Turn your face to the Sun, the shadows fall behind you
- Maori Proverb
When minds and bodies are tied to see the shadows, from where comes the chance to see the light? When the heads are bent down in slavery, from where comes the force to lift the head to kiss the light? When minds are buried under its own oppressive shadows, from where comes the will to break the veil? Who is to be blamed for such a state? Your own shadows, my own shadows. The shadows at work to hide the light.
The shadows hiding the light create a darkness that is hard to perceive and fathom. People are made to believe that glowing incandescent lights are enough to destroy the darkness of our times. Societies and organizational structures are built out of this darkness sometimes with a riotous colorful display of the mind's own shadows. The shadows still persist and seep in to every aspect of reality spreading its wings of darkness in all directions. Oh, do I see it?
Almost everyone agrees that humans have never lived at times with such technological and material abundance. People can even burn the earth and light it up for centuries in a second. People talking about darkness got to be blind or much worse their hearts got to be filled with such darkness that they can cover the sun with their gloom.There I was, dismissing every hint of ignorance with a tinge of pride and a hyper-emotional reaction to any perceived insult to the abilities and proud knowledge of humans.
The play of shadows and light have haunted and exalted people for thousands of years. Do we understand it well yet? What is it that works to make us believe the shadows as the ultimate and what is the force that helps to hide the light and live in darkness as if we are creatures of the dark. The light bearers and searchers have returned several times in the past and present with rays of light offering a glimpse of our own existential condition. Even with the knowledge of the way, we live in ignorance blocked by the shadows of our mind,
Plato used the metaphor of light for the knowledge of reality itself. This knowledge could also be about the social reality we experience and know. It is the aspect of reality we define that is filtered through our traditions, life experience, local culture, individual personality and motivations. It is our knowledge of reality along with our imagination that defines the possibilities in our lives. Defining our reality and possibilities based on just one limited notion of reality is indeed depriving our lives of the grand human potential and imposing on ourselves a prison of the mind.
Societies in Plato's Cave:
The world was fragmented until only a few decades ago. The globalized world is a relatively young one with people holding ideas and deeply conditioned ways of living that may be several millenia old. With the advent of new technologies like the internet, satellite communication and other such technologies, the world is certainly inter-connected in a dramatic way and the distance has shrunk too. People have established great communication channels and are open to trade and exchange goods in a very efficient manner. However, at this point most of it is utilitarian in the sense people are willing to exchange resources and do business in a open way, and there are several global organizations that claim to have an impartial global interest.
It is important to keep in mind that such a radical change in the world situation has not been accompanied by changes in the mind structures of people. The utilitarian globalization that has happened now is only the foundation for a higher stage of globalization, it is certainly not the end of it. It provides us a great opportunity to move to other stages of globalization, where the motivation for all our efforts is to bring benefit to all of humanity. Whether we seize this opportunity or let it slip away lies to some extent in our hands.
The word culture is used in widely different contexts and in all contexts it has something to do with the way we lead our lives. In a narrow sense, it only refers to food, costumes, the way social gatherings are organized and rituals are performed, and the way in which relationships are made and broken. There is also this common belief that culture is only relevant to people with people with enough money and leisure time, while the rest of humanity somehow lives under the dictates of currency and the need for basic necessities. That seems to be the case when we look at culture in a narrow sense.
At a deeper level, a specific culture evolves around certain deeper truths, shared realities and a way of life that allows people to access that truth and lead meaningful lives. These truths certainly affect the value system and the specific values that organize any society or culture. Unless we have access to these deep truths and beliefs around which a culture has evolved and thrived, we will be wallowing in shallow waters thinking that is all there is to it. In the narrow sense, there seems to be a lot of diversity, as those are contingent on several local context and history dependent factors. It is in the deep waters we find a common ground as it generally deals with the human existential condition and sometimes the nature of the universe itself.
People in different cultures to some extent grow up in different social universes with some communication between them. It almost feels we live in different parallel universes with regards to our culture. It naturally results in cognitive dissonance and discord when cultures meet. With great strides being made in creating communication channels across the world, such phenomena is occurring in a never to be seen before manner. People with a strong sense of cultural identity do seem have trouble resolving all this discord in a peaceful manner. That results in selective letting in of ideas and values from other social-verses while completely shutting off in other spheres. This appears to be a reasonable way to approach this problem for people who want to preserve their identity and think of those as pure and impure.
Such an approach seems to be fine, if not for the play of shadows. The shadows of power, violent enforcement and deceptive tactical enforcement of chosen values of some powerful people seem to hinder and repress any deeper level of dialogue between cultures. Such people provoke sentimental notions of cultural supremacy and look down on some unhealthy aspects of other cultures. This leads to specific stereotyping of cultures into narrow definitions and reinforcement of the negative aspects of any culture in people's minds. A mis-perception of something is often a greater hindrance to learning the truth compared to complete ignorance.
Can Multi-Culturalism Help?
Philosophers and Psychologists like Ken Wilber, Jean piaget, Erik Erikson, Kohlberg and several others have identified stages in ego development An ego self is the one constructed through our own life experience and other dispositions. It is the malleable aspect of our self that changes with our life experience and help us navigate this inter-subjective world. The ego developmental stages are based on the identity of the ego self and the motivation for their actions. The ego developmental stages that have been identified includes egocentric, ethnocentric, global-centric, higher trans-personal and stages that consider the self as one with the whole cosmos. In the ego-centric stage, the person is only considered about the welfare of his/her own self. Their actions are motivated by a desire to bring benefit to themselves, sometimes in obvious ways and at other times in twisted ways As these are ego developmental stages, in most people there is a progression from egocentricity to ethno-centricity and from ethno-centricity to global-centric stage and further up.
Some observational studies point that most of humanity live in ego-centric and ethno-centric stages and only around 30% live in a global-centauric stage. It sounds like a reasonable fraction for a world that is ravaged by poverty, corruption and the thriving of criminal-political mafia. We can only hope that this seed population holds the potential to help others move to the next stage in ego developmental stage.
Multi-culturalism seems to be a great way to experience and know the ways of lives of others. People do vary widely in their openness towards other cultures even when living in cultural melting pots. It is certainly a great way to understand the common ground in different social realities and live together in harmony. The superficial aspect of this is the risk of treating such a phenomena as a passing fad and people indulging in to reinforce a negative pride with out genuine respect for any culture. Some people may just think of it is as just a hip movement to include various cultures in their world view and everyday lives, while still holding on to pre-globalization patterns of behavior and value systems. The shadows are again our minds' shadows at play that can turn this wonderful experience into something that is meaningless and even make it a vanity project. Hence it becomes important to understand the deeper reality in this great experiment of a multi-cultural way of life, that is increasingly important in such a globalized world.
The Deeper Reality:
Our existential reality can be analyzed at three levels. The gross (what is generally considered as the physical level), subtle ( mind and all its other productions) and very subtle levels of reality (the level of reality. Realizing our shared evolutionary history in the journey of humans at the gross level, our mutual influence on each other during the cultural evolution of our species at the subtle level and the cosmic nature of our eternal being at the very subtle level leads to a much deeper appreciation of the whole of humanity and all other beings.
If we can our attention to the light of truth at each of these levels, the shadows do fall behind. In that light lies the hope for a globalized world with genuine contact between cultures and a peaceful co-existence between people on earth.
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