Culture and Civilization

Submitted by jackrabbit on Sat, 07/10/2010 - 09:11

Here is Wikipedia's entry. This provides a beginning framework that you understand image/knowledge based culture. As each person perceives events and objects differently, tribes,clans,nations,cultures perceive images and knowledge differently. Each has their own arbitrary bounded set of abstractions, different ways of fragmenting the unified field in-formation.
There are many levels of culture existing nested within each other. There's a culture of ideas in your mind, family cultures, friendship circle cultures, workplace cultures, neighborhood cultures, town cultures, city cultures, state cultures, national cultures, and beyond nationalism is religion, ethnicity, race, multi-national corporations and NGOS, and even now over the last 60 years a world-wide culture. All these levels of culture are constantly interacting with each other and morphing, folding, and blending in and out in patterns and resonances that we are only beginning to see, feel, and understand.

All this being true it is not the end all but only the beginning. The majority of us are unconscious members of our culture. Few of us consciously create the thoughts that are in line with the dominant cultural abstraction set. Once you begin to explore ideas which are out in the margins your mind grows beyond the default though patterns. At first this process is unconscious curiosity. If pursued further with conscious attention and intentional suffering (work) one discovers that all cultures are valid only in their clustered groups. Truth ceases to be belief and becomes what is sensed. Pursued to the end creates a mind which is bound by no culture, it has risen above static, fragmented thought and becomes nimble and synthesense based.

Culture is Organic

What is a culture anyway? Cultures slowly grow as groups of individuals interact in ever more complex ways. The very land inhabited by people affects their minds and feelings. Slowly these feelings spawn common myths, ideas, consciousness structures, sense ratios, and modes of expression. As larger and larger groups of individuals interact more and more complex structures organically grow.

Culture as organism which is born, adolescent, middle-aged, becomes elderly, and finally dies. Within each overarching organic structure are seeds of its own destruction. In time the cultures ideas are manifest in all possible ways and the primal creative force begins to lose its vitality.

Culture''s destiny is civilizations. A civilization is based on strict rule based structures. It is the state of become instead of becoming. Civilization is the slow death and decay of a culture creating the compost fertilizing the mental ground for new seeds and organizations to grow. The death of the Roman culture rotted and decayed into the early Middle Ages then spawned a tremendous outburst of cultural growth culminating in Western civilization.