Masters Of Culture

MASTERS OF CULTURE.

SUPREME CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE.

In this heading a twofold monumental assumption is hidden: Supreme intelligence can be equated to true cultural enlightenment. But in order to be truly enlightened in cultural matters a shadowless light is required. And as culture is part of the psychological architecture of man, the entire mental infrastructure needs to be illumined, for if one component of the whole casts a shadow, the entire mental architecture and with it the cultural contents will be affected and darkened and thus impair the desired uncorrupted cultural intelligence which can only blossom in a pristine, pure mind. This rather perfect state is that of mastership of culture, for it will only radiate the pristine purity of the mind in the outer world and soothe cultural tensions, wounds and conflicts.

Such mastership is cultural healing and mediation of the highest order. Supreme cultural masters will not need any technique, because their state of being and their mere presence, and even at a distance, they will benefit mankind. They approach sainthood.

And such saints rather than intercultural manipulators we need in today's world. We need the supreme intelligence of cultural masters to remedy eons of cultural and other conditioning of man. The cultural specialist more often than not is not of such a caliber, although the saint and the specialist can reside in the same physical garb. But culture experts will not want be true cultural masters for then the expert would no longer have a need to be. The cultural master-saint makes any expertise irrelevant. The master has left behind himself the toolkit of mental and cultural instruments and techniques. He has transcended the mind which is the carrier and creator of the cultural problems as well as of the instruments and techniques for their resolution.

Recently I attended an organ improvisation concert: Every virtuoso appeared before his performance in front of the select professional audience to introduce the theme of his improvisation. One would improvise on the Marseillaise or on some other known theme. After some outstanding technical improvisations an organist appeared in front of the audience and declared that he didn’t know what he would improvise on but that he might know once had ascended the steps of the staircase to the powerful instrument. His technically and thematically non-premeditated performance touched the audience, because he was a masterful improviser. The budo expert who is beyond technique defeats his opponents by his mere presence, because he is in tune with the universe. And who would attack the universe unless he wants to risk a complete loss of face? The Bible states: “if you can believe you can move mountains.” Those three examples from music, martial arts and religion illustrate the possibility of drawing on a principle that transcends the purely mental realm of man. It is the rationale behind superior performance from a more potent source than that of the mind which cannot contain and encompass that resource. And this capacity to transcend the mind is the hallmark of the masters in all three instances. They have mastered the mind which along with its extraordinary capacity also causes the problems and engineers the problem solving techniques.

Having fully mastered the mind they have become masters. They are fully aware of its capabilities. The awareness of its relativity provides access to vaster resources. A master of culture therefore analogously has to have the ability to master and thereby transcend the cultural component of the mind which is part of the entire mental architecture. Thus he will have to master the entire interconnected mental architecture. The entire mental edifice will have to be illumined so as to cast no shadow that would pollute the inner environment. Such is the mental stature of a master of culture. As culture is recorded in the mind cultural and mental mastership are interdependent and interconnected. Its achievement leads to cultural enlightenment and that enlightenment illumines the entire environment. A darkened inner environment with strong personal, professional cultural and cultural egos will act as a barrier to the transcendence and the mastery of the mind along with its cultural contents and prevent masterhood. Those professionals who do not at least aspire at masterhood - however expert and highly paid - cast a cultural shadow and their work will backfire over time. Here, the adage “who does not aspire at the highest partakes in the lowest” seems to apply.

The cultural master does not have to preach. “Veni, vidi, vici” is his strategic motto. His seeing is doing, his presence cleanses and mediates. He works by resonance and radiation. He is in tune with the ocean that simply resorbs the ripples and waves of clashing cultures. That is his very nature. The serious seeker and aspirant to cultural masterhood needs to expand his conscious awareness beyond the confines of mental cultural intelligence in order to connect to the ocean of cultural intelligence beyond it.

The growth process towards cultural masterhood and enlightenment is the birthright of any man, cultural expert or layman. To resolve the world’s cultural challenges cultural enlightenment in the sense of an all encompassing cultural intelligence is required. Otherwise cultural intelligence remains part of the sphere of cultural problem creation and cultural problem solving, at a level at which the problem scenarios cannot be solved sustainably but merely reconfigured. Cultural solutions at that level remain reversible and will reemerge in different shapes, forms and configurations. The sustainable solution offered by enlightened cultural mastery will connect the problem to the pristine source, the clashes of the cultural waves to the ocean. This act of reconnection in consciousness is a reintegration, which implies the return to integrity, wholeness and health and unity through transcendence.

The act of reconnection to the source is not an antagonizing logic and strategy, but an action of a different order and of recontextualizing the issue in consciousness so that the totality of consciousness can provide its integrating power, which is its very nature. It does not in any way act on the problem directly but the change of the optic, the widening of it liberates an integrative momentum and energy which resorbs the trouble into its source. It is a form of cultural reverse engineering or trouble shooting when the cultural conflict has occurred. The process rewinds the conflicting mental recordings and thereby deletes them. Once the tape is deleted and the slate wiped clean one needs to be actively aware to keep it in that pristine state of high level cultural intelligence. Supreme cultural intelligence will autopilot the process and instantaneously reconnect to the cleansing source when a problem appears at the horizon. Conscious contact with the ocean, the source, the light, is the hallmark of a professional who has achieved supreme cultural intelligence. That means that he is immune because the source is always new.

The roadmap towards cultural enlightenment which this day and age yearns for follows a personal track record of cultural turmoil or the sensitively intelligent awareness of fellow humans’ cultural sorrow and suffering. The confrontation with the own and the world’s cultural shadow will induce the aspirant to seek that cultural light which can illuminate the shadow. Fighting the cultural shadows of the world usually further narrows the horizons of awareness of those involved in cultural antagonism and tends to increase the severity of the problem to be solved, for only light can remove darkness.

Similarly cultural enlightenment can integrate and dissolve cultural shadows by expanding mental horizons. This is a more promising and sustainable response by virtue of a logic that transcends mental, cultural dialectics. The mind’s pendulum- like swinging energy is brought to a standstill. This standstill is not the end and death but the stillness and peace brought about by a liberation from the constraints of cultural shackles; a peace which needs to be reconquered continuously in consciousness and awareness for the antagonistically swinging pendulum of conflict will set in as soon as it slips out of awareness, as a dog may run away when one drops the lead; then your consciousness drops back into the old grooves of the mind with its natural dialectics. But the light of transcultural consciousness with its supreme cultural intelligence has the ability to always renew itself. The ocean of consciousness and intelligence behind the cultural streams and waves has the same restorative power as the real ocean has integrative power of myriads of currents. In the longer term its access can become a new learnt state of being, enhanced awareness and transcultural bliss instead of cultural turmoil.

However, one has to be aware of and also master a potential antagonistic dialectic between the transcultural and the cultural mind. If consciousness is not anchored in the pristine ocean, the mind seeks and takes its chance to drag you in a devastating fight between its shadow and the light of transcultural intelligence. Therefore only supreme cultural intelligence is the solution to this potential tension between the problem and the attempts to solve it in a non-invasive, non-destructive, non- dialectical manner. The nature of the mind tends to be dialectical. Pure consciousness tends to be non-dialectical. The latter integrates the former and not the other way round. It is an integrative hierarchy. That is the inner landscape and its interplay is a strong determinant of the totality of the field of the inner and outer landscapes of man. The seed is inside, the flower is outside. The seed contains the totality of the potentiality of the nourishing wheat and the polluting weed alike. Supreme cultural intelligence requires a constant attendance to the condition of the inner humus and to the nature and quality of the seeds one sows there, because they will manifest analogously and seamlessly in the outer world. Due to man’s psychological and ethical evolution there will be a concomitance and an intermingling of weed as well as of wheat. The biblical parables of the dialectic between seed and wheat points to the same strategy as the transcultural intelligence approach, where the situation is cleared from a superordinate vantage point rather than through antagonization.

The Christian Bible’s supreme command is first and foremost love, which is supreme intelligence and which also encompasses supreme cultural intelligence, because it draws on the non-dialectical ocean of all encompassing and all forgiving love as a panacea and for man’s salvation. Here, love heals the wounds of the erring human mind. The fact of accessing a higher order understanding brings about the solution in the cultural as well as the biblical approaches. And both approaches are born from higher wisdom as well as ethical. And as the Christian world has been socialized to supreme cultural intelligence throughout its history as one can see there is nothing neither exotic nor esoteric in my supreme cultural intelligence proposition. It has been a command for ages based on timeless wisdom irrespective of cultural background. But the mind has different inclinations that tend to ignore the timeless most precious gem and most noble value. It slips out of man’s awareness because the “dog of the mind”, due to its dialectical nature from which its seems to derive its energy and pleasure, likes to engage in a tug of war at the lead of consciousness which is its guiding and integrating master. But the mind is therefore not a culprit. It simply requires its natural reconnection and reintegration to be whole and fully functional. For, disconnected from the source, there is no continuity which translates another Biblical dictum, namely that of “separated from Me you can do nothing”. It follows that from a Biblical or consciousness research standpoint the mind needs a mooring in a superordinate dimension of awareness or truth.

What is required to solve and prevent cultural conflict with its myriad gross or subtle manifestations is to enhance awareness with regard to man as a whole. In that wholeness the integrating resource of conflicts can emerge which might otherwise remain insoluble. In the light of such awareness one can perceive an emergent transcultural intelligence which supremely reins over cultural challenges: supreme cultural intelligence.

This quantum cultural intelligence as we might call it in analogy to quantum physics, which allows complementary perceptions of the subatomic reality, provides a metaphor which similarly allows an understanding of cultural matters through diverse complementary optics: this quantum optical cultural intelligence selects the view of the cultural challenge which is most likely to solve it. The aggregate models of culture which we know from Hofstede and Trompenaars-Hampden-Turner are simply one perception of the cultural reality which tends to make sense at the level of cultural intelligence. As in the particle perception of physics they allow an understanding of the particularities, the positions and the differentiation of diverse cultures. The dynamics of integration behind cultural diversity need to draw on the equally valid momentum and wave conception of the subatomic reality. If the particle approach corresponds to cultural intelligence the more dynamic wave approach additionally provides what I call transcultural intelligence. And as is often the case in science, the chosen method and perceptual filters condition the possible solutions. In other words it is the optic itself in which the solution resides. And that also applies to the perception of the cultural reality. Due to its relevance in culture analysis I introduced the concept of a quantum cultural optic which highlights that there is an important methodological choice to be made which conditions the effective management of cultural matters. In other words the cultural and the transcultural approach correspond to the quantum physical particle-wave duality. Adhering to one aspect and ignoring the other is a sophisticated form of culture blindness. Such lopsided perception would be an incomplete perception of matter and energy as well as of culture. Therefore it is imperative to expand our perception in order to fully account for the physical and social phenomena alike.

Responsible, sustainable and future-oriented global governance require the design of a cultural blueprint for this global multicultural millennium, domestically and internationally, whose threshold we might have crossed numerically, but not yet with regard to the requirement of consciousness change management in light of the global imperatives and effective responses. We do not want to overthrow anything and fully respect the cultural diversity of people but we simply should try to also become aware of a dimension which humans are naturally endowed with irrespective of their intellectual sophistication and diverse cultural backgrounds. I refer to the natural state of man’s mind before it has been cluttered with social conditioning which causes the international diversity management challenge. The natural state is to be reconquered, through awareness and deconditioning, through expansion and recontextualization of the results of the phase of differentiation and in the light of complementary integration.

The new complementary awareness blazes a pioneering narrow trail in what has become the wilderness of the mind with its conflicting logic, however performing it may be technically though at a high price. A growing critical mass of pioneering travelers on this inner trail will ultimately transform it in a wide transcultural superhighway on which the culturally diverse masses can travel smoothly. This transcultural superhighway can be anchored inside through a new socialization in light of the imperatives of the multicultural millennium and bring about cultural peace which humanity yearns for. It is a natural and simple process based on a cultural add-on which man is endowed with evolutionarily. So, it needs to be recognized, identified and promoted. It requires less technique and knowledge than intuitive awareness of the state of the mind and the world. In that sense any man needs to become a master of culture. The solution to the cultural challenge resides in the ability to apply quantum cultural intelligence in the sense of dealing simultaneously with myriads of diversity in our metropoles at a cultural as well as a transcultural level. It involves a quantum optical cultural capability comparable to a cultural autopilot which solves problems as they emerge simply through the art of shifting perception without intervention in the outside. Maybe it could be labeled a quantum cultural consciousness technique, although words can cloud a discrete, simple process whose nature it is to transcend mind, time and words alike. Those otherwise important capabilities can reinforce the shackles we seek to master. - The transcultural state can enhance as well as transcend cultural identities and integrate the cultural in the transcultural state, where cultures coexist peacefully in a superordinate perception.

The mind asks how it can acquire this magic assumed transcultural potion and panacea, a quantic and superquantic awareness which effectively complement culturally conditioned responses. Indeed, some may be able to lead the horse to the water intellectually but not be able to make it drink and to practically implement seemingly lofty idealism. But it is realism, because it is a natural endowment which one is to rediscover at a later phase in one’s development. As the mind wants to be certain and secure and likes transparent, logic structures I would like to map the entire roadmap once more in the shape of my master model (Tranascultural Profiler) which can be called the model of masters, of masters of culture, because it covers all aspects of culture as well as their integration and transcendence.

But before I would like to model the diverse forms of human intelligence and then correlate them to the integrative Transcultural Profiler model of the diverse aspects of culture and the global, transcultural management context:

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