Sorry everyone that I have been so quiet lately. I have been pretty caught up in some developments in my personal life, and sometimes you need to just drop everything and focus your attention on living your life for a while. It is through these intense experiences that we live the deepest, and go through a crash course about life and ourselves. Maybe I will talk about it another day, but not now.
I have long viewed cultures and religions with some distaste. I wondered if it would not be better for all vestiges of specific cultures to drop away from an individual. To me, all that they seemed to do was narrow the mind of the individual. This is what he (and millions like him) ate for breakfast, ate for lunch, and ate for dinner. This is what they believed God to be like. This is how they understood human relations. This is the language that they spoke. The only people that they really trusted or understood properly, were people just like them.
To people who are really locked deeply into their culture, travelling is the best eye-opener because it exposes them to another lifestyle, which hopefully they experience. A different breakfast is eaten, a different song is song, and life is experienced in a different way. They realise that there culture and worldview is not the only one which has relevance and substance. For me, someone who has shirked against conventional thinking his entire life, travelling had a subtly different effect on me. When I travel, I try to dive into the local culture as much as possible. And what I realised is that these cultures all hold value. They did not arise from nothing. They definitely are not perfect, but they are imbued with certain understandings of life and humanity. That is why it is so monumentally important to be different to other cultures – you literally see life from other angles, some of which may be completely missing in your culture.
I realised something else lately. The reason I partly thought cultures were stupid and artificial, is because we are all made of exactly the same stuff – spirit. To be an Indian or American is really irrelevant. To argue about different faces of God is really stupid. In fact, we are not even really human. It is a form we have briefly taken, a tool to express ourselves with in this life, an embodiment of our current spiritual state. So that is the shared awareness that we should live with. Why should people have different cultures or religions? But then it struck me. While we may just be temporarily and superficially human, we are human. At least, right now we are. And that is how we experience it. It should not be ignored. Similarly, if someone as at a level where they still identify very much with their individual human life, there is nothing wrong with them identifying deeply with the culture that they are in. It is part of who they are, it is where there soul is at.
I used to think that Unity amongst humans would be best achieved by recognising our deep sameness and brushing aside all the differences in understanding. But on this planet, each species is magnificently separate and does its own thing. Similarly, Unity amongst humans comes from us celebrating our differences. It is the differences between us that make humanity such a vital culture, with such potential.
I suppose that is part of what makes my country, South Africa, such a special place. We are starting to embrace these different cultures, and people with different backgrounds and training are able to combine and deliver more innovative solutions due to the different abilities.
So now I have no more irritation towards those who are embedded in their culture. The only danger is when they are intolerant of other cultures or views. But I have often noted that good men and women from every culture are open to others, and now I have a deeper understanding of why.
I have always been naturally suspicious of collective thinking or worship. The definition of Free Thought is: Thought that rejects authority and dogma, especially in religion. This is still the only way for me to be. But I am accepting more why not everyone is like this.