Enmeshed in culture

This is an excerpt from my old course on Parenting about being Enmeshed in culture.

Culture is putting more and more attention on how to operate our state of consciousness,
on how to guide and attend to the structure of who we are. This is causing us to
update the oldest philosophical directive, “Know Thyself.”

One of the most critical things to realize as you develop your ability to operate yourself
is that you are not in a vacuum. You exist as part of a culture, enmeshed
in a world, a community, a family and it’s in the mediated space between you and them that
reality occurs.

We grow up in our parent’s culture as they grew up in their parent’s culture and on
and on infinitely backwards in time. But our parent’s culture is different than
their parent’s so we develop differently than they did. And we do so at
every level. We’re neurologically different than our parents and because of this,
we can’t really “get” the world as it was at any time other than the time
we’re living in. We simply don’t have the neural connections necessary to
conceive of it because we don’t live in the environment that made (or will make)
it possible. We can imagine it, we can watch movies and read books, we
can become experts in the field but we’ll never really know because when we
were three or five or eight and those neurons were pruned we had never
been exposed to the environment of that day.

None of us would be the same people we are now if we had been born in the time of
Shakespeare. And our children won’t be the same as us. They couldn’t be. The
hidden dimension of culture influences everything we do and everything we can do,
everything we think and everything we can think. Now this hidden dimension is
becoming more fluid. It’s changing more and more rapidly so there are more and more noticeable differences with each generation. Scientists call this rapid
evolution. It happens as a result of dramatic changes in the environment. Today
the evolution of our species and our culture is spreading like a virus.

As the Information Age has taken hold of our lives, we have been silently forced to
process information in new ways. As a result, we’re becoming more intelligent.
Culture has reached a point where it’s stimulating and activating evolutionary
circuits of our brains. This affects our neurological development. These changes
in our neurology are expressed through our behavior – the ways we
move, speak, experience and interact with the world. Changed, we feed the new
patterns back into our culture, reinforcing, spreading and continuing to
evolve these patterns. A real time example is this course, exposing our natural
tendencies and intelligence so we can take advantage of them rather than fight
them. Those of us who are using these parts of our brains (more and more everyday) live in
a different culture than those who don’t. It’s a culture we share with other
evolving members of our species, a culture in which we participate more and
more intentionally in the creation of reality, a creation culture. This culture isn’t a
secret – it’s happening right out in the open – some of us are aware of it;
others are not. Either you recognize it happening or you don’t.

Tonight, spend some time grokking what it would be like to have been
raised by your grandparents and your grandparent’s parents. Imagine yourself
enmeshed in the cultures of your ancestors all the way back to the primordial soup
in which life had its slimy-erotic beginnings. Now go back the other way;
experience how different life already is for your children – all the things they’ll
never know because, like 8 tracks and the cold war, they’re just not part o our awareness anymore.
Make yourself young and explore the things that they’ll know implicitly, at a level
of awareness only available to virgin neurons.

Happy Parenting!

Devon