It is through our relationships with others that we create “shared” meanings – to help us communicate with each other and fulfill our needs.
This is Culture.
Living together, to figure out and accomplish how to get food to eat, we have to be able to understand each other when we speak. We have to communicate.
This means coming up with symbols and words that we all understand. When we have these shared meanings, we can speak to each other to coordinate the steps to get food and other things that we need to live.
Each activity we do then works with all other activities we do, to help us gather and share food, shelter, and other resources.
All of our activities as a group of people living together, involve shared meanings. And so all of our activities and relationships are “culture”.
Because we need to communicate to reach our goals, our assumptions about life are “coded” as symbols in the languages we create.
There are currently just over 7000 recognized languages left in the world.
Languages are made up of words, how we use our bodies, different sounds we make, pauses with our sounds and words, and or silences, coming together into one story to communicate. It is how we describe the things we pay attention to.
The lowest guess is that about 31, 000 of known languages once existed and about 81 percent of these have died.
The number of languages we have created shows the vast number of different ways we have created culture and understood life.
This history of making meaning together and finding ways to communicate to reach our goals, shows the large ability we have to create.
The mechanisms inside of us that allowed us to create such different ways of understanding life, remain inside of us.
They are built into us as part of being alive.
Because we are in bodies and as a result, we have limits on what we see and pay attention to – no one language or culture can recognize or name all of what exists.
similar to our body’s limits in being able to see only what is useful to our survival, our languages and cultures name what is useful to the economy of the particular culture.
As a result, no one language or culture has had words or ideas to describe all of our reality and experiences.
We experience and feel a wider breadth of sensations, life events and realities that are not represented in the languages or cultures around us.
All of our experiences are with us in our bodies. Named or un-named, they are lived and felt.
Through new eyes, we can see, understand and feel our selves in and with our bodies – in ways that help us lead more effectively in our life.