Ancestral Pride; Could This Possibly Be a Copout from Being Able to Validate Ourselves with and of Our Own Various Manifestations?

All my life, I've never really understood why so many people express such great pride in their ancestry. Italian pride this, Irish pride that, African-American pride, Hispanic pride, Native American Indian pride, etc, it's simply never made sense to me. But up until recently, I've never really taken the time to analyze my feelings and actually come up with a solid reason as to why I feel this way. My thoughts on this aren't pretty, but I cannot deny myself the truth of what ancestral pride actually means to me.

My opinion regarding ancestral pride has recently been crystallized after reading two specific books; "The Value In The Valley" by Iyanla Vanzant, and "The Power Of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. What these two books offered me as it relates to the point I'm attempting to establish in this article is a means to understand how and why people validate themselves as they do. Is it possible that expressing ancestral pride prevents a person from truly becoming their own authentic individual? In my opinion, yes, it absolutely does!

The first thing to understand is that most people live their lives with their bodies being completely enslaved by their egoic minds. Simply put, the human brain thrives on drama, conflict, analyzation, judgment, intellectual stimulation and a large variety of superficial entertainment. In considering the concept of personal and spiritual growth, our egoic minds are the leading cause to our various degrees of stagnation.

For the past few years, I've studied the dysfunctional, toxic and dramatic theatrics that so many people regularly demonstrate as a means of learning to quickly identify such people and keep them at a safe distance away from me. In studying this kind of behavior, I had never realized until a few months ago that the reason that dysfunctional people perpetuate and embrace their drama is because it's their drama that actually validates them. The idea of their evolving out of their drama is out of the question for them because it would remove their sense of self and sense of familiarity.