the topic of this post is culture (or the notion of culture).
i saw such a topic on the teal tribe web site, and what was interesting to me was that there were merely 5 posts to it (tealtribe/culture). and they didn’t have much insight into them… so, as a person who has experienced an insight on culture from a combined academic and spiritual perspective, i believe there are some things i should now share with the rest of you.
now about that education in culture. the truth is i had my spiritual guides subconsciously take me through my academic studies of culture so that i could make use of them and expand that knowledge probably mostly (but not merely) for my own sake - that is how my self sees it, not how it must’ve seemed to them anyway. it’s even more curious i got to meet them because of me getting into these particular studies. (so that concludes my introduction. i met my spiritual guides because i got into that specific education course.)
okay. so what is culture?
i recently had a dream where i explained my notion of culture (the one i acquired through my higher education + my spiritual awakening “dreams” (or practice, as one may call it) - two processes which got enmeshed completely, as it were just before the 2012 events) to a professor.
many professors, in my experience, have that stable stubbornness about them that refuses to acknowledge difference to different degrees. they are, after all, “experts” in one specific area, which makes them delve into details and sometimes feel the need to defend one thing as “proper” or “good” in comparison to another that is “improper” and “bad”. in culture, let’s say, it could be “high culture and art” (always must be good, right?), versus “popular culture and art” (must be crappy, no?). of course such traits are their own to grow above, but they tend to drag them around (wherever) nevertheless. (these people tend to drag these things with them.)
so in my dream this professor had this same presence about him - he clearly was a “professor”, a sort of stuck-up academic :) but nevertheless i got to explaining to him, being all vigorous, energetic, lively and naive - childish, you may say - (so, in this way i explained to him) my own concept of culture. that, i believe, is another reason for me to make this post, because it needs to come out into the open and for people to get to think in that direction, i think.
so the main question here is how is culture related to life, the universe, the world, and so to teal’s teachings.
well, as i liked to say back in those university years, as someone who’s just acquired an insight: “culture is everything”. and by that i meant “culture is everything that man perceives”. not merely makes, or names, but perceives. why is that? of course, it’s because of what he has been taught to see, or do - and that is culture itself.
our way of living is not based on instinct. at least not in present-day “modern” societies, which i am clearly addressing now. we’ve come to the point of settlement when our culture is making up our lives.
one may argue it has been this way from the very beginning because of one key aspect of culture itself - it derives from the mind, it derives from thought. and thought is actually the only thing that distinguishes us, humans, from animals, as far as i am aware at the moment. (i mean, if i am wrong, please correct me, i would like to hear about that. thankyou :))
i liked, in my very first thoughts on the subject, to distinguish between culture and nature.
you see, culture is a complete derivative of people, that is of the mind (of thought), whereas nature (as well as its material aspect, it’s dense form) is a completely different thing, governed by its own laws and types of energies. (that is how i imagined things to be in the beginning.)
that is not to say one is inferior to the other in any way - as we all know now, everything is just an aspect of a whole, so that even polarities are “the two sides of the same coin”, as the worn-out but still vivid phrase goes). but still the human world - that is the world of thought, is different than then the nature world - i’d like to call that the world of action.
action is actually movement, whereas thought is actually more of a slow-paced, static condition, one of observation and acquiring meaning. so in that sense animals not thinking does not make them lower than us in any sense, other than us imagining things from a safe perspective in our physical confinements.
i don’t believe a martial arts master who’s achieved enlightenment, or a shaolin monk, practicing for long years, who has been peaceful and in bliss, is any different than an animal that is alert even as sleeping (resting). and, to be more precise about it, martial artists tend to learn everything from animals:
by all means, a great part of all techniques in martial arts are not simply influenced by nature, but are a true imitation of it - like the monkey stances in kung fu, the “white crane spreads its wings” in tai chi, the lizard walk (actually referred to as the “reptile skill”) practice of shaolin monks, etc., etc. (yeah, never-ending list…) all those mimic directly the (gracious, or aware) movements of animals, this state of being that animals have. and the monks’ lifestyles tend to mirror the animals’ lifestyles themselves - their way of sleeping (always alert, but peaceful nevertheless), eating, cooking even.
monkey kung fu (wikipedia)
shaolin warrior training (youtube)
so, in regards to culture, those martial arts practitioners are ones who are breaking culture, going backwards on it, and actually acquiring a different state of being, that aids culture’s expansion into something much more “natural”, in the terms i’ve already discussed.
so culture is actually the way we perceive the world.
it is our encoding of what we feel (this means “see”) as vibration. culture is our reference to everything that surrounds us - it is our naming of things, it is our structuring of thought, it is our inclination towards certain ways of treating all that surrounds us, including our own self.
