Culture Blindness

Old Man

We have words for the obvious like color blindness for the fact that one person cannot perceive colors. If we all had no means to perceive colors in our environment, would we have a term for it? How could we?

What if the majority of humans were actually colorblind and perceiving colors was a mutation due to the activation of genes, which were dormant and merely inactivated in the majority of people? What then would be looked at as being “normal”?
How could the one, who perceives colors, explain the phenomenon of “color” to the majority of colorblind humans? How high are the chances that he may make himself understood?

Would a majority, which cannot perceive colors, have any interest in getting to know the phenomenon “color”, when all what they have seen so far is the world in their own shades and therefore they are fine.

By logic there would have to be an advantage for humans in perceiving colors for it to be of interest. What if perceiving colors became a matter of survival like being able to make out that bright red saber tooth monster long before the rest of the colorblind horde? Or, more modern: “the advantage consisted in a higher quality of life”.
Furthermore premises would require a desire, a readiness, and willingness on the part of those, which are so far colorblind, to wanting to be able to perceive colors.

Color blindness is something we are familiar with or at least able to imagine how it could affect somebody.

Yet what about “culture blindness”, a phenomenon rarely described so far, as not truly identified as such. Can we imagine how deeply culture blindness has affected us to this day as a whole, as “humankind” over a long period of time, when we are not yet even aware of how “culture seeing” is like?

What about our capacity to discern cultural patterns in our environment? Are we ready and willing to identify the cultural filters through which the world, “our” world after all, comes to us? Are we ready to put down those cultural glasses through which we look at the world, again, “our” world and perceive and interpret and judge from there? Are we ready to see how culture blind we are?

I do not ask for the abolition of cultures in general or for the equalization of cultures on this planet.

I ask for an individual readiness and willingness to open one’s eyes to the phenomenon of culture blindness within every human being within every culture, regardless of his culture, race, creed or sex.

The most refreshing way to look at this matter, is to listen to the following story, which my Native friend Mario Blackwolf likes to tell:

Old Man and Old Woman

We are Old Man and we are Old Woman, both, within us. They are our inner male and female, representations of our animus and anima. They, too, are representations of our male, mental aspect and of our female, inner knowing, the aspect of “wisdom”.
They both live within us, together, in lesser or greater harmony.
Our civilization yet has caused a deep disturbance of this harmony. As much as we can feel this disharmony, we are unable to lay our finger on the cause of it due to our “culture blindness”.

Old Man stands for our tendency to believe what we think, thus falling prey to our own illusions.
This is a remarkable aspect of our modern days’ civilizations all across the planet, an aspect we cannot limit to the Western culture only. We have come to live in illusions created by ourselves, created so tangibly that we think they are the one and only existing reality, be it religious belief systems, social structures, political theories, history or science, just to name a few.

We have become objects among objects in a material world. So deeply have we subjected ourselves to the material world that we believe our existence will end in the moment we lose all our acquisitions and objects we have built and gathered around us, as much as we believe, our existence will end in the moment we leave our physical body. Our subjection to the material world is so strong,
This in my understanding is “The Fall from Grace”, the “Original Sin”, the fall into the material world, mentioned in many old prophecies and scriptures, not just in the bible. We assume that on a moral level the fall from grace means to pursue moneymaking and the acquisition of material goods. Yet the fall from grace is more deeply: It is the drowning in the physical world, the getting lost in substance and matter, where the view of the essential, the essence is lost and only the outer appearance, the “Gestalt” is accounted for.

The story of Old Man and Old Woman is known by the Native people of this continent and reflects their culture, a “Native” culture in which the female is respected and honored for her innate wisdom. In many tribes the women in their Council of the Grandmothers or Circle of Women spoke the final word when it came to making decisions on matters that concerned the tribe as a whole. As Kahn Tinehta Horn, a Mohawk elder put it: “If we as women refused to mend or prepare the moccasins for the men, who intended to go to war, they had to stay home!”

Over thousands of years we have created several major world religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianism, Buddhism, Islam to name the largest ones. We have created a linear history pointing out events in a certain order in which they are important to us – mainly wars, conquests and colonializations, we call it “politics”, and we have come to believe, that history took place exactly in this order and with this focus.

Where can we find harmony and balance in a modern world?

What has our culture to offer in this respect? Have we almost on a global scale come to the point, where both men and women desperately try to catch reflections in the water together or in competition with each other? Have the women in our culture lost touch with their inner Old Woman, just as the men have done?

I want to speak on non-native cultures, yet how should I call them? Is “civilized cultures” an acceptable word? Although, I have to admit, that native cultures seem to me to have been and in their essence still are more civilized than the non-native cultures.

How much longer will we, men and women, sacrifice Old Woman, our wisdom, and continue to catch “apples in the river”, just because everybody else is doing it as part of a larger “meta culture”? How much longer will we delegate our powers to people, men and women, who are relentlessly trying to catch “apples in the river”?
How can we know whether we face reflections or true apples, when we look at both with eyes stricken by “culture blindness”?

How can I express my thoughts and feelings in a language that reflects a culture in which “Old Man” has the saying?

We talk about an explicit (readily observable), and implicit (inherent in the nature of something) order of things these days. Patriarch cultures are based on “phenomenology”, they describe the outer appearance of things and their relationships with each other, almost like mathematical equations and forget that their perception and interpretation is conditioned by their culture. In matriarchal cultures, like the ones, that existed on this continent, before the arrival of the “White Man”, the focus laid on the implicit order of things. People had an awareness of the inner nature of life and lived according to it.

The mainstream American culture today lives by the motto: “Name it and claim it!” – Name something and it will become its reality. This has a long history: many of the people who came here called those who lived here “savages” and so they had to be savages, “my projection is what you are and there is no way for you to prove the contrary to me”. “If you don’t belief in the God, in which I belief and follow my ways of how to worship “him”, than you don’t believe in God, you are not a religious person and therefore not spiritual.” “If you eat meat and don’t wrap yourself up in a pretzel to meditate, then you are not a spiritual person.”


In our modern days in Western culture people can accept easily, that ideas of love, romance and relationship, as much as glory and fame, wealth and power fall under the category of “reflections”. Yet when it comes to subjects as “solid” as history, religion, philosophy, and science, people start turning their backs to what they think are “non-sense” discussions.

Yet seeing the world through my eyes as a spiritual healer with the background of a medical doctor I have no choice, but to sort these subjects into the category “reflections”. They are reflections of a culture, projected back onto “life” by the representatives of that culture and then believed to be essential to life.

Moreover, they are reflections of a culture, which claims a cultural monopoly for itself. Consequences are, that no other culture can fit the criteria as put forth by the monopolizing culture, when it comes e.g. to history or science. So we are the only ones, who know history “right” and know how to proof whether something is scientific or not.

Few other cultures can come up with religions, which fit an as well monopolized definition of religion; they are welcomed into the circle of “world religions”. Everybody else is “pagan”, an equivalent to “savage”, which means “wild” and “uncultivated”, and is by logic endangering to our culture. They therefore need to be “cultivated”, at other times called “civilized”. The Latin civilis,-e became civil, befitting a citizen, who is defined as a member of a country by birth or by law.

A native person to this day faces a serious Catch 22 and so do those who have realized the evident errors in Western and other cultures: They are forced by a dominant monopolizing culture to follow the “fall from grace”, to become a citizen of their country and hence their culture. They are forced into falling away from nature and her inherent laws and order. They are forced to live in permanent contradiction to their inherent heartfelt understanding of life, that everything has “soul”. Denied the understanding that pantheism is monotheism as all is one, God is everything and everything is God.

“Only when you discipline your body and your mind and exercise contemplation will you be able to acquire a certain degree of spirituality!” Remember: “Flesh is weak!” (Christianism) and “The mind is distractive! We need to contemplate on the activities of the mind!”(Buddhism). Both religions state, that the world is full of suffering. These are cultural convictions, too, experienced, played back and strongly manifested, in my opinion. All world religions defined as such these days, have their origin in patriarch cultures. Can we contemplate on this? Can we contemplate on contemplation?

“Spirituality is like the wind; religion tries to contain the wind. The wind cannot be contained”. I quote my friend Mario Blackwolf again. Can we give the responsibility for spiritual fulfillment, awareness, health of body and mind back to the individual? This was custom among the people, who lived on this continent long before us.

I here the voice of another Native friend of mine in my head: “Humanity is standing at a crossroads.” We do, but we cannot cross this road as a mass movement. This road can only be crossed one by one, within every human being.

Therefore I ask for the readiness and willingness of the individual fellow human being to face culture blindness. The willingness to take responsibility in whatever we do and give expression to, to take one step back and look at ourselves through the eyes of “Old Woman”, through the eyes of the ones who lived here long before us, through the eyes of our own indigenous selves, that we carry deep down within us and through the eyes of the children, who are around us and within us.

I ask for an individual readiness to listen to one’s inner truth and to live one’s reality according to that inner truth. Too many of us have perfected to twist and turn their inner truth to fit the cultural reality to which they have been exposed to as a means of survival, sacrificing their mental and/or physical health by doing so.

“Search life! Go out, get lost and find your Self”, is what I would tell everybody, who asks me for advice, “Read! But don’t forget to get your nose off the books, go out, change the Petri dish in which you have bathed, befriend people from other cultures, talk to a stranger, chat with an immigrant. Be cautious, listen to your inner voice, be critical whenever you meet people, stranger or not, but don’t be paranoid and live behind the shutters of your sole and only culture!”

For me studying medicine was the way to truly get in touch with life itself in our culture. Where else, today, are you face to face with a human being, who is psychologically and physically naked? Where else are you exposed to life from birth to death, all comedies and tragedies in between included?

I surely know, this is a path, only few people take, but I feel the need to explain, where I drew my experience. How I came to my convictions and conclusions derived from the path that I have walked, my own healing path, out of the dis-ease I had found myself in, out of the de-rangement, that I experienced so strongly at moments in my life, the shared life stories and the dis-ease that I sense within people that have come to see me, within people around me and out there in the world.

Where has “life” gone in our culture? Where has the love for “life” gone?
How many children are born at home today “into the lap of their families”? How many people have had the experience of welcoming a child into the world under completely natural conditions? How many old and/or sick people are taken care of by their families or friends in their personal environment? How many people are able to take care of their beloved ones, who are sick? How many people die these days surrounded by their friends or relatives at home? How many people have held hands with someone, the moment this person passed on?

Birth and Death are no longer integral aspects of our culture, nor are rites and ceremonies of transitions in our lives.

“Life” has been banned from our culture into the shadow corners, where nobody wants to visit for long and “specialists” take care of everything.

Our culture has turned life into concepts and ideas, and “behold!” if life doesn’t fit them! We have mentally institutionalized life and poured our beliefs about life into concrete monuments. Everybody, who tries to tear those down and free life from its “institutions”, intimidates us forcibly. Most of all, Mother Nature herself seems to be our greatest enemy today. “Life”, is felt as something threatening to us, and therefore needs to be shut away and controlled by all means.

What will eventually happen to a culture, which is based on concepts and ideologies, may they be of political, religious or philosophical nature? Will that kind of culture be swept away by life?

Truth is, every culture consists of individual human beings and the choices every single human being makes determine the fate of that culture.

Karen von Merveldt-Guevara, MD
Copyright - October 2009

True Healing

Healed

Just as much as the absence of war does not mean “peace”, does the absence of disease mean, “to be healed”. There is more to being “whole” than not being sick.
There is more to healing than to make the symptoms of diseases disappear. “Healing” is more than “making healthy”. “To heal” means to help somebody to become “whole”.

Basically, as human beings, we all experience limitations of our “Selves”, simply by us being humans. Our personality and the way we experience our parents, most of all our mother, already during pregnancy and birth, are factors, which condition our lives.

More or less traumatizing experiences during our childhood, and the most common measures of education and socialization contribute other factors that shape the way of how we see the world.
We develop behavior patterns to get along with this world and to survive in that world. These behavior patterns may hinder us to different extents in our later lives to be truly our selves. How deeply we are affected by this depends entirely on our own feeling and can only be judged by us. We may suffer from a chronic or acute “Not-being-myself-cold”; we may get sick from a “Not-being-myself-flu”, or die from “Not-being-myself”.

To make our search for sense be the reason for our existence leads us just as much into a dead end road as the flight into any form of religion.

As humans we cannot become “our Selves” as long as we search for our completion outside of ourselves, and as long as we try to fill our inner void with concepts of life, with belief and value systems, or with other people, be it a partner, family or friends, be it an idol, a role model, or a guru. As long as we keep ourselves in that dependency to fill our inner void with knowledge, power, fame, richness, sex, diets, drugs, medicine, supplements, or alcohol, as long as we do this, all our trying to gain “wholeness” is doomed.

We can truly heal, when we are ready to literally jump across our own shadows and look them consciously into their eyes. When we are ready to admit our dependencies and fears to ourselves, ready to look at our thoughts and emotions, ready to carry the responsibility for our world, and ourselves then we are on our healing path.
Then we are ready to gain autonomy from parents, families, or partners, and we are ready to see how we have created all sorts of substitutes for them, such as followers, fans, self-help groups, the church or the state.
Then we can grow into the understanding that we as human beings are born striving for self-realization. It is the desire for the original unity, the being “one” within oneself, which means to be all one and therefore whole, which drives us.

This kind of being alone is a healthy being “all-one”. It is not being lonely, or excluded, or exclusive. It is to be “whole”. In this wholeness everything can be. Everything can be lived and experienced no matter what it is, be it pain, grief, anger, angst or fear, be it passion, desire, joy or happiness.

To be whole and alone is the consequence of realization of unconditional love for life, for “being”. It is to embrace our inner world as much as our outer world, together with the ability to judge without to condemn.
This is only possible from a point in which we can rest within ourselves – which does not mean that we have to be quiet and silent if we have reached this point. To rest within ourselves means to be full of life, filled with complete presence, as we can equally embrace death and life.

Yet, we can only rest within ourselves, when we have made the journey back within, when we have walked back through the circumstances and feelings of the experiences, which conditioned us, when we can release mental and emotional ballast.
The attempt “to go back” soon fails in therapies such as psychoanalysis or discussion therapy, where “analyzing” and “speaking out” intellectualize life. Memorized experiences stay in the head, though they are mentally resolved. They still remain energetically stored in our bodies creating a field of consciousness, an imprint in our energy field. Thought and speech as means to enter the unconscious and to actually remove these imprints lead us sooner or later to the point where the dog bites its own tail. The passage deeper into our unconscious remains denied.

What we need are people who have the gift to help resolve these fields of consciousness with us, people who can bring the conflicts that we carry deep inside of ourselves to our consciousness. Medicine people among some of the still existing tribal cultures are capable of that, and so are a few “Westerners”. People in native cultures have traditionally worked with all energetic bodies of the human being in their “Medicine”.
In our Western culture we find elements of this e.g. in Kinesiology, in the “Hellinger Family Constellation Work”, in the works of Thorwald Dethlefsen and Ruediger Dahlke and in several of the so called “Release Therapies” originating mostly in English speaking countries.
Consciously we need to speak of elements in this context. The Western culture seemingly has not yet rediscovered the direct access to all other bodies through the physical body. Historically we find hints to this type of work in Greek and Egyptian temples.

Is that what keeps us in our Western culture from being able to understand and do this a cultural blockage? The journey back within us is a large aspect of how to become whole. Yet it can only bear fruits if we develop at the same time a keen sense and sensory for the natural order which surrounds us, if we can rediscover nature for us and within us.

The moment we can recognize, that the nature of the human being is divine, that every molecule, every cell and every organ of our body has been designed in the most perfect way, is the moment we can regain the respect for our body and our senses, our bodily existence.
If we can learn again how to love the very nature of this Earth, a nature that shows us in its tiniest details divine beauty, then we can be whole. If we can learn again to love “her” for what “she” is: the element from which we are made, the substance from which we come and to which we will return in our bodily existence, then we can reunite with the source of all from which we once separated ourselves.

To be healed means to understand, that as humans we live to an unfathomable extent behind the veil of our projections cast onto the world around us by our unconscious. Our perception of the world, inside and outside, is filtered by the structures of the culture in which we grow up, that culture’s religion or religious worldview, and is interpreted by the value and honor codex of the society, in which we are raised, and the lived or not lived ideas of “how life should be like” of the families to which we belong.
Our view back onto the world is influenced by projections based on the life experience of our parents and ancestors, based on our earliest childhood experiences, which conditioned our emotions and the way we experience them. This view back onto the world is again based on our inner, psychological image of the world conditioned by society, religion and culture.

To be healed allows recognizing this as a fact in the life of every single human being, to see every single human in the light of his own truth, and to be able to let him be there. Every human being lives in his own world. Every human being is a universe and therefore merely on this planet we can already count as many universes as there are human beings living on it.

To become whole requires of us to realize to which extent we have become victims of our own thinking. It is maybe time to demand the end of all paradigms. Paradigm, a Greek word, after all means “yoke”, that human invention, with which animals mostly oxen were put in front of a cart or other agricultural device. Who wants to have his thinking yoked? And yet philosophies, religions, political worldviews and other theories as part of the history of human thought caused us to lock in our thinking, without our knowledge or against our better judgment!

Isn’t it, that to be whole, is to finally realize, that we have to liberate our thinking from the fetters that we once put on it? Yet, at the same time we have to accord to it the place in our lives and our worlds, which it deserves! This place is not on a throne, not as our Master, not as our reason for existence, but as a tool, kept in honors, used daily and cared for accordingly. It is a tool, which can serve us, but may not dominate us, on the way to our self-realization, a process, which cannot be thought, but has to be lived, in this world and with this world.

This world is all that is here and today. A Beyond is simultaneously a Here, when we have understood, that what we once experienced is still with us. True release and consequently rediscovery of complete unity can only come from our hearts, out of the feeling and with the feeling to love, not “Something” nor “Somebody”, but merely and simply out of love, out of love for ourselves, for our lives and for the world as it is.

Karen von Merveldt-Guevara © 2006