The time is approaching when we’re going to need to have global conversations.
The very same year that I began conversations with Archangel Michael, he told me:
AAM: You have known that the time would come when we would ask you to work very much on a very global level. And this is the beginning of that undertaking. You have already built a very firm foundation for this to occur and for this we thank and bless you. (1)
More recently he said this about the charities I’ll be founding:
AAM: This is you becoming the steward of an organization and of an undertaking of massive, massive global impact/import. (2)
I won’t be able to escape – I called it “growing up” earlier. I mean that spiritually rather than chronologically. I cannot do the work being laid out for me operating from the rather slack way of being I operate from at the moment. There’s no better term for it than “growing up.”
One of the ways I grow up is to start thinking globally while acting locally.
How does one think about global society? Whenever I want to establish a beachhead of understanding in a new area, I start with the basics.
What’s basic to global society? Global culture. Let’s start with that.
Anthropologists talk about our “culture.” Sociologists talk about our “social construction of reality.” They’re both looking at the same thing.
What is a culture? In an earlier lifetime as a cultural historian, I defined it as:
“Culture – whether we look at it through time or in the present – may be seen as an organization of ideas, manifest in act and artifact (though consisting of neither), by means of which humans experience their world and take purposeful action. “(3)
Unearth a stringless guitar from the ground a thousand years from now and the finder may use it for a garden pot. Without the idea “guitar” and the ideas of how to use it, the object itself may mean nothing to others. The object is not “culture.”
Culture is not acts either. Take a North American and plant him in deepest Africa and he won’t understand what the people are saying or doing. The speech and physical actions themselves do not convey culture.
The North American would need to know the meaning of the acts – he would need to know what ideas are behind the acts and what is being transmitted to be a participant in their cultural processes and meanings.
The prime limiting condition on culture is that it must be transmissible. If it were not, it would die in a day.
Culture is not innate. If we were blind and deaf, we might never know culture. It doesn’t exist in our genes. It really does live in our minds – as culture. And it has to be handed down from parent or teacher to child – by spoken or written language, pictures, etc.
We translate those ideas into the spoken and written word and pass the message along.
We take them and apply them to production processes to come up with things, from flint tools to cellphones. Anthropologists call these “artifacts” – they show evidence of human manufacture. And culture.
All of these are cultural ways, means, and products.
So the very first thing I need to do, in contributing to the building of Nova Earth, is to create for myself – to have the notion cease to be merely a dry intellectual construct and have it come alive for me – the context of a global culture.
Footnotes
(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Nov. 30, 2011.
(2) Ibid., Feb. 17, 2017.
(3) Changed slightly from the original. S.M. Beckow, “Culture, History, and Artifact,” Canadian Museums Association Gazette, Fall 1975, 13.