THE ANCESTRAL CONTINUUM

Spiritual counselor and psychic O’Sullivan and journalist Graydon provide guidance toward connecting with the gallery of heroes, villains and everyday folks who comprise our physical, psychological and emotional heritage (and baggage).

As the authors endeavor to help readers find their place in and path through their particular family tree, they give advice on how to tap into the flow of the past to the present, primarily through meditation and prayer and perhaps in association with a healer or other member of the spiritual community. Although O’Sullivan and Graydon suggest readers remain open to intuition and incorporeal voices, to “allow ourselves to cross the bridge between our day-to-day awareness and higher consciousness,” they also have much to say to the spiritually clueless among us. Curiosity about your forebears is certainly a near-universal condition. There are many quotidian avenues to explore genealogy, and neither O’Sullivan nor Graydon disavow them. Still, feeling the potency of a familial landscape, for instance, isn’t a great surprise, and it affords us an opportunity to keep an open mind and pay attention to premonitions, dreams and sudden empathies. The authors present dozens of stories about people visiting in one form or another with deceased family members, which will appeal to a limited audience of readers. Although a certain passivity occasionally interrupts the proceedings—“The secrets of our inheritance...lie in our genes. They contain the memory of all that we are and all who have gone before us”—it is more likely that O’Sullivan and Graydon espouse active engagement, to seek and interpret your past to both fill yourself out and to disentangle yourself from any ruinous family script.

A mystical foray into our ancestral shadows—not for nonspiritually inclined readers.