Cultural Contexts

Jim and I have now completed all the film-watching we had planned of the Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Broadway stage musicals that were later made into Hollywood movies. And even though the movies were primarily produced in the 1950s, for me they have represented many of the predominant cultural patterns from the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, before the large-scale cultural upheavals began here in the 1960s and 1970s. (Until 1968 there had been censorship guidelines for the film industry called the Hays Code, that spelled out what was acceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States … and I think the Hays Code directly represented some of the cultural limitation agreements at the time. Then after 1968, a film rating system was introduced.)

During our recent movie-watching process, Jim and I also added a made-for-television Rodgers and Hammerstein production from March 31, 1957—Cinderella, with Julie Andrews in the title role. It was reported to have been seen by over 100 million people in the U.S., fully 60% of the country‘s population at the time. Watching the fairy tale in February 2011 provided a fresh picture of some of the underlying patterns that are part of our Western world and mutual European backgrounds for gender relationships.

In Cinderella, she is a poor but beautiful young woman, while he is a handsome and rich prince—a story line that played out with different versions over and over again in movies I saw on Friday nights with my parents in the later 1930s and most of the 1940s. At a minimum the male needed to be able to support them both because the female had limited options to make much money in those days; and besides, it was her gender role to take care of the home and family. In many of the films, before marriage she was a secretary, store clerk, or struggling actress, and he was a successful businessman.

Jim and I have also completed hearing/seeing two of the three proposed CD/DVD series from The Teaching Company about our American past—America‘s religious history, and its philosophical/intellectual history. Furthermore, we ordered and watched a two-hour film—A More Perfect Union: America Becomes a Nation—based upon the 1787 convention of delegates in Philadelphia, convened to modify or streamline the Articles of Confederation, out of which the Constitution of the United States then emerged. (The film had been officially recognized by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution as of “exceptional merit.”)

To all of those perspectives I mentally integrated some of what I read in the Prince of Wales‘ recent book, Harmony, A New Way of Looking at Our World. He wrote that from the seventeenth century onward, science was able to view Nature as inanimate, unconscious, and mechanistic. He says the British worldview had become “a mechanistic mindset,” wherein humans were separate and separated from the natural world.

So watching film representations of the men who crafted our country‘s foundation in A More Perfect Union as people amidst their time and context too—inheritors of British traditions, laws, agreements, and worldviews—was illuminating. There was a mutual background of individual rights and the rule of law. I think the combinations of who those individual men were, their industriousness, their educations (including their ongoing self-educations), their mutual beliefs, the economic opportunities available in “the New World,” and numerous other factors combined into a potent mix that has grown and been developed to become what the United States of America is today.

And now, many people in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, within their historical and current-day contexts, are expressing their desires for more freedom and economic opportunities. At the same time, they don‘t have a whole continent of resources such as the colonists had in the New World. They also don‘t have the backgrounds the American colonists had from the previous European Age of Reason, the European Scientific Revolution, the European Christian religious past, the English Magna Carta of 1215, and subsequent English laws. What people elsewhere do have are their own backgrounds and belief structures—which I think are very wise to be aware of as patterned energies in motion from their past into their present.

One of the things I‘m saying is I believe there is an overall cultural cohesiveness within each era in each geographic location that includes its past … and to my mind they all have had and have value in their own ways. By not using any filters of superiority/inferiority, dualistic opposition, or competition, I can use a lens that Sees the value of us all amidst the contexts we live in today, along with those contexts within which earlier people lived.

In terms of Going Beyond into A Completely Different Reality, I still come back to a perspective I expressed in the essay “Freedom” I blog-posted on 9/23/10—that for me a wholer, fuller freedom is liberation from one‘s culturally conditioned mind. Hence, clearly Understanding one‘s cultural past and present can be used as stepping stones during the process of Liberation. Then, no matter what culture one is amidst, being free and liberated from embedded cultural patterns can open up new and fresh ways of thinking, everywhere. That is, it really can be a more even playing field as each individual spirit-being person who chooses to access a dimension of basic Oneness, achieves her or his vaster and more wholistic potential > > and then keeps on expanding.

With Respect for Each of Us, J.