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