10

MEETING THE ANCESTORS

Most people do not understand our relationship with the ancestors, or g||aoansi, who have passed on. When anthropologists talk to a beginning healer, they typically hear how the healer is scared of the ancestors. They also hear reports about how often the healers keep seeing the g||aoansi and how they must fight them. A strong healer will likely not tell anthropologists much or else tease them, warning them how dangerous it is to even talk about these things.

During a dance we might feel that the ancestors are nearby. When we let our n|om heat, rise, and peak, we can see them. The second our n|om is heated, we are able to see the ancestors in a flash. Because new and inexperienced healers are filled with fear, they see bad ancestors all the time. Those ancestors love fear. The bad ancestors love fear and anger; it attracts them. When we get past wanting to fight these ancestors, they just go away. This is why it is important to move from the experiential station of power to the station of love. They run away from love.

The strongest healer will tease the younger healers and say things like, “What do you mean? I don’t see any g||aoansi. They don’t bother me. They’re scared of me because I’m so strong.”

The g||aoansi, our ancestral spirits, are just like us in that their emotions change all the time. All beings—dead and alive—live with changing emotions and are capable of either purposefully or accidentally sending a dirty arrow.

When the ancestors occasionally make us sick, it’s usually because they are trying to help us. When we forget to spiritually wake ourselves up they might bring sickness to remind us that we need to dance. In a way it’s like they are trying to scare us in order to make us strong. Of course it’s not always like this; sometimes an ancestor might miss us so much that he wants us to be with him. That’s when an ancestor is acting selfishly. We have to be careful that the ancestor’s love doesn’t hurt us. While the ancestors are capable of becoming jealous, angry, or missing us too much, most of the time they love us and want us to live a long life.^*35

There are also ancestors who were jealous or mean when they were alive, and they may remain that way once they pass on to the ancestral home in the sky. For the most part, the ancestors who loved us on Earth will always love us, and this binds the relational world together throughout all of time.

If our nails are strong and clean, the tricksters, whether a trickster ancestor or a trickster god, will stay away. When our nails get dirty, they come toward us. This is why it’s dangerous for people not to dance. This is when trickster is able to make us sick or cause us to do bad things.

When the ancestors have a bad feeling and try to hurt us, we can see them for only a second. An ancestor can look like a regular person; we can see them with our eyes closed. Once in a while, though it is a rare experience, a healer might wake up and see a bad ancestor sitting on him. It’s scary and looks frightening. The ancestor might be sitting on our belly and we feel like it is making us disappear. We may feel like our flesh is dissolving. That’s when we have to wake up our n|om and deal with it. Some of us have placed our hands on our body at such a time and found that our hands went through our belly as if we were made of a cloud. An ancestor can make our body seem as if it is dissolving away. These things can happen to healers, especially when they are learning.

When we are hot with n|om, any g||aoansi who formerly wanted to attack are now cautious. They don’t come at us because our body has turned to light. When the ancestors see a body shaking at the highest and purest vibrations, they don’t know we are there. They simply think there’s a light that’s watching them. They are awestruck by the light and they stand behind something to hide from it.

As our n|om becomes more cooked, we are able to alter our feelings and see the ancestors differently. When we then communicate with the ancestors, we shift to conveying something like, “I know you really love your daughter but you’re being selfish. You need to listen to a bigger love and not to your selfish desire.” When the ancestors hear us feeling their love it helps them wake up and say, “Oh, I need to not be so selfish. I need to have more love for my family.” We see and interact with their loving side as we look at them through our love.

When we are fully cooked and look at an ancestor, we can heal and tune them as well. If we look at an ancestor who is emotionally missing a daughter and trying to make her sick, we can communicate with our feelings, as if saying, “Stop that. She wants to live longer. We want her here now. You must wait for her.” If the feeling in our heart descends and we get angry with the ancestors, we will see them through our anger. This is when they look very ugly. In actuality, we’re really not seeing them as much as we are seeing their bad wishes. We see the ugliness of their feelings and selfishness. However, we notice this through the ugliness of our anger. Here we are actually seeing bad feelings on both sides of the relationship—in us and in them.

When ancestors act like trickster, they can also take us to our death. If someone is looking at us and it looks like an ostrich is staring, it is trickster. He is easily identified by the nature of his eyes. We watch someone’s eyes and know what a person is and whether to trust them. (See editors’ commentary 10.1 below.)

When we pass to the spirit world, we won’t become a trickster if our heart is big enough and holds enough love. It’s only when our heart is closed or hard or too trickster-oriented that we become malevolent or ambiguous. We need to dance a lot so that our hearts become good—that way when we pass over we’ll continue being good. Otherwise the future will be very difficult. If we don’t heat our nails, we are like someone without life and love. The trickster ancestors will notice this and come close to cause sickness and death.

Editors’ Commentary

10.1. On Bushman knowing through the sensate body

Bushmen value their body sensations more than mental calculations and logical arguments when making decisions and evaluations. Body sensations are regarded as giving information about the interactions of their ropes, while mental calculations and argument are regarded as the possible distraction of trickster, something to be cautious about. This is not a strict dichotomy between body and mind. Trickster talk can sometimes be valuable, for trickster can be good or bad. It is simply less reliable than the pulling of ropes that are experienced as body sensations and emotions. Stated differently, the ropes are metaphors for relational interaction and, as such, provide more relevant communication for here-and-now, situational presence. Trickster discourse, on the other hand, can get caught inside the interactions of abstractions and can easily become dissociated from the web of relationships, where life is lived and experienced.