of her family or according to those of her husband’s, like how his mother used to make it for him. Of course, this is a very simple example, but what if a husband and his wife belong to different religious traditions and social systems? In many cases, contradictions between egregores are so big that individuals never manage to find any common ground. This can happen not only between spouses, but also among different generations. For example, a child is born into a family of robbers and decides to work in the police. Of course, he or she feels alienated from his own family and does not feel any support, just as his family considers him a traitor. His own children will feel the influence both of his upbringing and the ‘family calling’ – in other words, the temptation to walk the way that was trodden by many generations of ancestors. This also happens in cases when a child has not been told anything about it: they remember the history of their bloodline without consciously knowing about it.

Many cases are based on this, when somebody repeats an event that happened to their ancestors, not remembering or even not knowing about it.

As Anne Ancelin Schützenberger writes in her book The Ancestor Syndrome, it was President Kennedy who decided not to install his car with a roof (let alone a bullet-proof one) 22^nd November 1963, ‘forgetting’ a death threat and the fact that his great-grandfather died on 22^nd November 1858. He forgot about this event, but did not forget how to take a risk.

If it happens that in a family history there have been many influences that have been pulling ancestors in different directions, then a person might not feel this FAMILY SPIRIT. Instead, they hear inside their family (meaning also themself, from within their personality) only the arguments of various sides that cannot find a way to make peace. Then this compromise will not only be this person’s individual task, but also the debt to their ancestors.

For example, in the case of criminal behaviour in a bloodline, a compromise of this kind might be to not be silent and critical of the past, but aware of the character weaknesses and lack of will of an ancestor who became a criminal and the difficult circumstances of their life – thereby, in the end, showing pity and sympathy towards them.

This is why an individual needs to know what has happened in their bloodline in order to understand what affects them and why.

The strength of the family spirit is fed by the attention and memories of its living relatives. It is therefore a good idea to keep your ancestors’ photographs and to know your family tree. The strength of a bloodline increases when members of one family – even distant ones – maintain good relationships, are ready to help each other and know the history of the previous generations.

Ancestors only exist for as long as they are remembered. If you do not remember them and do not arrange memorial meals and ceremonies, this connection will gradually be lost. Then the bloodline itself will weaken.

The Path to Developing the Spirit

Here I need to make a small digression to tell you about the connection of the Cult of Ancestors and teachings on reincarnation.

I see it as follows.

There is some kind of Higher Mind, God or Absolute – I prefer to call it ‘Source’ or ‘Arche’ (‘arche’ is a term from Ancient Greek mythology that means beginning, source, main principle, primacy or root cause). It is a certain field where everything is and is not. All we know about it is that it is something fundamentally unimaginable and incomprehensible. For everything existing it is Perfection, Truth, Bliss, Law, Energy Centre, Eternal Life and so on. But, because it is something incomprehensible for us, all these characteristics are conditional. We can call it ‘Mind’, but in fact it does not have a mind in the way that we understand – that we have – because it does not have a human mind. We can call it ‘Bliss’, but it cannot be the bliss that we can experience living our lives on Earth. We can call it ‘Eternal Life’, but it is not life that also includes death. Therefore, we must understand that our ideas about the ‘Source’ of life and another world are in many ways our fantasies based on the image of ourselves. And not because we are stupid, but simply because we are absolutley unable to think about this ‘Other’. There is nothing onto which our consciousness and feelings can grasp, because consciousness and feelings do not exist there – at least, not in our understanding.

There are bundles of energy that come out of Source or Arche, which carry a particle within them. This is a spirit. Each spirit has a divine spark – that is, its message, its own and unique contribution to the overall picture of the Universe, a note that is interwoven with the global symphony. At the same time, it has a desire to return to Arche, to merge with it, for which one needs to improve, to develop in order to turn this spark into a flame. The spirit itself is nothing more than this.

In that world where spirits come from – where there is everything and nothing at the same time – everything is arranged completely differently to our world. Our physical laws do not apply there; space and time are arranged alternatively there. Therefore, spirits in that world cannot develop: there are no conditions for this, no difficulties that need to be overcome or mistakes that can be learned from. In fact, it is even impossible to change there, because there is no time in our understanding of it. How can you change if you constantly exist in one instant?!

Therefore, the physical world and the very possibility of being born here are so important to spirits. Since there is time and matter, evolution is also possible, and as such the spirit can be improved here. On the physical level, this is evolution; on the spiritual level, this is karma.

The development of the spirit begins with simple forms of life, such as crystals. Gradually, a spirit, life after life, masters new stages and moves up the evolutionary ladder to plants, animals, man and so on. Spirits and souls are not the same thing. The soul is that which the spirit inhabits in the world of the living, as its shell. A soul is connected with the very personality of a living creature, its emotions, feelings, thoughts, and can change. A spirit is that divine spark that is present in all living things, that unknown particle of Eternity, which we can barely influence. We can only help it improve and develop; as a woman’s womb carries a foetus, so the soul carries the spirit.

Just as that world is Other for us, for the spirit the physical world is Other. The spirit goes into the physical body in much the same way as the living go into death.

On Earth, the spirit is only a guest. We can say that it is like a student who is receiving their required experience here.

After each life, the spirit returns to another world a little different. Changed, ideally, it is now one step closer to perfection, although the inverse can also happen. But – and this is crucial – the spirit itself, being in another world, cannot grasp the experience it received on Earth. The spirit is energy, and energy does not have consciousness as such (nor a brain). The spirit receives experience energetically and unconsciously, so it cannot comprehend when its energy state has become worse because in the physical world it has made some specific mistakes. Theoretically, in the next incarnation it can do the same, further worsening its condition and moving away from perfection. On a purely biological level, this is regulated by evolution, with the energy of the spirit manifesting itself as a tendency inherent in all living things to continue, survive and leave offspring – that is, the impulse of life is largely automatic. If an individual behaves inappropriately, it is rejected. Otherwise, its entire bloodline will die out. Of course, at levels below the human, ‘wrong’ behaviour of a spirit is not ‘hatred of one’s neighbour’ or ‘disrespect of the Divine’, but simply behaviour that does not correspond to its position. For example, for the spirit in the body of a wolf, it would be a mistake to consider oneself a hare and behave accordingly. The wolf pack and the whole world around will quickly explain that it is mistaken. So this spirit will have to live the next life a level lower down (in the body of a hare, perhaps).

But the transition of a spirit into human existence is already a fundamentally different level, and so the situation becomes more complicated. A person has a spiritual dimension, for which karma (the causes and consequences of actions) and the state of a soul begin to play a big role. The development of the spirit, among other things, is the development of free-will and responsibility for itself. It is clear that a stone or a flower can answer very little, but a person does have such a possibility. The purely biological in a person fades into the background, with the development of a human spirit being influenced by its actions, relating little to its biology and instincts.

The mechanism of transmitting a purely human experience is not so much biology or genetics, as much as culture.

Perhaps you know that the tale of Mowgli is based on reality: in history, there have been quite a few cases when a child from infancy was raised by wild animals as their own cubs. In reality, such stories tend to have a sadder ending than in literature. As a result, even if they are taken away from animals in childhood or adolescence and there have been efforts to educate them as people for many years, such people always remain inwardly animals. That is, in these cases the child has the vital energy to survive in the world, but loses out on all the genuine human experience. And so the soul will most likely no longer remain human. At the same time, he or she retains all the genes and evolutionary experience accumulated by their ancestors, but which cannot be used since the necessary tools for this are not automatically transmitted.

The spiritual dimension does not directly obey biological and physical laws. Instead, it supports itself. It exists and develops in the information field of the Earth, that is – in the space that humanity creates with its culture, thoughts, ideas and so on. And for the spirit to continue its human existence and perfection, from one life to the next, it needs access to this spiritual dimension, the information field and human experience.

But, in addition to this access to universal human experience, it also has access to its own experience of its previous incarnations. The fact is that the spirit itself has no memory – it is just energy. Of course, its experience always remains with it and does not depend on culture, but this experience is energetic and unconscious, and will not help the spirit to correctly continue its further evolutionary path, if it does not fit into the human spiritual dimension and information field. Human experience can only be in the human sphere – in consciousness and in culture, which is the tool that a spirit needs in order to perfect itself in the human body. Incarnating once again, the spirit must connect to the information field in order to take advantage of human experience.

After a spirit leaves this world when a human dies, the soul remains here in the information field. If the living forget about it, it disappears; if they remember, it continues to be here. Its memory can be preserved even after the spirit incarnates in a new body and receives a new soul. In this case, the spirit will have access to information about its previous incarnation – that is, an understanding of its experience, which will help it to further improve on its strengths and correct mistakes. The information field is formed by living people and their thoughts, which is why people strive to ‘remain in the memory of their descendants’, giving a spirit additional knowledge about itself. Therefore, the memory of ancestors is so important. The living memory of the soul creates a connection between the spirit and the human world. If none of the living think about the dead, do not remember them, then souls lose their ‘records’ in the information field of the Earth and spirits lose their memory. In this case, a spirit cannot take advantage of its experience, and will need to live again and again in order to truly learn and move to a new level.