Worlds apart:Culture Shock

How can we grasp the ideas of another culture or another person, when the very way we and they define our worlds uses a different context a different language even. How is it possible to cross the divide and come to some comprehension. I think it was Rumi or another Sufi Sheik who said that we could not define or come to an understanding of God in this world because God is not of this world. Yet hes till continued to love God. So …..

how can we exist side by side with individuals with countries with culture that is so different from our own, and not fall out, not feel rejected or abandoned, slighted or put upon. Its very difficult.

We learn from history, there is a Turkish saying “he who is burned by the soup blows on the yogurt” our past experience has been that those who are different from us are our enemies, we wont take on their ideas or bother to understand them. This however is false reasoning.
—UnderThisSeparatorIsLatterHalf—
I only have to look at the food in the supermarket and how it has changed since i was a boy to understand how our tastes have changed and how these tastes have been effected by other countries and cultures. And as I think abut my own personal ideas and ideals how they have changed over the years and been influenced by other people.

However there a few people in the Uk that won’t eat anything with Garlic or whatever the colour of their skin maintain a view of others that is really coloured by race, or whose ideas are so fixed and yet their foundation so unsure that they can’t let anything in, any other idea, thought, ideal, view, because to do so would, as it appears unconsciously to them, destroy their sense of self.

Perhaps we all do it shut out ideas, don’t really listen, and if we have been hurt, its even worse. For me I am aware than having been wounded in love, i would not want to be hurt again, but I refuse to shut myself off, or shut my feelings down. For love whilst it is wounding is also healing. I love ideas, i love people, I love the many cultures and peoples that make up our world. Islam fascinates me as does American Capitalism, both in their best sense and in the way they have been corrupted.

Many of us across the globe have given up on God, because it is as if God exists in a different culture, and is therefore not for us, it is time we changes and worked harder to let the spirit and soul back into our lives, because it is through this we communicate with the ultimate creative spirit in the Universe..(as Quakers say “God or what ever you want to call it”)

It is also a time for us to break the deadlock between one idea and another , one religion or another in their conflicts. We need to think outside the box, with completely new ideas for life, completely new ways of approaching spirituality.

An example of this can be seen in the dogma of science, it having taken over from religion, took on many of its ideals, including the we are the only ones who can show whether a thing is meet and right. Everything that enters the arena the culture of science must first prove itself by the rules of science. Perhaps it is time to change the rules, to look at things differently. as i believe it says somewhere in the bible, a new heaven and a new earth. How to do this means people giving up their worldly power, being less protective of their ideas and ways. Why? Because the way we do it now just doesn’t work…does it.

Sub Saharan Africa ravaged by HIV/Aids and war and poverty, the western world plagued by obesity and heart problems, look around you at the graffiti, the fear we have for each other, the lack of awareness and poverty of education and knowledge, the violence that pervades our world the greed, and then here and there a few people planting the seeds of love.

This rambling piece, is really about my own inability to communicate, to listen, to care, to love, to be true to all of you and to myself, my own powerlessness in the face of war and famine, of poverty and corruption and all the other things that i feel blight my society.

Slowly, slowly I try to do a little, but what I want and what is possible…they are worlds apart.

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  Jonathan Spencer : Posted a new post on their blog
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