Most if not all religious faith traditions believe in some version of life after death.  When we reach our point of transition from the realm of the living to join the realm of the ancestors, it is generally believed that our physical bodies return to the soil.  Our breath, or the animating principle in the body, cease to exist in relation to the physical body. There is some disagreement on the subject of our individual consciousness. Most religionists believe that our individual consciousness continues to be active in a state of bliss or in a state of torment. A minority of faith communities however believe that our individual consciousness enters a state of quiescence when we transition.

It stands to reason that if the majority report is right, and our individual consciousness remains active when we transition, there is a high probability of some kind of contact with those who have transitioned. It was the belief in active individual consciousness that led our African ancestors and many other cultures to venerate their ancestors.  After-all, who would be more likely to be rooting for us from the other side than family members who have transitioned into the realm of the ancestors. Venerating and remembering the ancestor makes perfect sense against a backdrop of belief in active individual consciousness after transition.

Even in cultures where ancestor veneration is rejected as a relic from a more primitive time, ancestors are remembered in many different ways.  Remembrance of the ancestors is built into the religious architecture of the culture.  The memory of significant ancestors is invoked repeatedly in the sacred books of the culture.  The academic discipline of history offers another effective mechanism for remembering our ancestors.  A culture that is dedicated to the study and remembrance of the ancestors of another culture may be in fact be cutting off its own feet at the knee.

Many faith communities that reject the notion of active individual consciousness after transitioning, embrace the notion of guardian spirits that attend us all from birth to our transition point. The belief in guardian or attending spirits, both positive and negative, is ubiquitous to both schools of thought. Guardian or attending spirits constitute another source of connecting with those who have transitioned. Since the guardian or attending spirits would have gathered an encyclopedia of knowledge about our ancestors, these spirits constitute a gold mine for research into the realm of the ancestors.

Our African ancestors and other spiritually attuned cultures may not have created the internet but they certainly had access to far more knowledge that now exists on the super information highway that we call cyberspace.  Our technology today is simply attempting to achieve by physical means what our ancestors achieved through spiritual technology. The irony is that artificial intelligence ultimately is going to complete the circle and bring us right back to the spiritual reality embraced by our African ancestors.

Eric von Daniken, David Icke, and faith communities may be on to something when they articulate a case for something beyond the mere physical.  The universe is too vast and too mysterious for the puny organ between our two ears to claim total mastery over all that is knowable.  The fields of knowledge are opening up and revealing some of the hitherto mysteries of life.  Our journey of knowing has however only just begun.  Each new discovery is but a stepping stone to even greater discoveries.  Our contemporary generation could therefore be on the cusp of creating a new Eden.

Spiritual scientists who understand the intricacies of navigating the spiritual ecosphere may very well prove to be some of the most farseeing thought innovators of the future.  Artificial Intelligence is already charting a course that is mystifying the best minds in our midst.  Technology is opening Pandora’s box in the modern world and few really have the mental capacity to comprehend the implications of the myriads of changes that are exploding our sense of reality.

In a sense technology has ushered us back into an age of magic and wonder.  If it were possible to reanimate a body from two centuries ago, reinstall individual conscious, and set that individual loose in the modern world, things that we take for granted would seem so magical to the reanimated individual from two centuries ago.  Our generation would be considered as a generation of magicians because we have mastered some of what magicians would have been working on two centuries ago.

Tapping into the body of knowledge stored in the ancestral realm and by the guardian and attending spirits that watched over our ancestors is as valuable a route to knowledge as is surfing the super information highway.  As already stated, we have come full circle and the spiritual scientists in our midst may very well be best qualified to help us make sense of artificial intelligence as it evolves into the realm of super-consciousness.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Future of Africa and the Caribbean: Challenges and Possibilities.