On "Creating" Culture

Ritual, attention, and the efficacy of futility

The second in the conversation series with me and Benjamin Life. It’s quite long and might get truncated by your email server. In that case, click on the title to read online.

Benjamin Life  

The seed for this conversation was: once we have cohered in islands of sanity, how do we create healthy cultures that are not an appropriation of intact, high-context cultures that those of us who feel like spiritual orphans are learning from? How do we move from talking about the thing to actually practicing the thing? And how do we deal with the real grief of not having an intact culture and needing to create it?

Charles Eisenstein  

I want to start by questioning the premise of the question that you're raising. The whole enterprise of creating a culture assumes that culture is something that one can deliberately create. It puts one in the creator’s seat, as if in front of a canvas with a brush and palette, painting something according to one’s design. But I think that it's much more the case that culture creates us than we create culture. 

It's not that we have no creative input into culture, but whatever we create as individuals and communities is a lot smaller than culture. It feeds into culture. But our creative scope just isn't that large. So all of our attempts to create culture are themselves aspects of the emerging culture, within it not above it. And the cultural elements that people are consciously trying to create may feed back in perverse ways, or very unpredictable ways, into the culture that actually emerges. It could be that the reaction against something is a lot more powerful than the thing itself, as far as the culture that emerges in 50 or 100 years. 

I'm not here just wanting to critique assumptions, but to clear away faulty assumptions so that we're not attempting something that we can't actually do, so that we can devote our energies toward something actually useful.

Benjamin Life  

I think the impulse, for me at least, comes from this feeling of stuckness. There's a default culture from which we're very obviously, gradually withdrawing our participation, our consent, and our alignment. We’re deprogramming a lot of aspects of the way in which that culture has created us, how we relate to each other and to ourselves. But then there's a reconstructive move that's trying to reassemble the world through a new story. And it's such a bizarre ontological trap to find yourself in. You're trying to exit a matrix into something that is yet to be born. But in order to exit, you need to exit into something. And so how do you navigate that process to actually move yourself into a coherent culture that isn't just a repackaging or fetishizing of indigenous culture or a subtly reconditioned version of the culture you're leaving?

Charles Eisenstein  

What we were born into, what we might call modern culture (and some might not even call it a culture) is definitely at a transition point. The myths of that culture seem unbelievable. They're no longer compelling. And we have begun to step outside them and see them as delusions, as ideologies, as stories, as myths, rather than as simply reality itself. 

As we do that, we see their bankruptcy, we see their destructiveness, so naturally, our impulse is to replace them with better stories. But that conscious attempt already starts with implicit stories that are becoming obsolete. 

It's not like at one point, we decide the story of “God created the world” isn't working for us anymore, so let's make up a new story: “I know, how about atoms and void, and forces like gravity. What do you think, Benjamin? We should design a good one. Or maybe something else would be better. But let’s make sure it’s not cultural appropriation.” That's not how a mythology is formed. It’s not deliberate like that.

What's going on today is that new stories, new mythologies, new ideologies are sneaking up on us. We don't even recognize them because they're so immersive. And one of those might be the story that we have to find new stories. Another might be the whole discourse of cultural appropriation. It's the things that seem unquestionable that are the foundation of a new culture. They seem like reality itself. And the same thing is true of rituals.

We see the phoniness of the rituals that we've inherited. They seem empty. So we want to create new rituals. Now how do we do that? Well, we can copy rituals from Africa or from Peru, or from the Lakota. But not only is that disrespectful, it's actually futile. You can't extract something from its cultural and geographic and linguistic context and make it work somewhere else because it then becomes just a “ritual” in quotes. 

In my 20s, I spent time in Taiwan, and I got to see actual rituals, folk Taoism, folk Taoist rituals. The people weren't like, “Okay, we're gonna do a ritual now.” What they were doing was part of a whole worldview, a whole understanding of “We have to set off these firecrackers, otherwise, the ghosts are going to inhabit our new business. We have to parade the temple Gods through the streets so that we will have good luck.” It was just as serious as people today going through the ritual of hand washing to protect themselves from invisible spirits that they call viruses. People in our society don't think of that as a ritual because it makes sense in their reality.

So anything that we see as a ritual, the intention to make a ritual for our gathering, the idea of trying to invoke the four directions but in a way that it's not culturally appropriating, any of these things that fit into the mind’s category of ritual, are already not authentic rituals. Rituals are a sequence of symbolic actions that feel more real than other actions. They feel more real, not less real. And that means that they have to be part of a whole reality context. They should be part of a whole worldview.

And so, we're facing a time where we're losing faith in what we thought was real, in the meanings we made about the world. We're losing faith in our stories. Now finally, we’re realizing, “Oh, those were just stories, those didn't really work. We were just washing our hands to comfort ourselves. We were signing these documents to feel safe.” That’s another ritual that is starting to become obsolete. It used to be a matter of great gravity to sign something, to put your sacred mark on an agreement. And now, multiple times a day, we click, “I agree.” It's become more and more obviously a “ritual.” And that means that the whole system of law, which is a system of magic in a way, is also losing its potency. And so just to circle back to your question, what are we going to do? It's not the right question: what are we going to do to replace that? As if we can design something and make ourselves believe in it. 

To really develop a new culture, we have to clear away the obsolete beliefs and we see what's left. And we discover the beliefs that we see not as beliefs really, but as reality, the new perceptions that we have, and the new ways of making sense that feel natural to us. That's the beginning of a new culture. It's where we feel at home. And I would say that that is the essence of culture. It's where we feel at home. You used the word orphaned, spiritual orphans. We don't feel at home in the stories we grew up in. We don't feel at home in the substitutes and imitations that we've imported from other cultures. We don't feel at home. So whatever the new culture is, it's not something that we design. That’s already wrong. If you're designing it, it's not a culture. It's still like, well, I designed this. It's not reality itself. It's just something I said, but what will emerge through getting honest with ourselves and accepting what is resonant with who we are becoming as we exit the state of being that corresponds to the old culture. That's how the new culture emerges. Does that make sense?

Benjamin Life  

It does. It just reinforced though, for me, how challenging it is to do that, when the tool that is deconstructing the stories that are no longer resonant is the same tool that we're then trying to use to create new stories. But then we've already created an abstraction of the idea of the story. So there's always going to be this ironic distance between ourselves and the new story that we create. And then we're enacting this performance of the ritual, this performance of the new culture, as opposed to actually doing it. But it seems inevitable that we would have to go through some aspect of that process. And it feels like a sort of maturation point to reach a place of deconstruction having been so complete that we're now realizing that even the tools that we use to break ourselves out of that culture are not sufficient to actually enact a new one.

Credit: Cameron Smith

Charles Eisenstein  

The deconstruction has to reach the point where we begin to see things that we otherwise could not see. And if they occur to us is real, they can be elements of a new culture. It brings to mind a beautiful speech I heard from the poet David White. He's such an amazing speaker. And he spoke of this Scottish fisherman, this guy living in a very remote island of Scotland where times had not changed that much. And this was many, many years ago. So he was living in a different world. And his entire day was suffused with little prayers. Like there was a prayer for getting up in the morning, a prayer for getting out of bed, a prayer for opening the door for the first time, a prayer for opening the window, for crossing the threshold, for getting in your boat. There was a prayer for breaking bread. Every significant act of the day was accompanied by a prayer. And it certainly wasn't coming from a place of, “Well, reality’s gotten really meaningless so we better make some rituals and prayers to bring meaning back into life.” It was that he was in actual communion with all kinds of spirits, presences that were real to him. When they're real to you, of course you talk to them. If you see that they have power and influence over your life, just like you take an umbrella out if it's raining, you do the things that are going to smooth the relationship. So I think that there are stirrings of these new perceptions and new relationships that have been on the margins for a long time. But with the disintegration of the legacy reality/story, they're becoming normalized now. 

The first example that comes to mind are the worlds of alternative medicine. 30 years ago, the stories from this world were met with incredulity. People had trouble believing them. I had trouble believing despite desperately wanting to believe them. But there was part of me that still believed that it couldn't really happen. But now those stories have gained enough currency that you can pretty much live in that reality entirely. And the reality of modern medicine and the hospital begins to fade away a little bit. This is how I live my life. It's still a world that's forming, but I just don't go to conventional medicine. My first, second, and third line of response to any physical condition I have is chiropractors, energy workers, herbalists, etc. The vocabulary, the conceptual vocabulary of that collection of adjacent realities generates what from one perspective might look like rituals. I'm still taking these pills and putting them in my mouth. That's obviously a ritual, taking these magic tablets with the superstitious belief that that's going to make my teeth feel better or give me more energy or something. It’s absolute, out-and-out superstition. There's part of me that recognizes that. But there's also a part of me that says, “These two herbs are traditionally used in Tibetan medicine to…  and these extracts from bovine testicals will… “ Whatever supplements I'm taking, I have reasons why I believe that they're going to work. So it's not just a ritual to me.

Here's another thing. People have these gatherings and they're wanting to address the vacuum of culture that's left by the collapse of the modern world and the desperate longing to find home again. So they try to create rituals and ceremonies which, on some level, don't feel that real. Usually you walk away from them and that experience is just disjointed from the rest of life. But I don't want to condemn such things.

On the one hand, they are a cry for help. They're a cry for home, and home will reach out to find us in response to that cry. Home will find us just as much as we will find home. And you can look at those gatherings from another lens and see it as a bunch of people telling stories about how to be together. So the futility and the storytelling are themselves part of the emergence of a culture.

People have done much stranger things than that, much stranger things than gathering in rituals that they don't really believe in. It's almost like the act of ritual making is the ritual. The attempt at ritual is the ritual.

Benjamin Life  

It’s a story that we need new rituals. There's such a sweet, innocent and furtive  grasping of a new culture, even in it not being the thing we’re grasping toward. There's an engineered feeling to it. And yet, I feel like it's worth doing, even if it's not the thing that it's trying to be because there's an opening, a proto-culture, or a seed of a story that we haven't yet quite believed.

Charles Eisenstein  

In a way, all these attempts to design the next culture, they are very much the old culture.

The idea of designing a culture. What other human beings have thought in those terms besides the modern?

I mean, Plato, actually. But he's the forebear of modernity, who talked about designing a society.

It's the idea that reality can be designed. We can design things within reality. Of course, we design things all the time. Design is not a dumb concept. But the idea that there are no limits to what we can design, that everything can be brought under the umbrella of design, and that that represents human progress, is one of the defining myths of modernity. It's the myth of conquest. And extending that mentality to spiritual or cultural realms is an extension of it. It's not an overturning of it. It's more of the same. And a lot of people have an understanding of this, and they're like, “Okay, we're gonna let emergence come into it, we're gonna let wildness come into it.” There comes a point, a transition point, a phase transition, where you're no longer trying to hold or contain the wildness or the emergence. “Okay, now we're going to do open space for two hours. And then we're going to get back to the program.” But when the wildness takes over, you lose control.

When you try to plan the wildness, it takes on a performative aspect. That’s not a bad thing, I suppose, but at some point, we have to surrender to the intelligence that actually does design things.

Benjamin Life  

What you were saying did not land for me until you said that last sentence, because every indigenous ritual that I've ever participated in has been highly structured. And that structure has made a lot of sense. I've immersed myself in those contexts, with Sun Dance being the most powerful example of this. Every act, from the procession, to cutting down the tree, to the process of the community carrying the tree back to the arbor, to the process of the women placing the prayer ties on it, to the process of raising the tree, to the process of each round of the dance, each one of those components is ritually significant, very predetermined, and there's no emergence whatsoever other than maybe the endogenous prayers themselves that are being offered, but the structure of the ritual is very intact and precise. And it's very literal. Every ritual action is corresponding to an aspect of natural law that is reified through the enactment of the ritual. And so that's what I heard at the very end of what you said is that actually, the wildness leads us to a structure that is the imminent structure of reality.

Charles Eisenstein  

I wasn't trying to advocate that wildness and loss of control be the essential ingredient in any ritual. It's quite the opposite. What you're saying is true. And it's true of the legacy rituals of our own culture, the real rituals, such as legal proceedings, and medical procedures, where, just like you describe, everything has to be done exactly right. And if not, you anger the spirits and terrible things will happen. What I'm talking about is the process of formation of new rituals. You can't extract them from their context and import them. You can't just descend into chaos either. But necessarily, there has to be a moment of real chaos after the dissolving of the old set of rituals. You cannot jump straight into new stories, new mythologies, new rituals. There has to be pandemonium. There has to be a dissolution of all the meanings. The old story has to die before the new one can be born. And there's always a place of latency, the space between stories.

Benjamin Life  

You call it the fertile ground of bewilderment in one of your other lectures.

Charles Eisenstein  

That's right. We hold on to more and more desperate versions of the existing story that may be disguised versions of it. They may seem like a new story. But at some point, you have to let go of control. And that's not a general principle of devising rituals. That's the principle of the transition in mythology.

Benjamin Life  

Have you ever seen this done well? Have you ever have you had an experience where you felt like that process occurred and something happened?

Charles Eisenstein  

It comes in spite of your efforts to do it well. It's not something that we can do. It’s something that happens to us. And the only doing for us is that moment of realization and of surrender. I surrender into not knowing. Trying to make that a formula is fake. In fact, our desperate attempts to cling on as long as possible are themselves an essential part of the process. So therefore, our efforts to make this into a “how do we” themselves are part of the clinging.

You have to let go of that question. How do we do this? Where does that “how?” come from? Why do we ask how? What are the instructions? There's a subtle lack of trust in that question. We don't have to know how.

And there's a paradox here that knowing that we don't have to know how is helpful. That's part of the “how.” Knowing that you don't have to know how, is how.

Life knows what to do. All of the things that we might categorize as a mistake, all these futile attempts to make a new culture, those aren't even mistakes. The mistakes are not mistakes. They won’t achieve what they intend to achieve, but they are part of the process of that thing that we yearn for, that we call for, coming to us, moving through us, that we do not know how to achieve. I wonder if this is all way too abstract for Substack? It's getting very mystical.

Benjamin Life  

I think it's instructive. I think it's useful, even if it's just useful for me. I really appreciate it because I definitely need to hear that more.

Charles Eisenstein  

Yeah, we're making things a little too hard for ourselves. And I think in general, we're making the transition process too hard for ourselves. It's like a baby being born. Imagine you’re a baby being born. “Okay, what do I have to do?” A tremendous process is underway, you’re being ejected from the womb, your whole world is falling apart, you’re getting pushed and stretched and squeezed. What's going on here? Tell me, what do I do? How do I make this happen? How do I make this work? I can't just react, right? I need to do something.”

It may seem, from the infant's point of view, that he's achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn't have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.

Benjamin Life  

Is it almost like our experience of longing for a new culture is us experiencing the contractions. I think that's how it would relate to this metaphor. Because it feels so visceral. I feel a visceral desire to experience a culture that is different than the one we have.

Charles Eisenstein  

The contractions are the alienation, the anger, the betrayal, the grief at being born into a world that we don't feel at home in. All of that is part of the response of our life force to this world. The alienation and the striving, the despair and the hope, the anger, the grief, those moments of revelation of joy when you actually do experience a little bit of the home that you've been looking for. All of that are the contractions and the motions of that baby being born. And, multiply that times millions and millions of people. Eventually we we get to these moments where the situation gets so intense that we're just trying to survive these struggles. People are struggling. It's the sum total of these struggles that creates a new culture.

Benjamin Life  

One of the things that's so non dual and paradoxical about Taoism is “wuwei,” which technically means unforced action for anyone who's listening to this. The whole idea of action, to me, is so hard to disambiguate from force. It feels I have to bring my will in order to do something. But to be in unforced action is not coming from the same place. And it's not coming from the desire transform the world into some ego-identified mental image of how it should be. It's more allowing the way of the Tao to be infused into my choicefulness and my agency. I'm trying to resolve what seems like a paradox here. If we're just as baby being pushed through these contractions, where does choice reside? And where does action reside in that frame?

Charles Eisenstein  

Our responses to the physical and psychic pressures that bear upon us depend on what we allow ourselves to feel, in other words, what we pay attention to. That's actually where the choice lies. If you are able to ignore the world and blot out from your experience certain conditions of the world, then your natural response, the response of your body will be different. It depends on what you pay attention to. Ultimately, that's the only choice that we have.

You will live a very different life if you are able to not pay attention to the ecological and social ruin of the world. But ultimately, that ignorance will hurt more and more. Life will feel fake. It'll feel like you're not you. And you'll feel more and more like you're living somebody else's life. You can direct your attention away with the aid of stimulants of various kinds, addictive stimulants, which could be depressants, anything that can hold your attention away from what's really calling your attention. You can do that for an indefinitely long period of time until you make the choice that was inevitable all along. The choice is to pay attention to that which has been calling your attention more and more loudly. 

It is a paradox. The duration before your inevitable choice could be infinite. How is it still inevitable if it could be infinite? There's the paradox. But the effort at self denial becomes greater and greater. The pain of that becomes greater and greater. And therefore the need to intensify the denial becomes greater and greater. That's called hell. There's no escape from it on its own terms. The release from hell is what I was talking about before. There’s a step into chaos, into not knowing. The exit from Hell is always a step into the unknown, a release of control. 

It's like stepping off a ledge and you don't know if the bottom is six inches or 600 feet beneath you. When you land in the water, you realize that there was never actually any danger. But you cannot know that beforehand. In fact, it is necessary that it seem dangerous before you take the step into the unknown. And in a sense, it is dangerous. Because the unfamiliar world corresponds to unfamiliar parts of yourself. In other words, you will change. Change is a form of death. There's a letting go. You get to decide when you're ready to let go. And you will not be punished for holding on longer or shorter than somebody might believe you should. The world is not a test. Your power to create through attention is infinite. It's a choice, a pure choice. Who shall I become?

Benjamin Life  

Don't you think that the collapse of the biosphere is some degree of a test though? It's testing the limits of how long that denial can occur before a scale of destruction that we've never experienced before occurs.

Charles Eisenstein  

Nope. If that were the case, we’d have already changed. We're already deep, deep into a level of destruction that is unprecedented. And we just have gotten used to it.

I was remembering how many butterflies there were as a kid. There's way, way less now.

In a lot of places, the insect populations are 10% or 20% of what they were, and the same for many other animals and plants. So how big a collapse of the biosphere do you need? Is 80% not enough? And if it's not enough, then why do you think another 80% collapse or another 80% after that will be enough? I could see a future where everybody is totally used to being in air conditioning all the time. In fact, it's already happening. Now imagine if you had said 100 years ago, we are creating a future in which you will not be able to go outside for four or five months of the year for more than a minute. Would you put up with that? So no, the choice will never be taken from us. We'll always have the choice of directing our attention to the cry of life and its desire to live. And do we let that in? Do we let in the pain that life feels at its diminishment? And the joy it feels at its fulfillment? Because when we do, when we pay attention to that, then the natural choices, the natural responses of our living bodies and our divine souls will change. You take in new information through the power of attention and it changes you as an automatic chooser. So that's the answer to the how question if there is indeed a how.

Without a change of attention, merely using your willpower to try to be a better person will not work. Because it doesn't have its engine, the engine of truth. When you take something in, attention is the process by which you incorporate other into self.

If I pay attention to you right now, something of you enters me. And forever after my navigation of the world, my response to the world includes something of you that has entered into me. So it's an act of self creation, to pay attention to another being. And usually, it's a very subtle influence. But spend even a day away from screens, away from right angles, in nature, and give real attention to it, not listening to your Walkman, your iPod, whatever it's called these days, you're just walking, not entertained in your thoughts, but you're actually present. Then what you’ve attended to becomes you. This happens to me when I pick berries because I really pay attention, and then an hour later, I close my eyes, and I see the berry bush. With no effort of visualization, it’s imprinted into me. That is an act of self creation. If you pay attention to the right thing, it can enter your body as medicine. There are whole bodies of technology that take advantage of this principle. If you pay attention to the right mandala, to the right plant, to the right herb, to the right image, it changes you. Because what you pay attention to becomes you. Something of it becomes you. And then your reactions to all kinds of situations will be different.

That's what makes the new rituals feel real. They’re not just rituals, because they are your response to the world based on new knowledge. So they seem rational. They don't seem like rituals. If you develop your sensitivity and your attention and you start to perceive nature spirits all around you, then you're going to act as if there were nature spirits all around you. And you won't have to have some Lakota guy come and tell you that there's nature spirits all around you, and you pretend to believe it to make yourself look good in his eyes. You won't need to do that. And you'll know exactly what to do, over time, as you become more friendly with the spirits, more attuned to them.

Benjamin Life  

It reminds me of vision quest. It reminds me of dieting a particular plant. It reminds me of even just hanging out with a baby. There's a syntax of communication that when you place your attention on it, it’s completely pre-verbal, but you can observe, the baby is tired, the baby is hungry, the baby is scared of the loud noise that it's experiencing. And you don't need the baby to tell you that. There's a syntax of communication. Simply the relationship created by the attention will convey that syntax in a pre-linguistic form of communication.

Charles Eisenstein  

That's exactly right. And even if I'm paying attention to you, I can pay attention to different aspects of you. I can pay attention to the semantic content of your words, or I can pay attention to your voice. When I tune into your voice, that I learned things about you, I understand you in a way that I wouldn't just from your words or if I look at your face.

Instead of striving, the yearning for a new culture has to source down to this level. As I said before, it's really a yearning for home.

And although it sounds a bit too much of a cliche to say it, home is within.

We have to learn to recognize simply the truth of our perceptions. Home is to be in the world here, actually in the world, and not in a bunch of concepts about the world in which we've become lost. Because we actually are home. Physically, we're embodied here. We've just been distracted from it a lot.

It is the power of attention that ultimately rebuilds community, rebuilds village. But we're so scattered. We're so atomized right now that we really have to start from the basics. And I guess, if there's any takeaway from this conversation, it would be to really take ownership of your power of attention. And you can do that as an experiment to really take responsibility for that power. When you're with somebody, the next person you're with, just see what happens when you give them your full attention. And you experiment with “Where do I put my attention?” What am I really listening to when they're talking? In what ways am I tuning them out? What ways am I filtering their presence through my ideas about them? And where am I going to put my attention right now?

It's not that putting your attention to one place rather than another is better or worse, but it is a creative act. And so, if you don't feel at home, then maybe it's time to direct your attention differently.