We dived deep into the Embrace of the Human Culture during our three-hour gathering last Saturday. This Embrace has always been the most troubling one in so many ways. The first problem is how to define it; is there a global human culture? Does it include our domesticated animals and crops, and what about computers? The second problem is the resistance many of us have against being part of a culture that is destroying the planet.
So I spent several hours before the meeting to sort it out, and I found four different human Embraces, each with its boundaries and qualities. And during the gathering, we sensed into them one at a time and experienced their various flavours and potentials. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed and shared during the session; it was beautiful to sense into these spheres together and astonishing how similar our experiences were.
Four Human Embraces
These are the four Embraces we sensed into:
- Homo Sapiens – Biology
- Humanity – Biology and relational.
- Noosphere – Mind.
- All of the above, including artefacts, domesticated animals and plants.
I’ll go through them one by one below, but first, some words about
resistance and fuzziness.
Humans are the Bad Guys
Many people, especially those with an environmental background, can be very critical of modern human culture in all its forms. So, the invitation to rest in the Embrace of Human Culture and feel that we belong unconditionally often raises considerable resistance, fear, and guilt. We don’t want to belong to the culture that we see destroying the Earth.
You can read more about this divide in my blog post, ”Are you a Nature-Person or a Human-Person?”. However, when we let go of our resistance and dare to sense into our deep belonging, there is tremendous healing and power. And it always touches me deeply when I, as the guide, hear the joy and relief from someone who fully embraces their humanity for the first time.
If we want to change our human trajectory, it’s much more powerful to do it from the inside together than banging from the outside.
Fuzzy Guiding – Fuzzy Experiences
It was relatively early in the development of the Wider Embraces method that we realised there are three main types of Embraces: physical, biological, and cultural, or any combination of the three. The physical and biological are both very concrete: location and kinship. But what is human culture?
When guiding, I have, for the most part, tried to include as much as possible when evoking the Embrace of Human Culture. Then, everyone has, more or less consciously, carved out their ideas about the Embrace, so we have ended up in a diverse range of places.
Here are the four different cultural Embraces we found:
Homo Sapiens, Our Species – Biology
The pure biological Embrace of our species, Homo Sapiens, is the same type of Embrace as every other species has. It felt dense and uninteresting. Biological evolution moves slowly.
Humanity – Biology and Relational
In the next step, we leaned out into the Embrace of Humanity. This
Embrace includes the biological, but also adds all our relationships and our social and emotional layers. Sensing into how meaningful our connections are to us, how much we love to connect, and how we suffer due to COVID-19. In this Embrace, there was a lot of joy and light, and it felt dynamic and rich.
Noosphere – Mind
“The Noosphere, in short, is a stupendous thinking machine.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
In this Embrace, we let go of biology and our relations and focus entirely on our ideas and knowledge. The word noosphere comes from the Greek noos (mind) and sphaira (sphere). It was coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922. When we sensed into this Embrace, I had no body, just a head, and it was a very airy feeling.
All of it, including artefacts and domesticated life
The last Embrace we leaned out into encompassed all previous ones and all our things, from stone tools to computers, violins, and all the plants and animals we have domesticated. This Embrace is a bit overwhelming because it’s not easy to absorb so much and sense it all as one. And that is precisely what we have tried to do for a long time. No wonder it has been a bit unclear and hard to grasp!
Which one to choose?
After moving through all four human Embraces, we briefly talked about which one to choose as our default Embrace. My conclusion is that all aspects and all combinations have their benefits, and clarity is what we need.
During the Wider Embraces standard process, we start off by moving through three Embraces; our physical Universe, the living Biosphere and our human Culture. One question is whether the later Embraces include the previous ones, or if we define them as separate?
Do we see life as something in itself, or is matter an essential part of life?
Do we see culture as something in itself, or are matter and life
essential parts?
Each sphere adds something new while building upon the previous ones; they transcend and include. So the choice is ours, to sense into everything that is included or to the new layer exclusively.
I think I will continue to have the complex and messy Embrace of the
Human Culture as the default, the Embrace that includes all of it, nothing excluded. However, on other occasions, we can also evoke the Embrace of the noosphere and all our human relations, encompassing both mind and emotions; I will refer to this as the Embrace of Humanity. And, of course, we can continue to explore all the various aspects of human culture, categorising them in numerous ways, depending on our purpose.
What are your thoughts on the Embrace of our Human Culture?