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Inside of the broadest cultures are thousands of smaller communities—each with their own cultural vibe that exerts influence on its members.

So far, we’ve been focusing on the relationship between culture and individuals. In that realm, culture functions as the rules of engagement. But when we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.

A human society is a rich tapestry of overlapping and sometimes sharply contradictory cultures, and each of us lives at our own unique cultural intersection.

A giant’s culture also affects how it interacts with the emergence levels above it, as each giant’s prevailing culture determines how it plays with other giants, and which types of other giants it will gravitate towards.

The visuals can get a little complicated here, especially when I’m the graphic designer, but try to bear with me. Emergence Tower is kind of like a z-axis we can flip on its side and add onto our x-y graph:

In higher-minded culture, the pervading values are Higher-Mind driven, making it a positively charged culture that exerts an upward pull on the psyches of their members. The behavior rewarded or zapped by the culture align more with the Higher Mind’s values, and interactions carry a generally high-minded tone, which empowers the Higher Minds of the... See more

In your head, your Higher Mind and Primitive Mind compete for control of your psychology. On the group level, the two minds jostle for control over the group’s culture. When people are around other people, their Primitive and Higher Minds band together with others of their kind in a group-wide power struggle. And like a human’s personality, a group... See more

Seeing in 3D

With all of this in our mind, let’s return now to the world of human beliefs.