One of my favorite contemporary songs is Dido's, and it's called White Flag. What brings it to mind is, although it talks about human love it is also appropriate for anyone wanting to talk about a greater love. By this I do not mean to denigrate human love, but rather want to ask a question; What is it that you believe so strongly that you would "go down with the ship" and that there would be "no white flag of surrender over your door"? For me it is the idea of a single faith appearing to us as a number of different religions.
Specifically I think the idea of a special religion begins to appear with the acculturation process. About the age of six people have the ability to operationalize their world and this allows for moving beyond living in a world driven by experience into a world driven by representations of the world. Joseph Chilton Pearce writing in Crack in the Cosmic Egg stated: "We interacted with the real world in our first six years or so through transactive movement of the primary processing. Culture, however, is a set of imaginative expectancies. To interact with the world of our culture we had to create the necessary concepts. Cultureal concepts are abstract creations" (p. 29)
Thus, it is the cultural interpretation of how the world acts that allows us to move one step beyond our basic level of interacting with the world and into a world where reality is a consequence of not what really exists, but what we have learned to interpret as real. The sad part of this, as Pearce goes on to demonstrate, is that we are not even aware of our not being in touch with reality, or even ourselves. The concepts we have developed become the vehicle we use to discuss reality with others, and so over time, they also become the vehicles we use to discuss what is real with ourselves. It becomes so strongly rooted that we are unable to distinguish that we are living based on a construct, an abstract concept, rather than what is actual.
The consequence of this for the western minded has become, to paraphrase Karl Jung, we are sick because we have developed a veneer that keeps us from ourselves, from the real root of our sickness. The thicker the veneer, the more distant we are from ourselves. For us this cure must be the movement of the person back to the self, back to communications with the primary processing capability that began to disappear around six years of age. To do this we employ all sorts of intervention techniques: therapy, regressions, psychedelic drugs, etc. In fact, many people have become quite wealthy leading others on journeys aimed at removing the veneer.
Pearce makes the point however, that any attempt we make to modify the acculturated learnings merely impacts another layer of the culture and re-energizes the system. Cosequently, we are not able to change the system by these various attempts that bring us back to the culture and this is what started me thinking about Dido's song. Perhaps if we can identify something in our lives that we hold to be so valuable that we will not surrender it, we can begin the process of cracking the egg of culture. Once the crack has appeared we can slowly widen the crack and see the world for what it is, a culture with specific values and limits, and the impact of the transgressor on the culture.
What is it that you believe so strongly that there will be no white flag above your grave, that is so important to you that you will go down with the ship? For me it is the awareness that faith in something greater than the self drives the crack in the egg, not the interpretation of the various religions.
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