More on Healthy Culture

{Note: its probably a good idea at this point to back up a bit and elaborate on the idea of healthy culture itself, since cointegrative science is in a sense, only the cosmological aspect of this aspect of this more incompasing dynamic. What follows is an edited post from my older blog in which I tried to describe better what I mean by Culture and by Healthy and Sick Culture--I-P}

Culture

"There are really only two kinds of music; good music and bad music"--Louie Armstrong (paraphrased)


By "Culture" I mean Cosmology or WorldView, Identity (meaning who am I and who everyone else is in the context of the story that is the Cosmology), Ritual (by which I mean any repeated actions that reinforce the Cosmology and the Identity-Politics), and Infrastructure (by which I mean the specific way space-time is arranged and altered so as to support and facilitate the Cosmology, Identity, and Ritual).

Its worth noting that such a 4-fold conception of culture as outlined above can apply as much to individuals as to groups to the extent that meaningful distinctions can be made between, for example, my own cosmology, identity-politics, rituals, and infrastructure and that of another individual, even within the context of the greater similarities of culture that we might share.

On the other hand, the conception of culture I am offering here is normative, as the phrases "Healthy Culture" and "Sick Culture" imply. The Idea is that the two main types of culture (these are in some sense "Ideal Types"), are a Culture of Apartness and a Culture of Togetherness.

In a Culture of Apartness Cosmologies and Logics (Logic is understood here as part of the Cosmology) of exclusion and dissociation are priviledged, factional Identity-Politics of seperation and alienation correspond with the cosmology, Rituals of Inner and Out dissociation and exclusion support the Cosmology and Identity-Politics and the fragmented and dissociated infrastructures facilitate the all of the above.

In a Culture of Togetherness on the contrary,  a Cosmology and Logic of inclusion and living wholeness is priviledged, the prevailing Identity politics is an inclusive "Us-and-Us" identity-politcs rather than an exclusive "us-and-them" and all of this is supported by conscious rituals and Infrastructure.

Note that the theory of Cointegrative Science and its "Co-inferential" Logic is itself meant to describe the (always tentative) content of the Cosmology of Healthy Culture, so I am not making any pretense of the possibility of neutrality in any of these ideas. Such a pretense would represent a presumptive dissociation of Fact and Value which (if viewed as primary) would only mark the idea as itself part of Sick Culture and the cosmology of dissociation.

Now there is a sense in which in reality every culture, say the culture of the Catholic Church at a given time and place or of Jazz musicians in New York or of a given individual living  in Cincinnati Ohio in 2012, are all combinations of both sick and healthy culture even if the cosmology of togetherness involved is only latent and unconcious. (I merely assert these things now I will show them later). Yet at the same time, though both kinds of culture are present in any actual situation, it is nevertheless the case that one form of culture is primary at any given time, so that the culture of apartness is either busy excluding and repressing the culture of togetherness or the culture of Togetherness is busy acknowledging and healing the culture of Apartness within it. 

This conception of Culture is not exactly meant to be strictly anthropological and, since the Cointegrative Cosmology involves things like Cosmology, Identity, Ritual and Infrastructure, at least three of which seem to apply solely to human beings, this of course is very odd but like much else will be explained later as a circumstance flowing naturally from the normative assumptions behind the whole idea of Healthy Culture.

These and other explicitly normative assumptions implicitly as well as explicitly challenge the “dominant culture” as transmitted through various kinds of education. Education is the transmission of culture, and if there is something fundamentally wrong with your culture than there is likely to be something fundamentally wrong with your education, including your education about culture. At the moment the dominant culture seems to be presenting a kind of dichotomy between conservative ethnocentrism and liberal or progressive multiculturalism as the terms of the debate. But to take sides in this debate is already to surrender to the dominant cultures way of thinking about and discussing the issue. It is to make the (in my opinion) ethnocentric presumption that the dominant cultures treatment of, and approach to, the whole subject is the correct or best one. If that were so one would have only to take one or another of the offered positions on the the nature of culture and fight it out—kind of like with the party system

This is the kind of situation that one can only be escaped through what amounts to creativity and insight rather than purely rational or reactionary response. It requires thinking outside the box of the whole dominant paradigm. My creative response is to propose the above different way of thinking about both culture as an aspect of an equally different way of thinking about everything else,so that what you are reading is meant to be both a description, and a gesture of Healthy Culture.

Next I want to treat in a little more detail each of the 4 aspects of Culture I have listed above, focusing for the most part on the Healthy variant though this will unavoidably involve making comparisons to current unhealthy practice. Future Posts will go into each of these, and much else in much more Detail. 

Cosmology

Of Course the Cosmology of Togetherness, the general world-view and fundamental cognitive orientation of Healthy Culture is some version or other of Cointegrative Science and its Logic of Cointegrative Coinference, Or ,put another way, Cointegrative Science and Logic are meant to be the "modern" version of that perennial, primal, and universally human world-view that assumes, as a starting place for reason, the fundamental Togetherness of Subject and Object, of self and other, of the vertical and the horizontal of the above and the below, and even of Togetherness and Apartness.

Such a cosmology of Togetherness, which I want to repeat, also implies and correspondingly nonalienated form of Logic and discourse,  is not, in a healthy culture, segregated from the Identity, the Ritual, and the Infrastructure of which it is such an integral part, but rather is transmitted with them as a part of a healthy Education (and by "Education" I mean exactly the "Transmission of Culture across generations", whether sick or healthy; a transmission inclusive of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure).

The absence of such a conscious Cosmology and Logic of Togetherness necessarily leaves us with an unconscious cosmology and Logic of Apart-ness which puts the accent on alienation and estrangement inwardly and outwardly and between the inner and the outer themselves. This kind of cosmology and "cosmologic"--and the modern scientific cosmology is certainly of this kind for the most part, as are many ancient ones--is inherently rigid and dissociated in that the accent on apartness is not a completely optional, volitional choice that can be reversed at will but rather something stemming from unconsciousness,  historical and biographical trauma, and lack of experience of any alternative. One could say that the now dominant Cosmology of Apartness, and the Culture of Apartness of which it is a cardinal aspect, constitute a kind of culmination or confluence of the global Cultural erosion which we ordinarily describe as world history.

Of course, like I said, it is not so simple as that. Healthy Culture and Sick Culture always coexist within any actual culture, so that calling a culture "sick" means that sick culture is primary in it for the time being, so that there is general denial and suppression real consciousness of its own pathology, while a healthy culture is, for the time being, acknowledging and engaging its core sickness in a progressive and evolutionary way. Thus, every culture, like every individual-person, has both its ""Piece of the Lie" and its "piece of the Truth" and invidious comparisons between cultures are not in order.

Various aspects of Contegrative Cosmology include "Life-Logic" ( or "Cointegrative Coinference", the Coordinating Cognitive Archetypes and Moral Compass that I call the Spirit Matrix, the concepts of Dysmutuality, Wholesthesia, Cointegrative Virtue, Inner Consensus, Consensuality, and very many others. I will post a fairly extensive glossary of Cointegrative terms and concepts

Identity 
 
The situation with Identity is of course the same as that with culture. The framing of the terms of the debate—the very creation of both the Debate and its terms by the dominant culture seems to me unquestioningly accepted by those in its thrall. Our culture tells us our history in terms of the competition between various factions ("us’s" and "thems") between which we are then obliged to choose and take sides. The dynamic is the same whether the antagonists are described as male and female, black and white, 1st world and 3rd world, north and south. And to say, for example, that it was the northern white European males that brought about and maintain this fragmented and factional way of looking at things, is only to assume the very thing that is at issue and betray the imprint of the dominant fragmented cosmology and its related myths of both Identity and causality; it reveals one as already under the spell of the dominant culture, having made a primary Identification in its terms and in its spirit.

The Factionalisms of Race, Sex, Nationality, Profession, Religion, and other identity politics in their negative manifestations are thus wholly a symptoms of the dominant Culture of Apart-ness and of our compliance with it in accepting such factional Identities as primary. The creative response to such fragmentation is again, not simply to take sides in the endless warfare that our culture wants us to understand as our essential history, so that we each dutifully wear (sometimes exchanging) the identity uniforms that fate, physiology, and "education" seem to have given us. A creative adaptation to the array of roles and identities that the dominant sick culture foists upon us is possible and in this case in is embodied in the Identity (actually the Coidentity) of Individual-Personhood.

This identity-politics, (described in detail in a previous post) is not factional at all. Everyone is an Individual-Person by the mere fact of their existence; by their very existence everyone has a “Familial’ association (even if only with his or her self and immediate environment. Everyone is likewise somebody’s Neighbor, somebody’s fellow “Citizen-of-the-World”, everyone has a subjectivity (psyche or soul) with some relationship to ultimate things. And, what is distinguishable from all this, everyone has an inimitable authentic individuality that is manifest to some degree in any given gesture or act. To affirm Individual-Personhood as ones primary identity then is in some sense to assert something obvious (at least when pointed out) and perhaps even commonplace.

But to affirm individual-Personhood as ones primary Identity is also, in the context of Healthy Culture, to consciously accept the right/responsibility of Coming-Together for Consensus in the inner and outer venues it describes. For this inner-and-outer coming-together is what real Health and real Living means. Real Living, as opposed to the unconscious, fear-based, surviving imposed by the dominant culture, happens when we engage in the Healthy Personal Culture of inner-and-outer togetherness, when we proactively and ritually affirm the primacy of the common Theme of Individual-living-Personhood, seeing Gender, Race, and other roles and identities as subordinate variations on this Theme at best, adjectives to this main noun (adverbs to this main verb). Real Living happens when I am being myself, becoming ever more myself, but in conscious and responsible relationship with others.

The opposite of an Individual-Person is a Phony-Alien (or as I prefer to say, and Alienated Phony, and this I also claim to be (though I guess not so loudly).  Cultivating Individual-Personhood (trying to manifest Individual-Personhood is more or less the same thing as being in a kind of Alienated Phonies Anonymous group and the two kind of identities are really just two sides of the same identity-politics...

In is important to introduce here the related concept of Shared SelfNature or NatureSelf that is a kind of Identity-Politics implicit (to a certain extent in the cointegrative assumption of the fundamental togetherness of the subjective and objective worlds and of fundamental Togetherness generally. Its easy to substitute the word Nature for the "objective world" and to not that nature is intrinsically shared, our own bodies being the part of this shared nature that we are and experience most directly. The Idea of The Shared Self mirrors this understanding in terms of a Subjective experience considered to be ontologic equal and coimplicated with Objective Experience (The fundamental togetherness and mutual definition of the inner and outer, the subjective and objective is after all, the primary datum of experience, is arguably experience itself. Thus the theory is that, just as the individual body is the part of shared nature that we are most directly, so the individual mind it the part of the Shared Mind (or the Shared Self) the we experience most directly. Moreover, just as the dissociation of Mind and Body is not warranted in the context of healthy culture, (hence the expressions like "Mind-Body" and "Body-Mind"), so this separation is not warranted between Shared Nature and Shared Self; hence the concept of SelfNature or NatureSelf. The identity of the "Shared Ego" has the same relationship to Shared SelfNature as that of the Alienated Phony has to the Individual-Person. This will all be explained later.

Finally the concepts of Identity mentioned here are derive from the "Law of Coidentity" which forms a part of the Conferencial ("Co-inferential") Logic of Cointegrative Science which I only just mentioned above in the Cosmology Section of this post. A future post on this topic is forthcoming.

Ritual

Just as in the case of Cosmology, we can distinguish Rituals of inner and outer Togetherness and Rituals of inner and outer separation or Apart-ness ( Again, By “rituals”, I mean repeated action or patterns of behavior in individuals and groups related to and reinforcing a consciously or unconsciously shared cosmology).

By "Rituals of Apart-ness" I mean acts of numbing and of dissociation that separate us from aspects of our own wholeness and relatedness. Some behaviors dissociate us primarily from our own bodies, such as the regular consumption of drugs and overly processed food for example. Others primarily separate us from our hearts--such as the repeated practice of vivisection in certain university laboratories, or of hours of bureaucratic office work. Some seem primarily to separate us from our minds or souls, like watching television often does. And by "Rituals of Apart-ness" I also mean rituals that isolate and inhibit us from coming together outwardly, with others, in meetings in different venues. These include such habits as that of using private transportation, or of simply always being busy. Many of these rituals require or are supported by their own technological and/or legal infrastructure. And all of them are inter-connected as “syn-entropic” rituals within a culture of inner and outer apart-ness. By this I mean that rituals of outer apart-ness reinforce and even imply rituals of inner apart-ness and visa versa.

As rituals of inner and outer Togetherness, I can sight the vision quest and various rituals of initiation. I can also sight things like “co-counseling”, Open Space Technology, or healthy Tantra,Kerreza,  Breema, Chi Gung, Yoga, Elimination Timing, Alexander Technique, Gormans, Learning Methods, Consensus Facilitation,  as, if not, in my view quite achieving really healing Togetherness, at least have potential for this kind of thing though at present tthe truly healing potential of such practices is for the most part lost in its translation into the dominant socioeconomic idiom of sick culture. These kinds of things at their best, informed by a Healthy Cosmology and Identity Politics and supported by Healthy Infrastructure, could be examples of real community and communion wherein the individuals come together in a way that encourages both inner as well as outer consensus. Eating mostly unprocessed and natural foods together, in a conscious way can foster both inner and outer communion and is not like the false communion of coming-together outwardly around substances that numb and estrange us from ourselves inwardly. Other rituals of Togetherness include the Personhood ritual and, the Life-Dance Party, the Four-fold Seasons Breath, Cointegrative Coinference, The Vision Dance, the Life-Dance Walk, The Welcoming Gesture and various other experimental practices (the word "dance" in the name of many of the rituals is basically metaphorical) . These rituals constitute experiments in Cointegrative Science and they will be described primarily in my other blog Healthy Culture; (Lifedancelog.blogspot.com).


Infrastructure

By "Infrastructure" I basically mean everything relate to how the way space-time is arranged so as to support either sick or healthy culture. This includes things like art, technology, architecture, zoning, as well as intellectuals tools like the calender and the alphabet. Like the other three aspects of Culture, the infrastructure is continuous with and shades into each of the other aspects so that it can really only be relatively distinquished. My own preoccupations in the context of infrastructure are presently centered around what we now call agriculture and architecture as well as the infrastructure relavent to various experiments in cointegrative economics and politics.

Currently I like to think in terms of transitioning from "infrastructures of Control" to "infrastructures of Communion" (what I mean really is that there is a continuum between Control and Communion generally and that the proper order of things it that the former should exist only to the extent that it can supports and enable the latter). Anyway, various ideas and examples of what I mean will be shared in forthcoming posts. Here I will just list some original theories and experiments in cointegrative science as well as some already existing consepts and structures (structures  that, perhaps with a little tweaking, seem to assimilable as part of Healthy Infrastructure.

Among the former I can mention "The Tree of Life" conception of optimal human demographics, the plan and outline WildWard Farm as a part of that, The Check-in Tray and similar entities, Experimental Calenders, the design of Life-Fair Grounds and forms of Cointegrative Media among other things. As for the latter, I think both the Natural Farm of Masenobo Fukuoka, and indigenous technologies speak of communion rather than control based way of relating to the land,  I also think there is a great deal that is explicit and latent in the work of Christopher Alexander and also in Galen Crantz that is relevant to the idea of cointegrative architecture and infrastructure, though again this is at least equally so for very many forms of indigenous and traditional architecture.

...

Conclusion

To reiterate:

This way of thinking about  Culture generally avoids the pitfalls of ethnocentrism on the one hand and those of a nihilistic cultural relativity on the other. But it only avoids a kind of simplistic dualism if its remembered that the two kinds of ritual process it describes are always Both present in any real culture or individual, that the essential thing that distinguishes a relatively healthy ritual from an unhealthy one is whether Conscious, healthy rituals are acknowledging, integrating, and healing the unconscious ones or not, and that one kind of ritual can change into the other with surprising ease as inner and outer circumstances change.

Having said this, it is still true that when and where the cultural soil-building of conscious healthy ritual is not happening then the cultural erosion of unconscious ritual is. And, though the distinction might still be seen as a dualism, it is a dynamic and sophisticated, rather than a simplistic and rigid dualism because it posits a dynamic but potentially unstable balance that can always reverse itself in either direction (both in collectively and in individuals) and so inherently advises neither complacency nor despair. In fact, the presence of either of these attitudes is a good sign that the balance is already shifting to the side of sickness and disintegration. This is not only the case for ritual but for all aspects of culture

The problem that all this raises then is the extent to which we, you and I, collectively and individually still primarily practice an unhealthy alienated and phony culture that does not foster, and makes it difficult to even conceive of, the dance of inner/outer coming-together that is consistent with true healing. It is the extent to which we primarily practice and learn the concepts and rituals of fear, alienation, anesthetization, and inner and outer dissociation that constitute our most active cultural heritage. We are all already initiated into the identities, rituals, and the cosmology of apart-ness and consciously and unconsciously proceed to likewise initiate the next generation. In our society the “conscious” initiation is called formal education and the unconscious one would, I suppose, simply be called "growing up".

Because of all this, the overwhelming tendency of people and organizations trying to manifest a really different kind of culture is a kind cultural backsliding (perhaps it really a kind of Post-system stress disorder) wherein supposedly new and radical institutions and practices are created which really just recreate with unimportant variations the very culture to which they aspire to transform. I can’t think of any political movement other than the (as yet unmanifest) one I’ve just described that is an exception to this. I think what all this means for activists, progressives and anyone who would be a part of a transformative and healing culture is that the co-creation of healthy culture means the creation and  practice of healthy culture; the practice of rituals of inner-and-outer coming-together, on the part of its members as individuals and as groups that affirm Healthy Cosmology, Healthy Identity, and Healthy Infrastructure. And it means establishing institutions or associations that encourage that practice. This means that within those groups and individuals, Rituals, Identities, Cosmologies and Infrastructures of inner/outer Togetherness need to be established and privileged while the present rituals and identities of Apart-ness--of dissociation--inwardly and outwardly, need to be acknowledged, understood, engaged, and progressively healed.

Ultimately, no real cultural alternative will exist within the so-called progressive or radical movements if the individuals in them do not own up to our own rituals and identities of inner and out apart-ness and if we are not sincerely trying to befriend or world, each other and ourselves (and our "enemies") through our own Rituals, Identities, and Cosmology, of inner and outer Togetherness. This, of course, means subordinating the “Us-and-them” meme that so effectively distracts us from our own “shit” and our own compromisedness, and that is so central to the culture of Apart-ness. It means, by beginning the process of fully understanding and acknowledging our own individual and collective wounds, inaugurating an individual as well as group in the cointegrative project of catalyzing our own healing together-with that of other people and the world in an affirmation of inherent mutuality. And It means confronting in the context of a Healthy Cultural Pilot Project our education in the current culture of Apart-ness, the Identities, concepts, Cosmology, and practices that we have internalized and that undermine our attempts to embrace (and sometimes to even conceive of) truly Healthy Culture.

Such education would be replaced by a cosmology and practice that facilitates the integration ones own healing with that of other people and the world. It would be a cosmology and practice that assumes the primacy of Togetherness and so is capable of fostering its nurturing and progressive manifestation as culture, Identity and Ritual. Of course I call this cosmology and Practice Cointegrative Science and the Dance of Living Individual Personhood and Living Friendship, which I am calling the Life-Dance is the primary ritual experiment of this science. You are welcome to join me in these experiments in this Dance, and Indeed this, all of the above, and the whole of these two weblogs, only justifies itself as a elaborate form of Individual-Personal Invitation to a Life-Dance, a of Healthy, Culture, Living-Friendship, and Goodwill. For more information about the Healthy Culture, the Life-Dance and Integral Science, e-mail me at individualperson1@gmail.com
I-P Kerren Odori  (a.k.a. Kevin Thompson)
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