The forces that shape culture

I really must stop listening to the radio when I’m in the car.  Will I ever not have something to say???? 

Today’s topic was young offenders and the impact (or lack thereof) of longer sentences.  An interview with a criminologist spoke to the degree to which more and longer incarceration periods were not achieving the outcome of reducing crime rates (frequency) and levels (intensity of harm) amongst young offenders. 

I listened…. and I felt a heavy sigh move through my body.  It really isn’t rocket science : 

* Androgynous Baby™ and Nested Living Systems™ are the forces that shape culture.  As forces, they are not good or bad, right or wrong…. they are just forces.  Powerful, extensive, insidious, pervasive, deeply entrenched forces… but forces nonetheless.  It is not the force itself that is causing the problem – it’s what we put into these forces that leaves us twisted and crippled.  

* The essential ingredient that makes it possible for these forces to continue in their crippling effect is that of external referencing.  The fundamental, underpinning of external referencing in our global culture (yes, we are one large, living, organic collective) is that there is a ‘god’ and we are not it.  The ‘god’ that we are taught never to question, shapes our lives – our past, our present and our future.  There are only two things that we know for sure about this god:  that there is one; and that we’re not it!  An externally referenced all-knowing, all-powerful being demands that we allow ourselves to know ourselves as ‘less than’, as a way of being; and in constant need of something from the outside ( a person, a job, $$$, stuff, things, etc.) to guide us and shape our lives.  

* This externally referenced way of moving through the world has a hierarchy :  god; god’s right hand in the church and its representatives; authorities (including parents, teachers, professionals, etc.) – all operating with the view that we must be shaped and molded or be lost to the internal structures that will destroy us.  Eureka!  There’s that terrible, terrifying internal state – not to be trusted or ventured into.  

* Networks of culturally conditioned, reinforced structures of beliefs and values that operate to hold in check the essential commitment to external referencing.  Lose that… lose our blind commitment to external referencing…. and we become a threat.  No wonder that it is enforced with such rigor (on all fronts) and often, brutality. 

Our family systems are the front line in this process of shaping culture.  Passed down from one generation to the next; unquestioned; enforced with violence of body, mind and spirit, we become replicas of what we have lived.  Our children do not do what we tell them to do – they become who we are.  

If we want to create change… if we want to reshape culture differently… we must move away from the content of that culture and redirect our attention to the forces that shape that culture.  Into the process of culture shaping… into the forces that shape and mold and structure reality… we must inject what is required to move from external referencing to becoming internally referenced.  

The Declaration of Evolution by Intention offers an internally referenced framework of beliefs and values from which to engage the world.  

We must rediscover and reclaim the godforce that we are, in expression in a physical universe.  And we must ask:  how does the godforce that I AM choose to live?  In that moment, culture reshapes itself.  

When I know that I AM the godforce, I know that I create it all…shape it all… manifest it all.  I know that I am responsible for it all – in my life and in the lives of all that I call on to my holodeck.  

In that moment, it is no longer about fixing the world I’ve got – it’s about creating the world I desire.  

So… young offenders?  Their roots are in the Androgynous Baby, Nested Living Systems forces of their lives.  In that, we’ll also find the roots of both the problem and the solution.   

It’s not easy to do – and it’s not tough to figure out.  The solution begins with me.  

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You’ll find information about the Androgynous Baby and Nested Living Systems in Fully Alive (book), Pathways to Personal Power (CD”S) and the new multi-CD set on Decloaking and Living Authentically; and you’ll find the Declaration of Evolution by Intention on the Home page of www.WEL-Systems.com in the column on the left (printable version)