Spiritual Spectrum Dialogues, Part I: Reasoning About Culture

Has my whole internet spirituality jihad been an autie spectrum misunderstanding this whole time?

Have I been saying “words vague, culture specific” to people who are NEUROLOGICALLY “culture vague, words specific”??

This could have saved me so much frustration.

To me, if you ask, “Do you believe in God, yes or no?” I’m like, “That question is ridiculous. Who are you? Where do you come from? Give me some cultural cues, so I can know what language to use to answer you.”

But what if you don’t know cultural cues?

What if you literally don’t perceive cultural cues or know how to internalize them, and so you need to use descriptions — precise ones — and they have to have identical referents for all parties, or else it’s a state of total confusion?

Then I NEED TO BE MORE PRECISE!!!

Before I explain culture precisely, explaining myself depends on a specific experience of reality that I reckon not everyone has had. I know enough people from enough backgrounds who have had it that I feel like everyone can, but I know not everyone has.

Namely this is the experience that consciousness is not individual but rather a co-arising, shared field in which we all partake. That doesn’t mean it all looks and feels exactly the same to everyone, or that everyone responds the same, just that we’re all in the same place, k?

Much of what I’ve gotten into online has been about practices or ways of having and returning to that, and its relative importance (or unimportance!), and I think it has gotten tangled up in the rest of the conversation, so I want to give it as a PREREQUISITE this time.

That is, if you haven’t experienced reality this way, you’re probably not gonna get what I’m talking about or why, and if you’re still on “wait what is this woo bullshit about shared consciousness,” then we need to have a different, totally have-able conversation first.

K. So.

Culture is the most important topic in any conversation with someone else about spirituality — especially if religious cultural layers are involved — because culture is the distributed organ housing each individual person.

Like, think of it as a literal brain if you have to.

If you’re talking to someone about their spirituality, you aren’t just talking to them. You’re talking to the entire conscious network they emerged from, and they almost certainly don’t even know where they learned some of this stuff.

THAT’s what I mean by “culture” itself.

An experience of culture I have had is feeling at home in it, understanding my place in it, relating inside of it with other members of it, and luxuriating in the ease of communication it facilitates and simplifies.

I can imagine what it must be like to never have felt this.

I can imagine it because my cultural experience is that of a tiny minority in my society, so I often — in fact, usually — feel like I’m amidst a foreign culture.

But I also have not always felt it in my own culture! What I haven’t felt, though, is not knowing how to fix that.

So that’s my bias. I have a lot of experience feeling into not fitting in, sensing where the misalignments are, and facilitating more alignments until I am nuzzled back into the cultural fold. This is a great deal of my personal spiritual practice. It’s an enormous privilege.

So. Culture is not a “belief system” or a “world view” or a “philosophy” or some other intellectual superstructure, which I know we have to impose on this conversation eventually, or I’m not fixing the problem. I’m not trying to make us understand it, just show that it’s there.

In fact, I have to get us where we need to go without requiring that anyone EVER understand culture, because understanding culture is a feelings thing, an irrational thing, a PRE-rational thing, because it literally IS the life-world upon which the reasoner reasons.

I feel like we can stop there, when it comes to explaining culture? Like, if I advance the conversation only as far as, “Humans have one more unavoidable, inscrutable layer known as ‘culture’ from which the topography of their conceptual landscape is mapped,” we’re in okay shape?

Cuz like if you’re talking to me, and I said, “God created the universe,” and you go, “Ah, an irrational statement. This human may be experiencing culture. Rather than proceed according to my own definitions, I will ask him what he means according to his culture,” we did it.

(I feel like I should pause here and acknowledge that I could very simply be an autist for whom culture is my Special Thing™. Like, it’s not like this is effortless for me. I struggle all day long, and I overcome it by caring about it so much and trying everything I can.)

(I’m also frequently driven insane by how careless, undisciplined, and unskilled people in my community are at living out our culture together, such that it seems reasonable to assume I am not doing it The Normie Way. Perhaps this foreshadows common ground we will reach here.)

(I also don’t mean to steal valor here. Perhaps it is all, as they say, a Spectrum™.)

Maybe that’s enough to be its own first conversation. I want to encourage a kind of curiosity about what words people use that one might suspect are “culture words,” not “reason words,” leading to a switch to reasoning about, as my friend nobuhojimichaan ' would say, “why one is like this.”

It’s okay for reasoning to be the mode. You don’t have to drop into intuitive feelings mode to relate to a person who’s different from you. I just want to present “because culture” as an endpoint for reasoning, prompting a switch to reasoning about the person in front of you.