A Culture That Holds You: The Feeling You Didn’t Know You Were Missing

I found it in the rainforest. And it made me realize why the modern world feels so wrong.

Feb 02, 2025

It’s hard to know where to begin.

Maybe here.

I have been researching the development of a new person. I know it sounds strange. And with this new person I do not mean technology.

I had looked at different psychological models and put together a starting model which worked well. Something was missing though, I could feel it.

I thought, this has to have been done before, so I researched some historical examples of a new type of person. Plato had his ‘Aristocratic Man’, Confucius had his ‘Jun Zi’. I researched the principles and foundations of these types of person. They were quite impressive. I began to see if I could combine them into something, including what I had already been working with, it could be really good.

Then, a large dawning happened. This won’t work.

Why?

Because Plato and Confucius put together these principles of a new person at a time when their culture supported it. Their culture provided a ‘container’ for these types of people to develop and arise.

Our culture doesn’t.

This meant I had to look at ‘culture’ and what makes a ‘supportive culture’. I wrote a substack on this here. It was a shock to discover at my age, that I grew up, not in a ‘true culture’, but in a ‘pseudoculture’. And this pseudoculture was missing fundamental aspects of a true culture that leaves us feeling alienated, lonely, and with lack of meaning in our lives. This pseudoculture that we live in, also fails to provide us with a larger cultural context for us to feel held in, and in order for us to feel part of something greater, a greater story or mythos. There are many other things that a pseudoculture lacks, including lack of transformation rituals and so people stay in psychological arrest state of childhood and never get to transform into the further stages of life. This is very visible in the USA where adults dress with tee-shirts and sweatpants like young kids because of the lacking of formal initiation rites to move through the stages of life, which exist in indigenous cultures.

People of the Rainforest

Culture at a core level, gives us an experience, a feeling.

I couldn’t believe it when I stayed with a tribe in the highland rainforests of West Papua. One evening I was sitting in a hut, where food was being prepared on an open fire. There was no electricity, no running water, everything was very basic. I could feel my senses heightened, the looks on the faces of people caused by the shadows of the flames, the smell of what was being cooked (I had absolutely no idea what it was!) and the sense of connection. We were just here, all together. I didn’t really know at the time, that what I was feeling was a deep sense of a cohesive culture. These people have been here for over 40,000 years, and the longevity and solidity of culture is palpable.

It was the first time I felt held, I felt supported. They didn’t know me from Adam, and yet, I felt I was already part of them.

In my own life, with the pressures of work, bills, responsibilities etc., - with all this I never felt held, I didn’t feel I was living in a supportive culture.

If I lost my job in the morning, I didn’t feel I would be automatically supported and cared for. This made all the pressures and work (that I know we all have) harder to bear. Yes we needed to do these things, but at least could we not do them in a supportive cohesive culture, where we are held and loved by simply being a member of it?

Here, way up in the mountains, with strangers, I felt really held, in some ways loved, as one of them. Yet in the western world where I grew up, I felt a stranger, alienated, and never inclusively supported by community or society (and I have lived and worked in Europe and the USA). Everywhere society and culture felt fragmented, and I was one of the fragments.

Here in the rainforest it felt coherent, cohesive, I was part of something ‘whole’ and it made me feel ‘whole’.

A True Culture

When working on the development of a new person, and discovering that we live in a ‘pseudoculture’, it all came back to me that I had in that rainforest with those incredible people, experienced the feeling of actually being in a ‘true culture’. And the feeling was very clearly made up of 3 aspects:

Connected
Worthy
Loved

Connected

I hadn’t been long with the rainforest people and yet I felt ‘connected’. Connected to the people, individually, and as a tribe, and connected to the land. There were only small huts, no large buildings or roads, it was just forest, so I was in it all the time, no distractions from it. Total immersive connection.

I also felt connected to a larger story. I felt part of their story of over 40,000 years going back in history. This made me feel part of a larger cosmic story. Without electricity anywhere here, the stars and galaxies were so clear and visible in the night sky. With no distractions at night time I found my eyes, in the darkness, naturally drawn upwards towards the night sky. It is easy to feel that a larger mythical story was taking place and I was in some way connected to it. It was a feeling, I had no logic behind it, it just felt really good to be there, and in that place.

Worthy

It might sound strange but I just felt worthy. I felt worthy by just being there. I didn’t have to do anything. I had a place to stay and food. Now you might say I was a guest, things would be different if I lived there. That’s simply not the case. They are fully abundant in the rainforest with areas for vegetables (lots of sweet potatoes!), fruit from the forest and meat (pigs, chickens, fish from the local lake and forest birds). And this abundance, because it’s on the equator is all year round.

Things are very ‘real’ there, there is no place for abstraction or abstract things. Because of this I also felt ‘real’. It’s a very grounded, earthy feeling.

Web of Meaning

Clifford Geertz, American anthropologist, describes a true culture as one that provides a cohesive ‘web of meaning’ for it’s people, and this is what I definitely felt deeply part of while I was there. I was there for 2 weeks, however, because I was on my own and it was days of walking up into the mountains, I really did feel away from my own world, and connected to something very different. I felt in those moments of close contact with the people, and all smells, tastes and sounds, connected to a living mythos. It all had meaning and I was a fundamental part of that meaning.

Loved

Although the love I felt wasn’t the types of love we normally speak of, it was a love for just being me that I felt there. It wasn’t just acceptance, it was love. When I was given food I really felt it was to nurture and support me. When I was talked about by the elders in the tribe, the smiles on peoples faces where very loving towards me, and I built friendships, even in such a short space of time. It was like, you are loved in the tribe, not for what you do, but because it’s a very loving atmosphere. There is no stress, people share everything and there’s lots of singing and at night time, dancing. I could look to use other words but it really was a feeling of being loved and I think because of all the abundance that the rainforest gives to the tribe, there is this overall feeling of being loved and supported by the universe, which I got to feel when I was there. I’m not naive, I know all indigenous peoples do not live in this way but these people do.

Connected, worthy and loved

And so the feeling, for me, of a true culture is one that combines these 3 things. In a true culture, we feel them all, at the same time.

This is quite important, because if we feel love, but we don’t feel worthy of it, it won’ t land in our being. We won’t be able to metabolise the love because of the feeling of unworthiness.

If we feel worthy, but there’s no love, then it’s a very different feeling.

And if there’s no connection to others, to community or the land, even if we feel loved and worthy, it will be an isolated feeling which is not good at all.

This is why I call them the Wellbeing Big Guns.

They have a big impact. Personally and collectively.

Culture and a new person

I truly believe that in order to become the type of ‘new person’ the world needs at this moment, we need a new culture. People are searching and yearning for it. It may come from a sense of a need for community, but it is really ‘culture’ that underpins community and gives us the feeling, so that is in reality, what we are looking for.

And in this culture, for me, the foundations must allow us to feel: Connected, worthy and loved.

I never thought about it until recently, but in some ways what I’m describing here is simply the opposite of what our current ‘pseudoculture’ is generating which is: Alienation, fragmentation, unworthiness, loneliness, unloved. And these things have their effects: anxiety, depression, lack of meaning, uncertainty, and a need for external validation.

It’s also, for me, that when we don’t feel connected, worthy and loved, we get into competition, conflict and war. We also feel we need more things than we do, because we feel we need to fill the hole inside us, that is the absence of these feelings of connected, worthy and loved.

Psychology tells us we came into the latter half of the 20th century as the ‘Empty Self’:

“Our terrain has shaped a self that experiences a significant
absence of community, tradition, and shared
meaning. It experiences these social absences and their
consequences "interiorly" as a lack of personal conviction
and worth, and it embodies the absences as a chronic,
undifferentiated emotional hunger. The post-World War
II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious
way of compensating for what has been lost: It is
empty.” (Cushman)

And he continues …

“It is a self that seeks the experience of being
continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences,
politicians, romantic partners, and empathic
therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation
and fragmentation of its era. . . It is a self that seeks the experience of being
continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences,
politicians, romantic partners, and empathic
therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation
and fragmentation of its era.” Cushman

It’s quite stark. To know that we are living in a pseudoculture and we are in it as the ‘empty self’.

Is it familiar, does this make sense?

Vincent McMahon

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