I had an epiphany talking to my partner, Karen, last evening. I have been harping on “create a new culture” but in many cases this has not connected because the task of creating a new culture seems too daunting. The real answer I realized is not to challenge people to create a new culture, but to create a new story to live by. A new culture will flow from the new story.

A story is the frame that generally defines our cultural behavior. Today we live by the Taker story that, “the world belongs to man.” This story, as you can imagine, has given rise to everything from the agricultural revolution to overpopulation, social injustice, peak oil, global warming, you name it.

Before The Great Forgetting we lived by the Leaver or native story that, “humanity belongs to the earth.” The Leaver story is evolutionarily proven to work for humanity for three to four million years—over 150,000 generations. Yet today, living by the Taker story has brought the earth, now our economy, and our children’s future to the brink of collapse in the blink of our evolutionary history.

The problem is not humanity; humanity has lived fine on the planet for millions of years. The problem is not males either, although many think so. Jesse Wolf Hardin founder of the Anima Center offers, “Given men’s general position of influence and power, and the ways that destruction and war are so often labeled ‘male’ tendencies. . .Anima teaches that the problem is not true natural masculine energy, but rather, men’s disenfranchisement from their true male attributes and callings.” That is the good news.

The really good news, is that all we need is to reclaim the original story that, “humanity belongs to the earth” to solve our deepest problems. We will call this The Great Remembering. Today, because we are experiencing cultural collapse, our society is ready to abandon the failed story that “the world belongs to man.” We can bring some of the best of what we have achieved and blend it with a new cultural story or vision.

For the first time for many people instead of working all day long to build pyramids for someone else, we are joining together in communities of like minded people to give ourselves the alternatives we wish to see. We are becoming the change we want to see. You should see a map of where people visit this website from around the world everyday—it is amazing.

The key is to start living a new story—what ever inspires you and gives you and your friends passion for life. By living your truth, you will joyfully and automatically make limiting decisions that bring you more in harmony with mother earth. If people are told to do something, it does not go over well. But, if it comes from an internal sense of being and it feels right, then your life will be in alignment and balance with the source. Every cell of your being knows what it feels like to be in touch with the source—the fire of life.

Our modern Taker story generates a tremendous sense of lack—it creates a hole inside of us that can never be filled by the story we are living. Karen says it this way, “We are Spiritual beings living in physical human bodies and having the ‘human experience’. Our true state of being is pure soul or life force—pure energy—but we have taken on the cloak of the human body along with the five senses and the mind/ego. Our real ‘problem’ is the Ego has taken over control.  Instead of realizing our true connection to all—in reality there is no separateness—we live this illusion that of ‘I’ that each of us is an individual separate being. I think the "’problems’ we experience in this world are merely the symptoms of our disconnect and maybe that is what [we] mean by changing the ‘story’ or belief that ‘earth belongs to man.’ Our egos are powerful, but in reality the soul is much more powerful, we just have to work towards helping the ego see where it belongs and allow our souls to shine.

Because we live these lives of disconnect, our instinct is to find something to fill that missing hole. Instead of looking within our selves we are constantly looking outwards hoping that the next car or house or career or adventure will fill that gaping hole, [our culture can never fill this sense of lack]. These things may fulfill a desire for a period of time, but eventually that hole becomes evident again and we move on to find the next illusion to grasp onto.”

This is what happened 10,000 years ago at the founding of the agricultural revolution. Our Taker cultural story began as a substitute to satisfy our inner self, “consume the world, your in charge, it feels good.” But, it leads not only to even more unhappiness, it has also led us to ruin today.

You can not change a culture by yourself. But you can live by example a new story that is so compelling it takes off like the industrial revolution did. Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, calls these self-replicating ideas memes, which seemingly use humans for their propagation. We are meme replicator machines.

Remember though, we are not walking away from something bad, although our culture is looking pretty bad right now, but we are walking toward something better. We are walking toward better cultural story or vision that is so much better it gets replicated in instead of the old Taker story.

Recognize to that the perceived benefits for the lucky few of our Taker culture are more visible than the wealth in the Leaver treasury. A new house is more visible than cradle-to-grave security, but which would you rather have?

We all do not have to become walking Buddhas to obtain peace and fulfillment. Remember, modern Salvationist religions were invented 2,500 years ago in a response to the failures of our culture. Before the agricultural revolution, all humanity shared one religion. First, if you woke up tomorrow, and the media told you that all humanity suddenly agreed on the same religion, that would be startling. The name if this religion is not capitalized and it does not even have a book. The ancient native religion that all humanity shared before the agricultural revolution was called animism. In fact, animism is not even a religion at all. It is more a respect for the fire of life in everyones.

The reason I mention this is that the beauty of a simple story that reconnects us to our home and honors all life in it equally, grants all species their inherent right to follow their own evolutionary path, works for average people just as they are. Once we break the current disconnect to our home and rejoin the earth, we feel it is right deep inside. Again, every cell in your body has been evolutionarily guided for millions of years to respect and honor the totality of our home that nurtures us—the fire of life—our mother earth—gaia.

Terence McKenna puts it another way. He describes our culture as an operating system. Most people on the planet are running Modern Taker Culture 5.0 so to speak. Living by a new story is like loading a new operating system. We need to role back to the original Earth 1.0 operating system, or an upgrade to Earth 1.1.

So now, tell a new story, tell the story that is hidden deep inside you that you know as your truth. Tell it around new campfires that will shine so brightly into the future that our ancestors will be see them on samhain or all souls night 10,000 years from now—rejoice!

Postscript—The discussion of our cultural story and the founding of the agricultural revolution also opens a discussion about the evolution of our language. What if the agricultural revolution was really a revolution in language that did not change our story, but actually created it? What if language broke the original unity between humanity and nature? What if language changed humanity’s emphasis from the appreciation of things to an emphasis of what can be done with things? We will discuss this and more in future essays.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

Lauren Raine
Rainwalker Studio

Daniel Quinn
The Great Forgetting

Jesse Wolf Hardin
Anima Center

Daniel Quinn
The Great Remembering

Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene

Susan Blackmore
The Meme Machine

Terance Mckenna
Culture is your operating system