Culturescape

This is a word coined by Vishen Lakhiani (founder of Mind Valley) in his book ‘The Code of the Extraordinary Mind’.
He uses it as a sort of concatenation of ‘cultural landscape’ but it’s a bit more than a simple description of the different cultures we live in throughout the world.
It also identifies how or why some culturescapes no longer serve us.
In this insight I’m going to continue the exploration of how we might change or even reverse some cultural paradigms.
I wasn’t sure whether to call this the paradigm of control or power or culture because it encompasses all three and more.
Let’s start at the beginning by looking at ‘culture’ and it’s development.
In the world today there are many cultures and sub-cultures
The ‘western world’ is largely dominated by the ‘work culture’ or ‘work paradigm’ I touched on last time. You know, the one where you get a good ‘education’ then you get a good ‘job’, then you ‘save money’ and then ‘retire’.
It’s a rubbish paradigm and doesn’t really work but here’s the thing, it’s all based on ‘ordinary people’ (whoever they are) ‘doing what they are told’ for the majority of their lives.
Pre-school – do what you’re told by your parents, at school, do what you’re told by your teachers, at work, do what you’re told by your boss (who by the way is also doing what he or she is told to do – however ‘high up’).
Then when you ‘retire’ and you think you’ll be able to do what you’d like to do. Nope, you don’t have enough money, your movements are restricted by age based regulations (extra driving tests, inability to get insurance etc.) and generally being considered ‘too old’ to do certain things so you end up being told what you can and can’t do by your kids!
In the so-called ‘East’ usually meaning Russia and China it’s much the same but there a greater emphasis on control by the ‘State’ which exists in ‘the West’ as well through in a more subtle way.
Most people think this ‘state control’ came out of the Communist era but both Russia and China have always been ‘ruled’ by and autocratic hierarchy. Current leaders are behaving in a very similar way to the former Tsars or Emperors – but that is the underlying culture in those areas and its probably fair to say the ‘people’ are probably better off than they were a few hundred years ago.
Elsewhere we have the phenomenon of control by religion which was also very much the case in Europe before the ‘work culture’ took over. Control and persecution – because people don’t do what they are told – on the grounds of ‘religion’ have been going on for a very long time.
Control is achieved by the deployment of ‘power’ and here I’m using the term as power exercised through ‘Force’ in the lower part of Hawkins’ Scale of Consciousness rather than power achieved through being on a higher vibrational or dimension level.
The paradigms of Control and Power are closely related but not the same as we consider where ‘power’ comes from, how it is achieved.
It is possible to have control without power through force, control by consent, and I’ll come to that later when I describe the fourth culturescape.
Power has to come from somewhere and in the culturescapes I’ve described it comes from ‘the centre’.
This is more obvious in places like Russia and China where power and ‘government’ are highly centralised but it’s also the case with western governments, global corporations and religion based societies.
Whilst there may be significant elements of ‘devolution’ to local ‘governments’, state or corporate, control is always exercised from the centre – the centre of power within whatever organisation we are looking at.
For millennia there has been a strong drive towards this idea of controlling the ‘people’ from a ‘centre’.
First came the establishment of towns and cities – ‘civilisation’, and then the formation of, in the monarchic age, ‘principalities’ and ‘counties’ – a word introduced by the Normans to denote an area ruled over by a particular Count and administered by a ‘Shire Reeve’ or ‘Sheriff’ (remember the Sherriff of Nottingham?).
Out of all this further centralisation led to States and Nations and now the associations of these such as the European Union, United States of America and so on.
On top of this there’s the centralisation of money, of the exchange of value. Bartering was phased out because ‘money’ makes it easier, especially when it came to collecting the taxes needed for the governments to sustain themselves.
Each nation developed its own currency, managed and controlled by the State and this developed into the globalisation of money where all currencies are related to the ‘Global Reserve’ currency, namely the US Dollar – why the price of commodities like oil and gold is quoted in USD rather than the currency of the country from where it originated.
You and I, and pretty much everyone else are living in a culturescape of centralisation, and control but there is a fourth culture which still operates but is continually under attack because it goes against the trend of the other systems of culture.
I call this the decentralised or ‘tribal’ culture and it’s where we started on this planet in the first place.
We lived in small groups, families and tribes, maybe small ‘villages’ created around and natural resource or facility such as a harbour.
We made our decisions in those groups with ‘everyone’ involved managed usually by a ‘council of elders’ – who by the way would probably be in their 40s.
Decisions were made not by ‘democratic vote’ where the ‘majority’ wins and tells everyone ese what to do, but by agreement and compromise until everyone was of the same persuasion. Anyone who could not agree, maybe one or two, were ‘free to leave’ the community and find another more to their liking.
This culture still exists and operates in some tribal and aboriginal areas of the world today.
It broke down largely because people did ‘leave’ but then cane back to ‘take over’ by force, becoming ‘warlords’ and setting one tribe against another usually on the grounds of fear or greed.
This divide and rule strategy gave rise to the situation we’re in today
It worked because of one thing – the inability for different groups to communicate with each other over distances even of a few miles.
If they had been able to talk to each other and keep up to date with what the disruptors were doing, then things would have turned out very different.
But now, things are different – we can communicate on a peer to peer basis, and although governments make every attempt to stop or disrupt free communication it carries on and gives us what we need to ‘return’ to a form of decentralised culturescape I will discuss further next time.