We cannot beginning to talk about culture to culture conversation before investigating what culture really is. A culture is a gameworld that answers the following questions: where do we come from? what are we doing here? where are we going? what does it mean to be human? We human beings do not interact with the world as it is. We interact with the world through gameworlds, including our culture. A culture is the unfolding of one story answering that set of questions chosen among an unlimited number of possible stories.

Culture is a Gameworld. Perhaps one of the most treacherous and lethal of gameworlds that humans ever invented.

Culture is a treacherous gameworld because we are taught how to play in our local culture before we are even out of our mother's belly, and what we are taught about culture leaves out the bit that culture is a completely arbitrary gameworld - in other words, Bullshit. Instead we are taught to give our Center and Authority away to our culture and its traditions. We are taught to believe that our culture is true and the best thing human beings ever invented, and that our culture and its flag must be defended with our life, instead of being taught 'cultural relativity' (per Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) that culture is a gameworld no more true than any other culture or gameworld.

A culture cannot be good or bad. A culture is a culture. It is a set of arbitrary beliefs and traditions. A culture has a certain level of responsibility. A culture also has very real consequences.

An unconscious culture does not know or teach its constituents that it is merely an arbitrary belief system that has no connection whatsoever to the Truth. It does not know it is bullshit. Bullshit is not good or bad. However, the belief that our bullshit is true has lethal consequences. For example, modern culture or western civilization does not consider itself as a culture, the others over there have cultures, sometimes even an interesting or a funny culture. Western civilization, a few hundred year old construct, considers itself as having found the best answer for how to go about life, and it relates to other culture as a failed attempt at being modernized. This belief has been strengthened by the idea that 'if I can kill you, my ways must be better than yours'. European people invaded the American, African and Asian continents killing off unimaginable numbers of local populations in order take their land and resources. In that way, culture can be lethal because, as was explicitly stated in most indigenous Cultures - people from the 'outside' are understood to be 'the edible ones'. Most cultures are unconscious.

A conscious culture on the other hand, is conscious of itself. It can look at itself and be amazed about the amount of bullshit that it really is. The people have become aware of cultural relativity. They have the ability to be comfortable in the realization that, while their own culture make sense in their own mind, it may appear quite ridiculous to someone else and vice versa, and that is perfectly okay. This opens the possibility of having a respectful and curious culture-to-culture conversation. The basis of such conversation creates the possibility of an exchange of knowings, skills, techniques, and initiatory processes.

People in an unconscious culture live in a fantasy world.

People in a conscious culture live in a Gameworld.

Want to more about gameworlds? Here's the DOORWAY TO GAMEWOLRD

The moment you are in the presence of the distinction, in all of your fives bodies, that a culture is arbitrary, you have come to and stayed at the edge of your own birth culture. Congratulations! You have questioned, inquired, and hacked your way out of your culture on your journey to the edge.

You can now turn around and look at your own birth culture. This is one of the most important and devastating initiatory process. You will automatically enter a liquid state when that realization sinks in (Maybe you can remember when that realization sank in). Probably, the first feelings you will experience are anger (or mixed emotions like disgust or revolt or guilt or shame). The anger is absolutely appropriate. The anger comes from the experiential distinction that you built your life to this point on the lie that what you were taught is the way it goes. Nothing else was possible or even imaginable. You made decisions, plans, interacted with people, did jobs, and chose to do this or that based on what your culture valued as important, noble, and right and also what your culture considered taboos, condemnable and wrong. When you discover that none of this is true or real but simply the unfolding of one particular story, you might realize that the choices that you've made didn't actually come from your own authority, and instead from your unconscious need to conform to the authority of the culture, of the status quo. The consequence of playing in an unconscious cultural gameworld is that you are a sheep and a pawn in someone else game. You don't get to truly be who you want to be and make each decision with full responsibility for it.

The second feeling that most probably comes a few seconds after the anger is fear. This is how it goes because if you make it all the way to the edgo of your birth culture and look outside of the bubble, what do you see? Nothing ... and everything! You are like a chicken who just hatched out of your egg. The world before that was limited to the comfortable, cosy and warm fantasyworld where the rules were determined by somebody else who you could blame for your unhappiness is gone. You are standing in front of the great unknown territory of the natural and free adult playground.

However, your first encounter with that space can be very uncomfortable, maybe even overwhelming, if you do not have the clarity that fear is one of the four feelings. Fear is fear. Fear is not good or bad. Fear is not a design error of the human structure. Fear is appropriate, needed and wanted for you to play in adulthood. The most common fear when standing at the edge is that there is no path, you don't know how it goes, you don't know where to go, or where the path leads.

Correct, standing at the edge of nothingness, the only step you can know is the one right in front of you. By taking the next step, you become a bridge builder. Yay!

The completion of the alchemical transformation of the initiatory process of getting out of your birth culture will happen when you can grieve the old identity that you created to match your birth culture. Creating that identity, called your Box, was necessary and appropriate because without it you would not have survived. And yet, that identity was made for you to survive rather than to live your full potential. With the sadness you can grieve what you have sacrificed.

Then comes the Joy. You gain clarity that the new distinction - your culture is just one of the possible gameworld - gives you power. You now have access to the power to create your culture - the gameworld you want to live in. Indeed, if a culture is simply a set of beliefs and distinctions, then what is stopping you from creating your own?

No one can do it for you. And more importantly, no one can stop you from doing it.

It is possible that you will find yourself jumping around those feelings for a time while the new distinctions sink in on different levels in your five bodies.

Turned on? For more of this, enter the DOORWAY TO GAMEWORLD BUILDING

Here is a distinction between beliefs and distinctions.

Anybody can believe anything about anything. A Belief is an Is-Glued formulation that has no connection to reality. Beliefs are defended not by experience but by a positionality such as “I’m right. You’re wrong.” Positionality excludes. In other words, a particular belief can be supported only if all contradictory beliefs are destroyed. The automatic and unavoidable result of positionality is war. This is how human history has gone.

A Distinction, on the other hand, is a Declaration of difference that can change who you are. When you get a distinction, it reorders your energetic body in such a way that you can differentiate something which you could not differentiate before. You can experientially discern more than you could before.

For example, if you believe that your culture is different from another culture, then your culture is right and they are wrong. However, when you carry the distinction that your culture is different from some else's culture, it is an experience. You don't have to defend yourself or attack the person across from you and you can be connected to each other without superiority or inferiority.

For more about what distinctions are, click here: DOORWAY TO DISTINCTIONS

The diversity of culture is a source of wonder and of strength. Each culture is a facet of humanity. Each of us has a unique way of interacting with the world, deciding what is important and what is not. The paradigm of modern culture, to makes us all the same in the way we interact with the world, is leading us and Planet Earth into total destruction. It is maybe one of the biggest challenges we are faced with today to revive the flame of diversity with respect, humility, and clarity.

The way for cultures to survive today - whether indigenous or next cultures - is not in isolating themselves, rather in inviting a deeper conversation between them where the aim is not to create a homogeneous and generic model. The aim is instead to stimulate evolution and transformation in each and every one of them. A culture survives if it can transform in the face of challenges.

Conversing between your culture and someone else's culture is a skill that we have not been taught in our classrooms for the majority of us who have been to school. There are multiple traps in that practice. What we have been taught instead of cultural relativity is cultural myopia where modern culture is not a just another culture, it is the most advanced and intelligent way human beings can relate to each other and the Earth. With that belief in us, in a culture to culture conversation, we rapidly become either defensive or offensive about our own culture.

If you have reached the edge of your birth culture, if you've even stepped out of it, another enemy is waiting beyond the lines: being adaptive to your birth culture as a habit of fitting in with your friends and family. When it's time to gather with your family for Christmas, a Birthday or a Wedding, old habits take over and you become adaptive to a culture that is not your own.

My experience is that with a solid dose of curiosity, your center, grounding cord, bubble and your sword of clarity pulled out, you can have the most marvelous, challenging and transformational conversations from your cultural bubble to someone else's cultural bubble.

Culture to culture conversation is a new skill, and as new skills go, it needs practice.

HAVE FUN!

Being offensive about your culture can be subtle. For example, a western NGOs settling in a 'third world' country with good intention wanting to "help save the world" is one of the most offensive and arrogant way to connect between cultures. The basis of that conversation is that one of the parties knows how to save the other one, because the other one obviously could not have done it themselves. The offer is one of creating Low Drama - the NGO being the rescuer, the people in the other country being the victim. The persecutor is often the people's government or colonizers.

This is the most widespread form of communication between people from modern culture and those from other cultures. Building schools, sending notebooks, pens and text books to countries in Africa or Asia is a new form of colonization by spreading the economic, industrial and education system across borders. Globalisation does not have to look like that. There are a multitude of possibilities for a globalized, connected world.

Your birth culture is inculcated in you from the moment of conception. The choice you have about it is to accept your birth culture or to die. After accepting, you then create your identity, your Box, that fits into your birth culture in its unique way. Even the rebelious children, teenagers or people in grown-up bodies are a necessary part of a culture. You can check out the 18 standards boxes to find out which identity you have created for yourself to survive in modern culture.

Defending can take the form of making fun of other ways of doing or behaving. This excludes the possibility of learning something different. You can notice that someone is or yourself are defending their culture when they say: " their culture than to face the possibility of dying by questioning it. Wars are set up on this basic premise.

Defending can take the form of making fun of other ways of doing or behaving. This excludes the possibility of learning something different. You can notice that someone is, or you are, defending their culture when they say: "This is who I am", "I do things like that since I can remember", "Leave me alone, I do it like I want to".

Being adaptive is a survival behavior of giving your center away to authority figures. It comes from the thought 'If I don't follow, I will die'. Most cultures imply that to survive you have to use the ways of the culture. Anything else is alien and dangerous for your survival. You were bread to be adaptive to your birth culture.

People from the non-westernized world have become adaptive to modern culture and the western way of life as it has been brought to them as the paramount of human existence. Without questioning the slogan of success, achievement, wealth and money. You are taught to give your center away to the ones who promise you heaven on Earth: religion, capitalism, money, career, ...

In order to access curiosity, start with remembering these two sentences:

"That is amazing!"

"I never thought that could be that way, this is fascinating"

Use them without any tone of sarcasm or superiority. Be amazed! This is where genuine curiosity begins. You have your culture, someone else has a different culture. Curiosity is about finding a way to discover their culture without attacking it or adapting to it, and without defending how it goes for you.