The Question of Culture

I've always asked myself why the world is like it is. I still don't have the answer, and don't expect to either, but over the years have developed many more ways of answering life's more humble questions. What is our culture and how has it gotten its shape? Where did it come from and where is it going? Who put it together and why does it seem as though appearances change on the surface while the undercurrents trace back thousands of years? Is there something going on that we as the general populace have no idea about?

These questions, and countless more, have been perplexing my perspectives for decades. Right now as I write this and you read it, the prevailing world-view is inordinately incapable of coping with even the information at hand, let alone providing a satisfactory program of what to do it with it. My self-appointed task is to do better than I'm supposed to of making up my own mind about what is worth my attention. One might recommend that I take up the study of philosophy, but as for the Indian guy who'd been everywhere and done everything, well, I hope you know the punch line. I had professors tell me that if I wanted to get into graduate school I wouldn't talk about psychedelics. Talk about limiting your scope! How are you going to answer life's questions if you prevent yourself from asking them? It never seemed appropriate to me, albeit glaringly immodest. I left academia, for this reason and others, and started putting together ideas for myself, resulting in this communication, among others.

Here's my unique way of formulating what must be an ancient question, and what I present as a unique way of answering it; steeped in contrarian perspectives both new and old, the method to my madness is to question what is called culture. To set up the asking I want to outline two different modes of thought. Neither having priority, both are aspects of the existential situation we call human experience.

The overriding thesis at hand is that the origin of this duality comes from a unified source. The basis of experience as consciousness is essentially unity; only in order to experience itself as anything, consciousness must necessarily make its limits. Be they just veils and membranes enveloping relatively independent transitional bodies, the code at their base has common denominators. Two categorical bodies are to be developed and employed here to indicate this fundamental dynamic. One question is to be asked of both ways of thinking: is this a sustainable way for culture to evolve? My answer is that they both need to be balanced consciously for culture to evolve sustainably.

To characterize this dynamic, two metaphors will serve to illustrate the idiosyncrasies of each end of our spectrum. The one I will call culture, for convenience's sake, as it is my way of describing what is commonly accepted as the normative and categorical elements of western society. The other I'm calling community, as the word holds common ground with unity, and hints at the feeling I'm trying to communicate. Culture, as elaborated here, is a process of building, whereas community is a process of growth. Community is an organic function whereas culture is an artificial one. Culture postulates that the original unity breaks down into a duality whereas community recognizes the impervious nature of unity as a polarized spectrum. Community shows that evolution occurs as a process of cooperation among biologically diverse members of an ecosystem whereas culture asserts that evolution happens by competitive domination over the environment by the most able organism.

As a general overview, I'm calling the metaphor of community organic and the metaphor or culture as archonic. The roots of these words indicate how I'm putting them to use here; as organic derives from the Greek root of organon, meaning 'that with which one works', archonic derives from the Greek root of arkhon, meaning 'ruler', or 'beginning to rule' in its verb form. These polarities can be considered as part of a spectrum and not mutually exclusive. Both are necessary and valid modes of thinking and being that constitute the yin-yang balance of this human condition. Try and guess which is yin and which is yang. My position is that in order for any sort of existence or experience, these forces need to be balanced enough so as to provide the form and content on which it can be founded. Therefore it is also my position that these forces are still balanced enough today so that we can experience existence and I can communicate my perspectives. The motivation behind my need to put forth these ideas is that although we're still balanced enough between culture and community to 'be' 'here,' where being is too vaguely defined and here is at a precipice. There has been, and still is, an all-too-much emphasized aspect of culture that implicitly refuses recognition of the importance of community.

It is an overwhelming tendency that summarizes my take on culture: humans have for too long invested their energy and attention into systems that divest them of responsibility for their actions, be they religions, sciences, or systems of authority. The idea that one can rest assured in something external doing everything necessary to provide the individual with sustenance, morality, entertainment, and ultimately salvation, is an irresponsible decision at best, and, more honestly, a parasitic scourge on the planet. Believing that one need not blame oneself for the happenings in and around the community, and that self-satisfaction is the ultimate goal of life, is to condemn the entire population and all of posterity to failure.

Rather, by taking up responsibility for one's own community by first standing up as a unique sovereign individual,

( still in progress)