Thinking, Feeling, and Acting Globally | Steve Beckow

Credit: supportforstepdads.com.

By Steve Beckow, December 23, 2020

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Thinking, Feeling, and Acting Globally – Part 1/2

As you know, I trained as a cultural historian and sociologist.

In spirituality I follow awareness and love, but my research link with the world is as a student of culture.

Interestingly, the tools of the historian and the sociologist hold less and less relevance for me over time. But the notion of culture is and will become more and more relevant.

We’ll soon enough be building a global culture and an understanding of culture itself is, I think, useful.

The discussion is a wee bit academic. Feel free to skip it and move on to the next article if it doesn’t set your toes tapping.

Culture is what lies at the heart of all the social sciences and what will concern us later as we build Nova Earth. Let me repeat my own definition of culture.

Culture, whether conceived of as a continuum or a class of phenomena, is an organization of ideas, manifest in act and artifact, though consisting of neither, by means of which we understand our world and take purposeful action.

I encountered resistance when I proposed that definition . Most scholars in 1979 defined culture in terms of behavior or artifacts.

Why is it ideas?

The precondition for the continuance of a culture is that it be transmissible. No transmission of the ideas behind an artifact or behavior pattern and someone finding it three hundred years from now might not know what to make of it.

We have to “pass the word along”; the receiver has to “get the message.” Culture must be transmitted via schools, the media, books, magazines, etc., to survive. And only ideas are capable of being transmitted.

Humans don’t navigate very much by instinct; we navigate mostly by culture. And culture is taught and transmitted from one generation to the next. If we grew up without being introduced to culture, especially language, chances are we’d become, not merely an idiosyncratic child, but a basket case.

***

I’m not as much attracted to the historical any more, but I am to the historic.

I’m amazed at my good fortune at being here covering the news at a time when extraterrestrials are landing, global poverty is about to be addressed, planetary management will change hands, Ascension will occur….

We live in historic times, as the cliche goes. Only it’s a true description of our times. And I want a ringside seat.

These events are monumental, outside the normal scope of anything we’re used to. Admittedly I’m no longer following accountability day by day, but I still don’t want to miss out on anything historic.

(Concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)



By Steve Beckow, December 24, 2020

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Thinking, Feeling, and Acting Globally – Part 2/2

The bow is an example of a custom that could become something we do globally.

(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.)

How is culture studied? There isn’t room here to go over more than one perspective: Anthropologist Leslie White, in what was for me a ground-breaking study, (1) distinguished three ways of studying phenomena, cultural or otherwise.

• The historical/biographical/ethnographic, which is what I write on the blog; discrete events in discrete time, like a specific UFO sighting or me processing an individual vasana or core issue;
• The structural-functional, which is like a snapshot in time; the structure and its functions are removed from and frozen in time like a still photograph; and
• The evolutionary, the developmental history of a class of events through non-discrete time – the history of transportation in general, money, painting, etc.

Sometimes I give an overview, which is a snapshot in non-discrete time, a structural-functional view. I might stop the clock, or look at any and all relevant instances of, say, extraterrestrial contact or Ascension.

But usually I write in an ethnographic/biographical, often stream-of-consciousness, manner. That’s partly because I’m new to subjects like Disclosure, Abundance, and Ascension. It’s also because the subjects themselves are new so we don’t have a widely-disseminated, widely-known literature on any of them.

Biographical studies come first; structural studies, second; and evolutionary studies, third.

Ethnographic/biographical studies yield data; structural-functional studies analyze it; evolutionary or developmental studies trace large trends. They make a movie out of the many structural-functional photographs. (2)

Following this ladder of research is how we study a phenomenon like culture. (3)

***

We can see right now how all is chaos and mayhem outside. All appears to be in breakdown, but we’re told that only the transient darkness will go; the eternal Light and Love will endure. For us that means ascend after the Time of Separation that we’re either in or near.

In order to live together amicably afterwards, I predict that we’ll translate the enduring qualities of Light and Love into a mutually-shared and agreeable global culture.

That’s the heart of the matter for me. We’re building, not a national culture, not an ethnic culture, but a planetary culture.

We’ll build it out of charters, laws, norms, traditions, trends, and other society-wide agreements, disseminated by an uncorrupted media. Our test in these efforts can be no other than: Is it of love?

Those ways of being which are most successful in promoting harmony will hopefully be the ones to catch on globally; others may not have the fuel to make it.

An example would be the bow, traditional in Japan, India, and other places. Covid-19 makes a bow more attractive than a handshake now. This is an example of how what we learn from Covid can be used for divine rather than corrupt purposes.

If it caught on globally, that would see the creation of one element in a global culture, something we all do and know. We could make that our first global convention, coming out of Covid.

I’m not talking about turning everyone into an identical robot. I’m talking about arriving at some helpful, shared ways of being, enough of them that we all feel comfortable with each other, some Gaian ways of doing things rather than eastern and western, etc.

In Fifth Dimension, none of this will be necessary. But in the meantime we’re burning down city districts. We need to think, feel, and act globally now to stop this global descent into violence (knowing full well that it’s destined to stop).

Maybe one decade, two decades ago, I remember thinking that the Divine Mother was putting the human race in the blender. Large numbers of people were on the move and the characters of some countries were changing. All of it seemed to be by design.

And now here we are, so interspersed that the idea of a global culture, combined with the reach of social media, suddenly becomes plausible – and possible.

Footnotes

(1) Leslie White, The Science of Culture. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969; c1949.

(2) I’m talking about structural functionalism as a point of view and not about the school known as Structural Functionalism.

(3) The data then enter my databases; it becomes formed into articles; and the articles become gathered into books. We created culture; studied it; and disseminated it, which in itself is part of the forming of the culture.