THE CANVAS
Culture is not your friend.
The ‘I’ that I think I am does not exist. It is only my idea of ‘me’, which is a product of my experiences, memories, thoughts, culture – a persona or a character that I play unwittingly. The reality of my perception is not real. It is influenced by my education, ideas, expectations, culture as well as my experiences. The real world lies beyond this material world1. For “this life is not a thorn fig but a dream”, as Lefifi Tladi puts it. Human beings are said to perceive only about 0.06% of the universe through the five senses. Our built-in senses of mood, balance, danger, temperature etc. notwithstanding, this means that over 99.94% of the universe remains a mystery to us. We are in our minds, preoccupied with our thoughts in what is a very tiny fraction of the universe. We spend most of our lives inside a pre-packaged culture, inside a reality of someone else’s creation.
It’s a peculiar experience becoming a fully grown person in the world: you begin in your original thoughts and ideas, which are slowly bred out of you in a years’ long process and replaced with the thoughts and ideas of society, which are pre-ordained, pre-packaged ideas and thoughts. You are gradually turned into the lowest common denominator of your fellow men. Then when you get old enough, you end up participating in and consuming a culture which you were never meant to realize literally devours you. The purpose of any system is to maintain itself, which is why children are taught to comply and adults are trained to fix their attention to various distractions and pleasures like the news, beer and other sedatives, sports of all sorts - or whatever keeps them content with the status quo. As long as they do not rock the boat and raise the next generation in the same way. Culture is a cult, and this entire process is indoctrination of the highest order. Human beings are not supposed to be consumer beings, but rather creator beings. Parents, artisans, philosophers (I use this term loosely) and artists fulfil their roles in this regard.
Stop Easy
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Last Man, a creature totally obsessed with security and comfort and is thus incapable of throwing himself into a higher cause. The modern world is the Last Man’s playground. We live in an age of instantaneous gratification, with mind-numbing pleasures just a hand swipe away. Such a creature is dangerously lethargic and easy to manipulate. Our problem is conformity and laziness. We conform because it is easy to follow the herd. Creation is difficult work and involves an element of risk. It is not easy to chart the road less travelled.
We need to stop easy.
This partly what I am trying to do with The Looted Goods Project - to force myself to get out of my prison of comfort and create - however it turns out.
If you do not have a plan, you will become a part of someone else’s plan. Terence McKenna says, “Don’t consume culture. Create your own culture.” The world is your canvas and each day a blank page – yours to make of it what you will. A friend of mine enlightened me to the fact that being ‘pro-culture’ and ‘anti-culture’ is essentially the same thing, due to the fact that both are centered on the same idea. Anti-culture is following very artificially the precise opposite of what is demanded by social convention and propriety. These are parasitic notions that divert one’s attention from things that matter like creating culture and defining meaning.
Meaning is not something that should be accepted without question, especially when it pertains to life itself and is defined by another human being. For who among us has all the answers? It is a continuous definition of the individual by the individual, an exploration of the universe and of being. It is the ink that scribbles on that blank page. To simply go along with some pre-ordained notion without proper examination is to fail oneself. It is to be thoroughly bamboozled by the CULTure. Culture is an active, present process which involves the formation of relationships between all things known to us, and the narrow specialist is its servant and informant, not its arbiter.
IT’S STEEP LIKE COMING UP WHERE NIGGAS IS SHEEP LIKE - Common2
The CULTure is a multifaceted scheme with unwitting dupes constantly conning more recruits. In the film The Matrix, agents dressed in slick black suits and shades et al. work to prevent Neo (the one) from escaping the matrix. So it is in the case of these unwitting participants, except they do not realize what they are.
A consensus in meaning is what creates culture - not the imposition of it. Real culture is a continuous examination and definition of meaning. We must become creators of values. This is our individual duty and our collective purpose.
The logos in Plato’s The Republic.
All spiritual work points to this.
The Corner by Common