Finding Your Inner Culture
Your soul, prior to incarnation, exists in a culture of pure love and it brings that awareness of love into the human world. Each human is born into a culture. The family culture is a part of societal culture, which together may be seen as Outer Culture. But the newborn arrives with its own Inner Culture already in place.
Culture is, of course, a set of ideas about how best to live. Your soul enters not just with a heart full of love, but a set of ideas about how to live, things that it values and wishes to accomplish. Your soul is your private culture, your Inner Culture.
Have you ever noticed how often your thoughts on how to live come in conflict with others' ideas about how to live?
The conflict between the soul's private, Inner Culture, and the family's culture, and society's culture, the Outer Culture, are the defining attributes of human experience.
As a child you are invited to forget your Inner Culture, which is, as you will recall, rooted in the pure love from where the soul emerged, and to instead take on the beliefs and ideas of the family, of society, to adopt the Outer Culture's collectively agreed-upon ideas of how best to live.
What we are suggesting is that it would be helpful for you to get in touch with your own Inner Culture, the inner culture of unconditional love and acceptance that you brought into this world originally. These ideas about "how to live" are your soul's desires.
They are with you all the time, seeking expression. To the extent you feel unease and dissatisfaction in this life of yours you are experiencing the friction between your soul's desires and the chosen path you have taken in your larger culture.
To harmonize your Inner Culture with your Outer Culture is the ideal that, whether you know it or not, is what you seek.
But it can be a bit of a mystery. The Outer Culture into which you are born is a potent force. You are trained into ideas that are presented as immutable truths, even if at a deeper level you are well aware the idea is wrong to your soul. This includes the conviction that you desire a thing laudable to Outer Culture that is not important to Inner Culture.
Outer Culture invites you to forget the inner self with all its beliefs and ideas of how best to live, how best to be, in this world of ours.
The Bard said "To thine own self be true." We would add that "thine own self" is the Inner Culture you have hidden in order to fit into the Outer Culture's system of rewards and punishments.