The Bridge to Transcendence
An Unfolding and Evolution of Heart Consciousness
(A preview from my new book in progress)
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—PART ONE—
Transcending Culture
“Be good to yourself. If you don’t take care of your body,
where will you live?”—Kobi Yamada
Looking after ourselves is more than taking care of our bodies. We must also nurture thought, since our reality is created around how, and what, we think. As a man or woman thinks, so s/he is.
Where Do Thoughts Come From? Essentially, from culture. We are conditioned to ‘think’ in certain ways, through our upbringing, our education, the sciences, politics, laws, morals and customs. Our written languages, governments, religions, buildings, and artifacts are merely the products of culture.
What Exactly is Culture? Culture is the cultivation of an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for abstract thought and social learning and ‘transmitting’ this knowledge to succeeding generations. Culture is our customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group—a learning of human behaviour patterns that begins when we are born. Our upbringing, our education, the sciences, politics, monetary systems etc.—shape and colour how we see reality.
Each generation then looks for new ways to reform culture, to make a ‘change’ and ‘create a better world.’ Yet that change comes only as a reordering of the same old conditions. Have we changed? Is the world a better place—or are we just re-hacking the same old human behavioral patterns? Ideas influence our perception—the way we see and interact with the world. Always, one culture sees differently to another, and always they clash.
Culture is reforming again, into our present era, this time into an age of information and technology—creating a global culture. Now we ‘live’ in a world programmed by social media and their virtual reality devices are making us more and more desensitized to the real world. What was once a chat over the garden fence is now looking at pixels on a screen.
“We don’t have Soul, but it’s the other way around,
Souls have us.”—Itzhac Bentov
How is Culture Influencing Human Evolution? Culture is the interfering pattern to our biological evolution and transcendence of consciousness. Culture blocks our biological unfolding because culture is primarily based in fear and that conditions us to see the world as a potential threat. In the world of politics—it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Survival of the fittest. Everyone has to fight for his or her own survival. When the ship begins to sink, it’s every man for himself.
We have not transcended far from our primitive beginnings when we were hunter and gatherers and needed to live with the knowledge of survival. Thousands of years of human life have passed and all we do is create a veneer of technology over our primordial way of thinking. Instead of building a relationship with our planet and each other, we continue to kill and destroy, now more than ever before. Instead of becoming highly intelligent beings, we become highly efficient killing organisms. Computer games, television and films explicitly illustrate fear, rage, defend, attack and destroy. We turn to the news and see it all happening again and so the two realities merge. More humans have killed each other in the 20th century then in all our history put together. Now with pillaging of the earth’s resources (trees, oil, ore), the violence and destruction is turned upon the planet itself—the only home (body) we have that nurtures life in the entire solar system. We’re running out of time to save this beautiful planet. We need to change our focus and be one with the life process and stop worshiping the ‘golden calf’ products of corporate creation.
“What there is is all there is.”—robert wolff
What is Transcendence? Transcendence is the ability to rise above and go beyond limitation and constraint. Nature is forever evolving and adapting to suit the changing harmony and balance of life—which means—life is forever re-evolving itself. Re-creating and refining. The inability, or rather limitation, to interact with this natural state of evolution in ourselves, causes us to become unsettled, frustrated, angry, which often times leads to violence and rage—particularly in these present days of uncertain times.
Since culture thrives on fear violence and destruction, it must continue to breed it through reforming. We remain locked inside a sequence of primitive reactions—defend, attack, destroy—which is the primitive reactions of the basic survival brain structure that nature gave us eons ago. We have not evolved too far from our primitive beginnings—even though nature has given us an innovative brain to do so. Why? Because culture is about power, pleasure and control. It rewrites and directs the great stage of biological life by keeping the human mind locked in fear.
We are biologically designed to transcend, but fear blocks the process. Evolution is programmed into our brains, yet ‘civilization’ consolidates this evolutionary pattern of change. So long as we fear, we cling to man-made ‘systems’ to keep us alive, healthy, safe and nourished. It is through fear that we submit to ‘The Establishment’, who tell us they have all the right tools to care for us, protect us from threats, heal us from diseases and feed us.
The Establishment (a word I use for the assemblage of agents of culture) endlessly intimidate us with the notion of fragility and mortality in order that we turn to ‘them’ to keep us. This is who ‘they’ are (the ones who think they know better than you). Yet they are equally threatened if we move beyond our limitations and constraints and begin to evolve as independent intelligent beings.
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce
Culture is a control-based idea that uses fear and violence to block our evolutionary pathway. We are always being told we are under some kind of threat: a war, terrorist attack, epidemic disease, climate change. This keeps us reacting primarily from the ancient reptilian brain structure—our survival fight-or-flight system—that was made to be transcended into the greater services of the higher brain intelligence.
Prophets, such as Jesus and Buddha, have broken through this tough shell that is the container of (our?) culture. These evolved people have led the way for others to transcend to a higher state of consciousness. They teach us to go beyond our control-based conditioned thoughts, and free ourselves from the mind enslavement that is culture. Culture programs us with an artificial reality. It paints a picture in our minds. It forms a fake structure and boundary to our reality. Culture even believes it can do better than Nature. IBM’s latest slogan: “Building a Smarter Planet”, is culture arrogantly proclaiming they can civilise Nature.
The real world lay hidden beneath this fake layer of cultural realities that are the structures, conditions and belief systems that we partake in. We live in a global virtual reality. Always at the base of culture is fear and this is what preserves the defensive survival instinct in us. We are locked in to this instinctive-survival approach to life which prevents our natural transcending abilities to move us beyond limitation and constraint. Fear, defense and attack is programmed in us. Truth, goodness, beauty and non-violence is the adaptive transcending path of awareness that we need to walk in order to catch up on Nature’s evolutionary path.
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‘How to Cross the Bridge’ Part Two: The Three Angels (Work in progress)
Your personal comments or suggestions are welcome!
Contact Us
Copyright © Robin Craig Clark 2011
Acknowledgment
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Magical Child and Biology of Transcendence
robert wolff
Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing
“Ben” Itzhac Bentov
Stalking the Wild Pendulum
(From Atom to Cosmos)
HeartMath Foundation
Connecting Hearts and Minds
