Steady. Better take this sitting down if you celebrated too much last night!
You and I agree that today is New Years Day and develop a cultural bubble around it.
On New Years Day, we sleep in. On New Years Day, we make resolutions. Coming as it does after New Years Eve, today we just relax, recover, and unwind.
Some of us are jubilant. Some of us “face into” the New Year.
I always ask of myself, “What’s the most important thing to do?” on any day, really. But especially on New Years Day.
On this New Years Day? Well, I think it’d be most important for me to kick off this year – as terrestrial events go on in the background, which I’m leaving to others to cover – by continuing to develop the concept of a global culture.
We’ve been advised to not try to wrestle with the old guard, but to build the new instead – and they will come. So here we are.
But why a global culture, Steve?
To explain, I’d have to back up a ways. May I?
I’m told I haven’t been here all that many times. Which is why I seem to walk through so many things. What’s the definition of this? Why are we doing that? How do we do this?
It may also be why I ended up studying human history, anthropology, and sociology.
I’ve seen my entire life as a learning experience. I often think of it as a workshop with I’m running growth experiments.
Every day I look at the smallest occurrence and seem to marvel at it.
If you were reading this Ascension ethnography, you might have noticed what was a milestone moment for me, when I saw that I as a terrestrial value how I feel above everything else.
All of it – working, marrying, vacationing, entertaining, pursuing career after career – was done in order to have me feel a certain way.
Let’s call that the highest human value, so we have away of referring to it. The highest human value, I assert, is valuing how we feel.
Extending that as a hypothesis, I hypothesize that most terrestrials tend to value feeling positive above feeling negative. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is the third-dimensional translation of this highest human value.
Those two goals neatly summarized an entire side of my life (there are other sides). I adorned them in various ways. Dressed them up. Gave them degrees, nice apartment, a fancy car, all what we used to call “status symbols.”
Earned brownie points which I could later cash in for agreement. Created treaties with others to mutually tolerate our BS and come to each other’s aid. On and on we ramified our lives based on the original intent to gain pleasure and avoid pain. (1)
Well, that was a significant part of my life, in its barest essentials anyways.
And I saw I wasn’t the only one! Even our movies seemed to be about luring people in and prodding or rewarding them to serve in our dramas to help win us pleasure.
I’ve now had another milestone moment, a realization.
Don’t fall out of your chair at the sheer obviousness of it. Remember, I’m a newbie. Treat me kindly. Here comes:
Our experience of life is what we make of it.
Let’s call this the “foundational principle of life itself.”
Oh, my Gawd. That’s so obvious, I blush at saying it. But I don’t act on the truth of it.
I know it’s true but I still go on attributing the failures in my life to others and the successes to myself. My self-servingness goes so deep it’s as invisible as the air I breathe.
Instead of acting on this principle, I created behavior patterns in life which alienated others, which in turn brought me pain, which is what I didn’t want from life.
Life is what I was making of it and it was bringing me pain instead of pleasure.
So that’s what I was making of life. It didn’t give me pleasure over time and you can see that, over time, I’m going a different way.
But it’s still a different way to get what I want.
We won’t escape having needs and wants as long as live in a 3D body and so we can’t escape coming into relationship with other people. It’s how we relate that’s at issue.
(Concluded in Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) I watch myself minutely and see myself, after determining I want something, strategizing, coming up with a great idea about how to get it from a situation. And then I begin to rationalize it, plan, and carry the maneuver out.