What is Sustainable Culture?
"To achieve sustainability world-wide, a critical theme is Sustainable Culture. It is increasingly clear that with a culture of sustainability, with an omnipresent paradigm of values cohered by principles of sustainability, and only with that, will human civilization thrive on this Earth. Moving to this new requisite cultural form will require a shift, an evolution of human culture."
Sustainability is a state of organization, at any particular level, that ensures, without discontinuity, an opportunity for evolution, not just now, but well into the future.
This definition gets around very legitimate concerns about how "sustainability" may be mistakenly considered to be the equivalent of "stasis." Evolution is essential for sustainability to be possible well into the future. Sustainability can be considered at a number of different levels, including the individual, a community, an organization, or a planet.
SUSTAINABILITY IN OUR TIME
As at any other time in Human history each of us face spiritual challenges. Collectively, perhaps the stakes are greater, as we see ocean fisheries plummet, arctic ice melt and all the other indicators of profound environmental change. Some fret about the 'axis of evil' while others lament political corruption at the highest level. Yet our ability to worry about greater scale phenomena, with high degrees of precision and detailed information is an indicator of another aspect of our world, of this time. For those of us doing the worrying about 'big stuff', for the most part individual survival is much less of an issue than ever before. Humanity is actually in a special time, a time when more attention can be directed to more fundamental topics. Perhaps never before has such a large part of the population been able to turn to basic spiritual questions. As yoga workshops proliferate throughout the land because the oldest cultural understandings of spiritual truth are now coming to the new world, to the mainstream of the new world, we thus turn to the basic spiritual question:
Fear or Love. Fear and attachment are a mind-based contraction response to challenging situations, to challenging times. Love, acceptance and surrender are the path to personal and societal evolution. It is with Love and compassion that the myth of the "End-time" can be met directly, with a firm resolve to meet our highest potential. This is the core of the subject of sustainability. It is nothing more, or less, than a fundamental spiritual question. Each of us must face it squarely - there is no other way.
For each of us to heal we must face those personal habits that sap our well-being. Addictions to substance, poor life schedule, negative thought patterns - each of us must learn to breathe into relaxation and surrender, to witness the madness of our minds, and let it all go - and then embrace the divine potentiality we all hold. Each life is precious; each blade of grass is priceless beyond measure.
To surrender incarnation while possibly under a misunderstanding about the true nature of spiritual reality is nothing short of personal tragedy.
To surrender the quality of our world because of some misunderstanding based on religious dogma and belief in some end time, or some other idea is nothing short of planetary tragedy.
If you're not sure, then why would you take a foolish risk. If you're not sure, then why would you buy into some mass delusion that depletes the quality of existence here.
Why would you dump poisons on your lawn, accept contaminated food, nuclear technology, or bandying about the term 'war' as a pretext for action.
War is a horrible thing and is no reason for any action. Wars on drugs or terrorism or any other concept or object we don't like are doomed to fail. The fear based reaction of 'going to war' is manifesting the shadow of our fear directly into our actions, and the failure is built in from the very beginning. Going to war on weeds with pernicious poisons, trying to kill off plants which are in fact medicine is thus seen as an approach based in a primitive pattern of thinking. And thus the world and our noosphere are allowed to be contaminated.
We don't have to accept this way. Not in our personal lives, not in our families not in our communities, our forests, our oceans. It is a personal choice, a spiritual decision, a spiritual practice, another way of using the mind. And there is a call to engagement, not from the reactionary activist place of the green vMeme, but from a more considered position, one that selects battles carefully, and also accepts the world as it is, from a place of engaged compassion. Conscious choice will take us there. To a Sustainable Culture mindset, and thus ultimately to a saner world. This is a battle that will be won one consciousness at a time. Collectively we will birth the new enlightened society. Individually we win our spiritual freedom. There is but one truth.
- Love and Light -
VARADAAN
Sustainable Culture as a conceptual model
In consideration of "Sustainable Culture," as a precondition for a sustainable world, if human society is to be a part of it, one might discern two emergent themes, which are Health or Balance and Scale.
To begin, let us consider the minimum size building block of human culture, which is one unit of consciousness, a single human being. The oldest written study of health of the individual is a tradition at least five thousand years old. Seeking a holistic tradition with such ancient roots and luminary contributors, we can turn to the Ayurvedic tradition from India, which was recorded in sanscrit, and is a medical science that considers the whole of a person, not just the physical body, and does not stop with psychology. The Ayurvedic tradition holds that there are three aspects of being: mind, body and spirit, and the functional integrity of these are the definition of life. When each aspect is present in a wholesome way, and in balance with the other aspects, an individual is truly healthy and has maximum potential for development. This state of balance enables an individual to live fully, with an open mind and an open heart, and the possibility for attaining enlightenment in this lifetime is enhanced.
An important realization is to contemplate that the same model can apply to groups. In fact, a group operating within a field of consensus, one of the most powerful decision states, there is a resonant harmony among all of the participants. For larger units of Sustainable Culture, we can explore a simplification of five levels of scale; enough complexity to enable meaningful analysis yet limited enough to be manageable. It is understood that the entire model is a sketch form for the vast complexity of existence, which ultimately is understood to contain all levels, all quadrants, all paths, all sectors, etc. It is proposed that five units of scale in the model are: Individual, Family, Village, Region and World. Note that in the Spiral Dynamics model with its eight levels of cultural evolution, the limitations of the Blue vMeme are revealed: nationalism has its place but ultimately can limit the potential for a truly integrated planetary human society.
In addition to Health and Scale, the full model of Sustainable Culture incorporates the 8 Levels of Cultural Evolution presented as Spiral Dynamics, and the understanding of the 4 Quadrants of Ken Wilber. Further, to ground the theoretical understanding into a framework that enables real application, there are 12 Sectors of Sustainable Culture, derived from fundamental principles of metaphysics and sacred geometry. These 12 sectors enable an assortment of activities, including: 1) Mapping a community to determine weak points and places for improvement, as well as points of particular strength, 2) Design and planning for human social systems that demonstrate superior states of Health and Balance in all aspects of human reality, at all levels of scale, and appropriate for all stages of cultural development, and 3) Delivering solutions for particular social groups that address the particular weak points a particular community.
One sector at an earlier stage of cultural development will tend to impede progress of the whole system, regardless how developed particular sectors may be, and of course a given society or social group will have individuals and subgroups carrying their particular understandings and limitations. Spiral Dynamics offers the understanding that particular codes carry special meaning for particular individuals and groups. Application of the whole understanding is a "Second Tier" approach, which accepts all the pieces as they are, perfect in their state as they are now, but committed to enhancing the evolution of all the elements, individually and as a collective whole. Thus we can explicitly develop codes and developmental paths specific to sectors of activity, appreciating that each sector has important relations to all of the others, and thus, accelerating change at a whole systems level is in fact possible. Beyond the "Second Tier", in the transpersonal realm, systems models fall away as being inherently limited because of the limitations of mind. However, just as the mind is useful in maintaining our bodies with food, medicine and healthy regimen, it is true that a planning and design approach to government, social welfare, transportation systems, food production and even spiritual development has its important place. Each sector is critical to proper function and development of all the others. There is only one existence, with interconnection beyond what we can understand with mind, with a fine structure down to the smallest quantum level, and yet, there is perhaps nothing more important on an important journey than a good map, a reference framework within which to build and progress, to make experiments, compare experiences and evaluate results. We need one trans-denominational integrated conceptual framework that enables universal discussion- a framework of language to build the next iteration of human society, a Sustainable Culture forged through a consensus on universal values.
What are the 12 Sectors of Sustainable Culture?
The 12 sectors of Sustainable Culture were identified from several attempts to describe environmental/sustainability concerns with general categories dating back to at least 1992 . The final list emerged over a decade ago from analyzing an early online sustainability conversations called sustain-L. 12 is a special number; 3x4 arranged in a circle has unusual capability and thus is incorporated in ancient human systems as astrological systems, the hours on the clock, and the months in the year. The sectors are arranged according to fundamental sacred geometry which includes two basic polarities: Matter - Spirit, and Mind/Male - Heart/Female. The sectors can then be applied to different levels of scale and different levels of social evolution, and thus fits nicely with the system of Spiral Dynamics with its eight or more levels of social development. One practical benefit of the 12 sectors is that it allows a construction or an analysis of society with an eye toward what is an ideal, a balanced society, a human culture that can properly take care of its world and continue to evolve.