A Wisdom Archive on cultural identity

Being unable to hear is only a part of being Deaf. In fact, when the word is used in the cultural sense, hearing is one of the least important criteria used to delineate group membership. Many persons that are labeled hearing or hard-of-hearing from the medical perspective are labeled or would label themselves as Deaf from the cultural perspective. Similarly, a person who self-identifies as Deaf may in fact have much more hearing than one who self-identifies as either hearing or hard-of-hearing. The use of the cultural label is a declaration of personal identity much m ...

Read more here: » Deaf culture: Encyclopedia II - Deaf culture - Background

Why do children refer to themselves by name rather than in the first person singular? If you were disembodied in one location and reconstructed in another, would you still be yourself?
 
What about that tune you were humming when you morphed? We may still be a long way from Star Trek, but scientists in Australia have recently managed to teleport a beam of light. 'I' has literally been the bugbear of religion, philosophy and science, across all cultures. Conceptions of the self invariably lead us down slippery slopes of exploration into the nature of identity, and possibly ethnicity.
 

 
(See also: The Self, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » The Self: I, Me and My Self - Lone Indulgences  

Vach vac (Sanskrit) Sound, voice, word, the mystic sound (svara) or essence of spirit of the divine creative activity, the vehicle of divine thought; and of this the Word is the manifested expression. Vach, or its equivalents in other cultures, is always considered feminine. Cosmically she is the carrier or mother of the Third Logos -- the Word or Verbum -- because of carrying perpetually within her the essence of divine thought, the First Logos; and hence Vach is the Second Logos, equivalent to the early Christian Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost -- later transmogrified into a cosmic male. In Hindu mythology Brahma separates his body into masculine and feminine, the feminine becoming Vach, in whom he creates Viraj, who is himself again Brahma. Here we have the three Logoi: Brahma, the First Logos, the divine thought; Vach, the Second Logos, the divine voice; and Viraj, the Third Logos, or the divine word, the philosophical equivalent of the Son of the Christian Trinity.
 
Hence Vach is associated with the work of creation, with the prajapatis. She calls forth the mayavi form of the universe out of abstract space or Chaos, of which the first cosmogonical stage are the seven cosmic elements. Mystically Vach is masculine and feminine at will, as in the Hebrew Genesis Eve is with Adam. It is through her power that Brahma produced the universe. Blavatsky points out that Brahma produced through Vach in the same way that the incomprehensible assumes a tangible form through speech, words, and numbers (cf SD 1:430). Vach through her productive powers produced what Pythagoras called the music of the spheres. The teachings of Pythagoras also speak of the hierarchies of the heavenly host as numbered and expressed in numbers. Vach is equivalent, in some aspects, to Isis, Aditi, mulaprakriti, the waters of space, chaos, and the Qabbalistic Sephirah.
 
"Whether as Aditi, or the divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of the seven sons: the ''Angels of the Face,'' of the ''Deep,'' or the ''Great Green One'' of the ''Book of the Dead'' " (SD 1:434). These feminine logoi are all correlations of light, sound, and ether. In many aspects Vach approaches Kwan-yin, she of the melodious voice. Sarasvati, the goddess of divine wisdom, is a later form of Vach. The Hebrew Lahgash is nearly identical in meaning with Vach as the hidden power of the mantras, the divine sound. "But Vach being also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha -- ''the god who lives in all the Kalpas'' -- her Mayavic character is thereby shown: during the pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the one, all-devouring Ray" (SD 1:430-1).
 
Vach is also called Savitri (the generatrix), the mother of the gods and of all living. She is identical in the human range with Eve, who is also called the mother of all living. Ila or Ida is but the second repetition of Vach in a different period of cosmogony. Vach refers to the cosmic and divine theogony, while Ila refers to a later period in the earth''s history when the physiological transformation of the sexes took place during the third root-race. In this last sense Vach corresponds with Eve.
 
Vach is often called Sandhya (twilight), also Satarupa (a hundred forms) to describe the feminine logos unfolded into the ten planes and subplanes of the universe. The cow is a symbol of Vach, for the cow has always been the emblem of the passive generative power of nature.
 
Vach is also mystic speech "by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vach is said to have ''entered the Rishis.'' . . . she is called ''the mother of the Vedas,'' ''since it was through her power (as mystic speech) that Brahma revealed them . . . " (SD 1:430). The Rig-Veda and Upanishads give four kinds of Vach -- vaikhari, madhyama, pasyanti, and para -- corresponding to the four cosmic principles: the physical universe, the light of the Logos, the Logos itself, and parabrahman or the infinite.

 
(See also: Vach, vac, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

There are two key Indian myths: Moksha and Maya. Within these two spheres the whole invisible world of gods, heroes, quests, and powers are contained.
 
Moksha speaks to the primacy of consciousness as the stuff from which all reality is created. Maya is the distraction that keeps us constantly in search of truth. Paleo-linguists tell us that the word 'maya' is not correctly understood as "illusion" but as "measurement", and from this we get the terms matter, meter, mother, mata, matrix, matrika, music and myth itself.
 
 

 
(See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Life and Death: Great Indian Myths: Moksha and Maya

Studying the myths of various cultures leads to a better understanding of their social and religious underpinnings. By turning the myths inwards, inviting them into our lives and learning their language of imagery and symbolism, we learn more about ourselves.
 
In almost every culture, the metaphor of descent serves as a powerful, sacred and mythic image for women. One of the earliest such accounts is the story of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess and Queen of the Upper World. She was worshipped in Sumer from the third millennium BCE (before the common era) to the first millennium BCE.

 
(See also: Spiritual Mythology, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Spiritual Mythology: Mythology Reveals Power of Descent  

Until 3,000 years ago, all religions were pantheistic and polytheistic as Hinduism, Taoism and Shinto still are. They tolerated the religions of other tribes and cultures, recognising in their worship the same divine energies as their own, albeit with different names.
 
Why then did patriarchal, monotheistic religions arise in the Middle East 3,000 years ago, and spread in their Christian forms throughout Europe and then on to the European colonised overseas territories during the last 1,500 years? Why did these monotheistic religions fight so fiercely to eradicate nature worship in the lands they controlled? Why did Christianity promote a dualistic antagonism between the spirit and the flesh, with only the former conceived as being in the "image of God"?

 
(See also: Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Peace on Earth: Cosmic Balance and World Peace

No religion preaches violence. If all religions advocate peace, why then do some who profess allegiance to their religion, commit violence to defend their peace-loving, peace-preaching faith? India is home to some of the oldest religious texts known to man. The Vedas and the Upanishads , for instance, do not preach a particular religion, nor do they spell out a list of dos and don’ts.
 
The Rig Veda says: “ Aano bhadrah kritavo yantu vishwatah ”, which means, let noble thoughts come to us from everywhere. These ancient texts did not have a single author, nor their philosophy a collective name. Because of its universality, this particular stream came to be known as Sanatan Dharma , or 'perennial duty’. Later it came to be called Hinduism. Unfortunately we now have its political version - Hindutva .

 
(See also: Peace on Earth, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Peace on Earth: House Of Hinduism: Room For Everyone