capricious cultural mongrel

More or less unique. The pattern of nature, nurture and chance that culturally shaped me means that I am similar to but not the same as other people in my natal community. And the same is true of them.

Since I became a man, I have lived and worked in many cultures, and, in adapting to their ways, I have become a cultural mongrel.

I spent many years being educated. Originally there was family, school and experience of archaeology digs. Then there was seven years of further education which included four years of Zoology, two years of Botany and more than a year of Psychology.

I am assailed with thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM). Everybody is the same in terms of the overall process but the details can be very different. 

These days, in the more developed countries, it is felt that the cultures of the ancestors were based on primitive myth and magic rather than on modern empirical science. But there is an exception with ‘mindfulness meditation’ which goes back more than 7000 years in many Asian countries and is now at the cutting edge of brain science. "Be still and know”

Fact – TFM arrive from the unconscious, hang around for a while, and then disappear. The process has a name – papanca or mental proliferation or monkey mind[1]. Brain scans show that, even in sleep, the mindbrain is constantly churning. Its task is to process the signals arriving from the sense organs so as to make sense of the internal and external environments, to compare them with memories of earlier conditions, and thus to respond appropriately.

Fact – most individuals have first hand experience of their parents and possibly their grandparents. There might also be stories of the great grandparents and the next few generations of ancestors. But the story line is normally very short.

Fact – our ancestry stretches back through the modern computer age to the age of farmers about 7000 years ago; and then way back to the first appearance of modern human beings who made a living from hunting and gathering about 200,000 years ago. And previous to that the ancestral line carries on through various types of monkeys and apes (75 million years ago) and before that through various lines of mammals (125 million years ago), and vertebrates (505 million years ago).

Fascinating fact – all living things are made of cells which contain a nucleus which harbours chromosomes which are made of DNA. The ancestors of the first cells appeared 2,100 million years ago and their complex biochemistry is ancestral to all that came after. 

Planet earth came into being about 4.54 billion years ago and the ancestral roots of everything was the Big Bang at 13.8 billion years ago.

So does this story suggest that I am a unique cultural mongrel? Perhaps. I was born into and processed by a culture that still believed in a supernatural and omniscient bloke with a beard watching our every thought and deed from his heaven in the sky. “What will the neighbours think?

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[1] Mind monkey or monkey mind is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".