Beyond the face level basic intention of describing what ‘marriage’ is there is a much deeper spiritual teaching. It is disguised so only some perceptive people recognise what it is.
This blog is not to analyse relevance to marriage specifically but to prepare the reader for the concept by way of example. To focus the awareness that (hidden) information can be encoded into other (face value) information.
Two dances emerged during wartime, a century ago.
The Tango and the Foxtrot.
Tango is the name of the military language where instead of saying ABC you say ‘Alpha Bravo Charlie’. It developed as a necessity to relay information accurately despite static in radio communications, a new invention for the industrial world.
Foxtrot is the active element.
People dancing the tango are flirting, deciding, networking. People dancing the foxtrot are having sex. The slang was used for that.
Tango is the command given that we’re talking about and around it, parley, figuring the situation and what to do.
Foxtrot is the command given to affirm definite action.
Watch the feet movements of the dancers you’ll see this reflected by the movements.
It’s theatrical and it’s ceremonial.
The high-culture aspect of military culture because at the time these different items emerged was a time of war affecting the whole of the national and international culture. Our grandparents and great grandparents lived through that so they remember it more than we do.
The language is simple because it has to be. It follows the pure form, talking is yin action is yang. T for tango talking F for foxtrot fucking. Decision and Action.
When people said the foxtrot was a more adult dance thats what they meant but didn’t openly acknowledge. To protect and enforce the division lines between the excitement of child developmental awareness and the wisdom of adult knowledge.
Next after the war came the invention of the teenager. A grey area of extended childhood overlapping with adult responsibilities and awareness.
In 2009 a coastal park ranger in southwest Wales explained to me how one of his duties was monitoring the behaviour of plant species with relation to their adaptation to climate change. What the rangers had observed “is best described like this; the gap between springtime and summer is getting longer.” Spring ends later but summer starts earlier. They overlap and the overlap is widening.
This reminds me so much of what happened with the invention of ‘teenage’ in Western civilisation.
Unlike how African and South American traditional tribal rites of passage where everyone knows their place in the world because everybody knows their responsibilities and what behaviour is expected of them. This is marked by having a ritual ‘death of childhood, birth of an adult’ ceremony as an overnight transition from childhood to adulthood.
Modern Westerners do not know their place in the world because they have no definitive sense of self as either child or adult. The social experiment is that westerners can have both at different times during the day. It creates confusion and delusion. It promotes a culture endorsing lack of accountability. By the 2020s it has resulted in a pandemic of narcissism.
We live in what Buddhists determine as a sansara society. Sansara means ‘the confused and conditioned mind’. The ancient Mayans forsaw this era as ‘the time of illusion’.
To safely navigate the current and forthcoming era, the necessity to sharpen the mind without developing rigid fundamentalism about irrelevant and delusional things is necessary now more than ever.
The ability to do calculus and maintain tight mental focus is a heightened tension. It necessarily for health involves also developing the ability to at other time relax, to let go of that intensity. An era marked by the development of neuro-plasticity also known as neuro-flexibility, as a psychological and as a social development by those who thrive.
The Modern World was post-industrial-revolution cultural development characterised by excitement and aspiration. Technology will solve our problems.
The Post-Modern world is characterised by cynicism. Technology has caused more problems without solving most of the original problems.
It was taught to me at the Acadamy at degree level in 1999 that;
“Currently we are post-post-post-modern because of rapid social transitions. Post-post-post modernism is at this time in history identified as ‘more of the same’ although with retrospect perhaps those yet to come will define it differently. We have to wait and see.” Alan Ford
As I write this in 2023 there have been sufficient social changes since the Millennium to notch a few other posts to the bedrocks.
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