October 17, 2025
The Hidden Culture
There is an invisible culture that we are a part of. It is intrinsically human — born from the divine presence as it is expressed through our embodied nature.
It doesn’t have a name. But if you observe carefully, you can see it thriving.
This culture is the very best of our humanity; of what it is to live a blessedly finite life, made infinite through our intimate relationships with place, family, all people, the earth, the cosmos, and to the great, sentient God-mystery that holds us.
It shows itself in the care we extend to each other; in profound faith and intuitive trust in existing; in accepting the responsibilities that come with the power of our intelligence and the co-creative role that we humans have been endowed with. It shows itself in our willing sacrifice for the greater wholenesses that we are a part of — loved ones, community, ideals, the potential of a better shared future.
This culture reveals itself not in a proclamation or dedication to an exclusive name of God, or a specific religious or spiritual tradition, but through behavior — actions that affirm that life is sacred, that love is highest, and that creation is to be cherished.
This is the culture oriented to the God to which all people belonged before there was a language to articulate separation, and that we still belong to now. We are born into this culture, through our heartbeat and our breath. We inherit it through our bones rather than indoctrination.
This culture of care and reverence never dies within us, even when society temporarily forgets it and collective values obscure it, except in special moments of shared clarity — disasters, tragedies, deathbeds, close calls.
This culture is like mycelia in the forest soil. We don’t always see it, but it is always there — in every society throughout every age, nurturing the eternal truth that everyone is connected to everything.
This culture is deeply, profoundly human, because it is what *makes* us human. It is every human’s birthright, because it is a part of every human’s nature.
If we were to give this culture a name, perhaps we could call it the Culture of the Human Heart.
It is the Divine’s greatest gift to human beings, because our Heart is our greatest gift to give and receive, and because we are more powerful together than alone, and because culture is what *is* when we are together.
Religions & Traditions
The Culture of the Heart thrives in many religions and spiritual traditions of the world. It is often directly nourished by them, but is not fully contained by them.
Religions and traditions are authored, codified, and structured by humans — ways of being together, speaking together, growing and initiating each other, of communing and aligning with what is most important, in order to strengthen the highest values of our society. Wise elders sometimes help us to cultivate new traditions, or adapt old ones, in order to help us thrive in changing environments.
But more so than religion and tradition, the Culture of the Heart is shaped by our nature. This nature is gifted to us by the living universe — not by what we believe about God (that’s religion), but about the innate presence of God in our life, whether consciously acknowledged or not.
The Heart is the ancient and eternal signature of the Divine in human physiology. It ensures that this culture can never be fully destroyed when a religion, tradition, or civilization is corrupted.
Wise spiritual elders and teachers in contact with their Heart will birth, again and again, the necessary traditions to renew the Heart’s energy and ways in collective consciousness.
What they remind us of, again and again, is the sacred privilege of being human.
The Gift of Being Human
There are certain qualities of consciousness that belong only to the Divine, by virtue of the eternal and infinite nature of Spirit: unbounded creativity, knowing, organizing power, energy, and grace. The Divine is the consciousness that gives rise to, and sustains, an ever-evolving cosmos. We can live in relationship with this Divinity, but no individual identity can contain it.
There are also qualities of the Divine that arise when that same infinite consciousness takes form — when Spirit becomes embodied and enters into relationship. These are the divine qualities that can be known and lived by human beings: reverence, gratitude, love, co-creative vision, compassion, right action, and constancy.
These are the aspects of consciousness that are both divine *and* embodied — what are recognized as *human virtues.* They exist already established in your Heart, for they are the Heart’s own nature.
To awaken to these virtues — to live as their expression — is what the wisdom traditions have long called *spiritual maturity*, or simply, *realization.*
As long as we remain human, and therefore connected to our humanness, we have something special to offer each other and all other living beings, in this realm and beyond.
Human beings sit deep in the web of Nature, and her innate rhythms and cycles of birth and death.
As a species, our modern consciousness has not evolved to collectively see and experience the deeper reality beyond suffering. Nor has it yet mastered the biological processes that might one day extend human life beyond death.
The dying process is significant: intense, deeply felt, life-changing for those crossing the veil, and their loved ones as well. To live, we must take the life of the plants and animals that are our companions. We love, and we learn that we cannot be attached to the forms of those that we love, for everyone that is birthed in this plane will die.
These experiences have the capacity to forge powerful humility, empathy, sacrifice, and care. This is the foundation of human wisdom and our ability to be joyful stewards of life.
Remembering Together
Your Heart sits at the junction point of divinity and humanity, and your Heart guides you to move *into* life, not away from it. Your Heart shows us that human suffering is not a mistake of the universe, nor a punishment, nor even a law of cause-and-effect (karma), but the *infancy of divine wisdom*.
As we wake up individually, and then in small communities, the influence that has thus far made personal awakening to the Heart so challenging — the effects of collective consciousness — will work in our favor by creating a positive feedback loop between individual and group. As you live from your Heart, you strengthen the group. As the group lives from its Heart, it strengthens you.
The conditions of the time are rebirthing a renaissance of the Culture of the Heart.
And we are remembering together.