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In order to begin to recover their sanity, and avoid the destruction of the world, the people of Western civilization must learn to recover and re-connect with the roots that link them back to the Source of existence, to the wellspring of life and of the universe. There are various ways to do this, and each person will find some variation that best suits their needs. In the path I have taken, there are both rewards and challenges, some of which I will mention here.

Many people fear becoming conscious of anything biological about themselves that would undeniably tie them together with other living and long-gone people in a specific way, as if that could tie them to a limiting, regressive mentality, that rejects and excludes the Other: what has been considered tribalism in the worst sense.

This is related to the tendency that has for so long plagued the West, the belief that if one tried hard enough, one could find freedom from the hardships, the blood, sweat, and tears of the body and its interconnectedness with the physical, natural world.

Progressive people have made many mistakes when they have tried to ignore things natural and proper to our species and our physical selves, which has resulted in people's valid feelings of love and identification with their family and their homeland, and their respect and admiration for the incalculably important labors of motherhood, being left to be claimed, manipulated, and exploited by reactionary, racist and extreme rightist leaders.

Instead of abandoning this work to those forces, I call upon people who are committed to justice, to increasing understanding, respect, mutual help, peace and reconciliation among the peoples of the world, to claim the ground which is often so easily occupied by those who feed on people's misunderstandings, fear, and ignorance of others, who create followers for themselves by making others into the threatening enemy.

Realize that the concept of 'family' is one that connects and unifies individuals into a greater whole, and a family that is healthy knows itself to be an essential part of a larger tribe and a community that it depends on, and that depend on it.

Whether or not modern people wish to acknowledge them, cutting-edge science is bringing us the realization that we are each related to larger groups of people, to whom our family is related, with whom the DNA that's being deciphered reveals our shared biology: in science's terms, clades or haplogroups -- in plain English, clans or tribes. With them we share our history over thousands of years. By becoming aware of that history, by trying to understand it, we can come to understand the mistakes that have been made and the better ways for us to go forward from now on.

What makes the new genetic discoveries potentially so enlightening is that where the longest memories had forgotten the ancient unity of one tribe with another, the unraveling of DNA shows how each is unmistakably tied to the other as kin, members of the great family tree of humanity, its earliest roots lying up and down the continent of Africa, its trunk extending itself and branching out over every continent, the one family tree of our species to which no human group does not belong. Every people who have ever lived form a branch somewhere on it, are children of some long-ago mother, who is some kind of a relation to our mother.

We know that some individuals have compiled their genealogy only as a prop for the longing of their insecure ego to be clothed in glory, not by their own efforts, but by pretending that their 'special' ancestry lifts them above others. These people are fortunately becoming dinosaurs, because of the discoveries of science as well as the growing rejection of racism and of the belief in class superiority by many. What we can now see is that the failing of those family trees, extending back to the 'nobility' and 'royalty' of past centuries, was to stop short, not to go far enough. They drew arbitrary lines that artificially excluded their true kinship ties that, in reality, extend in every direction back to common, shared roots: roots in village people, tribes, hunters, gatherers, fisherfolk and nomadic bands of the Paleolithic and all the successive waves of human migration.

In this spirit I will be sharing the incomplete family tree of my own little branch of the great Tree, as a testimony that my search to reclaim the knowledge of my ancestors is part of a quest to recover the strands of unity and connection with the greater family of humanity. As some genealogical websites have pointed out, "We are all distant cousins." That is the literal truth. If we could become fully conscious of this truth and learn to live by it, we would take away the causes which give rise to war.

Some of the world's most vicious wars, ironically, are among the most closely related peoples. The Israelis and Palestinians are only one of the most extreme examples. It would need to be a conscious, and most difficult choice, to defy the will of the majority of one's tribe who are possessed by hatred and rage, and say,