I often hear you say “we live in a very low culture”. What do you mean?

Question

I often hear you say “we live in a very low culture”. What do you mean?

Nukunu

Yes it is a low culture – look how we treat each other! Our science is very developed, but we know nothing about our deeper inner life.

Man is a social being. Our consciousness is more or less formed by the society we live in. Most people in our culture live in words, labels and concepts that relate to the state of consciousness of our culture. To be considered wise in our society is to have the ability to accumulate a lot of words. Our universities are places where we learn words, but nothing about our deeper self.

Very few people know who they are behind all the words. It is very difficult to be filled with contentment in our culture, since everyone is trying to live by getting something from outside their self.

Our life is dualistic, which means that it is based on separation.

Our life is dualistic, which means that it is based on separation. We are separated from our experiences; we live in the lonely ego-mind separated from others. When we live in this way we try to find happiness by grasping and manipulating the world we are separate from.

But there is another way of living; instead of living outside in – trying to get something from what we believe is outside us; we can live inside out to realise that in reality all experiences are a function of our own true essence. Loneliness and separation are taken away and we are brought in to oneness with everything. If we know who we are we cannot torture and kill our fellow human being!

Realising who we truly are is a total shift in perspective – it is the end of the world as we know it; a total revolution in our consciousness. This is very difficult to bring about and sustain alone. Should it somehow happen to you and you start talking about it to your family, friends and other people who live in the accepted “collective hypnosis“ that we call “normal”, they will not be able to understand you, and even worse, they may think you have gone crazy!

One of my great teachers is Osho Rajneesh (also called Bhagwan in the early days). As a boy he was taken by his mother to the doctor, because he could often disappear inside himself for hours. The doctor examined the boy and after a while he looked at the mother and said, “Mata Ji (honoured mother) your son is coming home!” The doctor proclaimed that the boy was on the way to self-realisation! Can you imagine something like this happening in our modern Western culture? No! And today it is also disappearing in India.

I was so lucky to come in contact with the old high culture in India while it still was alive. I came to Poona in 1979 to meet my first master – Osho. Learning about the high culture that preceded the one which we are living in now really changed my life. At that time I had almost finished my Master’s degree in Cultural Sociology at the University of Copenhagen and I wrote a paper called, “The Ways of Spiritual Liberation in the East”. The examiner gave me the highest mark because I wrote about the subject with rare insight. Of course I was not only quoting book-learned scientists in the paper. By then I had already meditated for some years, so my writing was also based on personal experience.

Our modern society – more or less the whole world – is standing on its head and we must come back and stand on our feet! We must be grounded in our innermost being; otherwise life will be as Shakespeare described: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”