Introduction

In the last blog post, I mentioned we would begin to excavate more about what our ancestry and origins reveal and how it may have an effect on us in the present.

I’ll begin by sharing a little history and a little physics, starting with time. Time is often discussed as a circle. In fact, over perhaps thousands of years ancient people drew pictures of time as the sun, as a circle, coming up, going down, and coming around again. The reasoning seemed to be that time is controlled by an inner, linear, sense of time, which enforces the sense of ‘past, present, and future’. As such, they exist as separate positions in a straight line. Our human ancestry progresses in time along that straight line, echoing our identity, behavior, and collective memory. 

Cyclical Time

Yet time recurs, as in a circle. How can that be? 

Cyclic time has been used by Indigenous cosmologies, philosophies of the East, and in ancient mythology through millennia. Hinduism includes the wheel of time (kalachakra), and the Mayan civilization fashioned calendar cycles that extended through time over many life cycles. They all believed that time seemed to bend, going around in an ongoing circle. But today the way we view time is linear, with everything viewed as past, present, or future. It controls the schedules and economies of the world, the rise and fall of empires, and the repetition of natural seasons.

But the past does not disappear completely, and it resonates through the present and continues into the future. Each generation does not merely supersede the previous one but also inherits it in its ceremonies, traditions, and genetic characteristics that come back to life in each generation.

Genetic Echoes

Genetics shows how the codes of ancestral DNA resonates; DNA is transmitted through centuries, and what we have today in our DNA is the expression of those codes. We see remnants of those codes in archetypes, symbols, and patterns, what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, which exists across time and cultures. We see it too in  how we think, how we process and teach. Daily we use stories and metaphors reminiscent of fairytales and mythological stories that are remnants in today’s TV shows, ads, and our social media.

Recurrence in History

We are now recognizing the impact of culture, and we see cultural psychology emerging as a thermometer of today’s world of humans. Culture permeates so many aspects of our lives, it controls historical, family,  and societal rituals, as well as news, and daily routines. Ongoing life events, like birthdays, weddings, funerals, and town festivals are all symbolic and cultural; they are recursive events that propagate coded values through generations. Time is circular in all of these instances. 

What our grandparents and their grandparents passed down to us is a kind of blueprint bequeathed to us. As we learn more about man’s history, we see it has been this way for thousands of years. While civilizations have changed and progressed in many ways, we still carry the blueprints and continue in our habits and choices. 

History also repeats itself on a macro level. Historians, such as Arnold Toynbee, Timothy Snyder, and Karl Polanyi all noted that civilizations go through a rise, a peak, and a decline. If we go further back in world history, we see that there seem to be repetitive structural patterns and cycles that have occurred from the evidence of early humans. 

Interestingly, the advent of technological over the last century’s innovation has not invalidated these cycles and may even have speeded them up. Events of the present often resemble those of the past, and so ‘the wheel’ of history and time moves predictably through our lives and world. 

We humans persist through time and are both resilient and fragile. Genealogical research and genetic ancestry testing are becoming increasingly popular because, on some subconscious level,  people have a gut feeling that they need to get back in touch with their long-lost histories. They sense a few  of the artifacts of their histories may still be present, that their lives somehow could be covering the same ground as their predecessors. Their quest is to unearth more of what these were and assess how they may relate to their lives now. Perhaps even more important, though, is how they may relate to the future.