The practice at the monastery was big on the ancestral "continuation" thing. I didn't like how I felt they posited it as a universal truth, as if it was supposed to mean something to me. Mind you, I'm not big on universal truths.

Well, maybe they didn't intend it as a dogmatic universal truth, but just as a personal meditation. The idea being that we meditate upon our own beings as a continuation of our parents and grandparents, and so on and so on and so on.

There's probably something deep there, but not looking at it as meditation, the idea is a pretty big turn off. Thinking that I'm a continuation of my particular ancestors, and that my hypothetical descendents would also be a continuation of them makes me want to end the line right here. It's not something I want "continued".

Fortunately, or not, "spiritual genes" have little to nothing to do with accidents of biology. For those who believe in reincarnation, spiritual genes are what are carried over from lifetime to lifetime that shape our spiritual personalities, psychologies, and "aptitude".

They get right down to the very core of our being, our deepest habit patterns that make us what we truly are. We can get a glimpse of our spiritual genetics just by basic meditation and extending the introspection of meditation to our daily lives by being mindfully aware of ourselves throughout our days.

We watch our minds, our thoughts, our patterns, our feelings, and eventually we can notice what is hard-written into our personalities. Unlike biological genes, we can re-write them! For example, an easy one, my fear of spiders.

My theory, perhaps just as example, is that my fear is sourced in past lives, and whatever happened then had such an impact that the fear was written into my spiritual genes. Recognizing that, I've worked on re-writing the fear out of the code by facing it and seeing it as irrational.

The benefit of doing so is that in future lives, hundreds or thousands of spiders won't lose their lives. But that's a big "eh", since life is a crapshoot, there is no hard and fast objective good or bad in the loss or preservation of life. Everything flows, everything transforms, and everything biologically living will die.

A more definite benefit is in my mind. Whenever I kill a spider out of fear, that reinforces that negative spiritual gene and disrespect for life, whether or not it is a crapshoot. The focus is on the disrespect. As it happened, I feared a spider and I killed it. The next time I saw a spider, I killed it. And so on and so on.

For me, something started bothering me about it. Even if I didn't mind the killing, I did mind the fear and I wanted to know what that was about. What I hope is that I've re-written the gene so that it is not fear that I feel, but compassion, and that's what I'm practicing in this life. And actually, now I do mind the killing. I find it abhorrent for me to want to kill even an insect.

When I see a spider, I think compassion and I don't kill it. It has a right to live, it has a right to exist. Like all living beings, its instinct is to survive, it doesn't want to die. The benefit is what that is doing in my mind. It's watering a seed of compassion. Instead of fear and killing, it's tolerance and understanding. Successfully writing that into my spiritual genetics theoretically gets carried over into my next life, hopefully not just towards spiders.

And even if you don't believe in reincarnation, it certainly doesn't hurt to cultivate those things in one's life now.