Culture is Not Your Friend

TRANSCRIPT

In the past hundred years as these super technologies have been developed in the west (the smashing of atoms; the invention of radio, television, computers, immunology; so forth and so on) data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet: that they dissolve ordinary realities - ordinary cultural values - through an interaction, a symbiosis, a relationship, to local plants that perturb brain chemistry and in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry the cultural operating system is wiped clean and something older, even for these people, something older more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul replaces it, replaces the cultural operating system, something not determined by history and geography but something writ in the language of the flesh itself. This is who you are, this is true nakedness. You are not naked when you take off your clothes you still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your dillusions. When you shed the cultural operating system then, essentially, you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

Desmond Morris called it "The Naked Ape" and its from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human? What kind of circumstance are we caught in? And what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave? In other words we have to return to first premises.

So I've been thinking about this a lot and at first it seemed to me only a metaphor - this phrase "Culture is your operating system" - but because I travel around a lot and get that jolting experience frequently of, lets say, leaving London on a foggy evening and arriving in Johannesburg fourteen hours later to a sweltering day in a city of fourteen million on the brink of anarchy. I get to change my operating system frequently and so I notice the relativity of these systems and some work for some things and some for others. For instance of you are a positivist, if you're running positivism 4.0 you can't support UFO's. Positivism 4.0 does not support UFOs. If on the other hand you're running Urantia Book 5.1 as your operating system, UFOs and a number of other things can get in through the door. That is what we would technically say is a more tolerant operating system, or its plug-ins support special effects benighted at the positivist. Well, it’s fun to think this way because it shows you that you don’t have to be the victim of your culture. It’s not like your eye-color or your height or your gender. It’s fragile, it can be remade if you wish it to be and then the question is, well, how does one download a new operating system? Well, first of all you have to clear some space on your disc. The best way to do this is probably with a pharmacological agent, umm.... you think of some while I’ll have a drink of water.

Psilocybin is an excellent disk cleaner. You can put a lot of things in the trash and have them just disappear with a psilocybin upgrade. Other pharmacological agents that will clear your disk are ayahuasca and of course these are gentle clearings of the disk which take five, six, seven hours. If you’re in a hurry to dump that old data and leap right into the new operating system, click on the button marked dimethyltryptamine. A compressed disc-erasure will immediately be downloaded, unstuffed, bin-hexed, implemented, installed, run and you will find yourself with an entirely different head.

Now shamans have always known - though they may not have used the kind of language I’m using here - shamans have always known this trick. What trick? It has two facets. First of all that culture IS an operating system, that’s all it is, and that the operating system can be wiped out and replaced by something else. So in-essentially what’s going on among shamans and those who resort to them, for curing and counseling and so forth, is somebody is running a slightly more advanced operating system than the customer. The shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about the local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of. The client is running culture lite. The shaman paid for the registered and licensed version of the software and is running a much heavier version of the software than the client. I think we should all aspire to make this upgrade. It’s very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your operating system otherwise somebody is gonna be able to get a leg up on you.

Well, what’s wrong with the operating system that we have? Consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. Well, it’s dumb! It’s retro, it’s very non-competitive. It’s messy, it wastes the environment, it wastes human resources, it’s inefficient, it runs on stereotypes, it runs on a low sampling rate, which is what creates stereotypes, low sample rates make everybody appear alike, when in fact the glory is in everyone’s differences, and the current operating system is flawed. It actually has bugs in it, that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we’re cutting the earth from beneath our feet. We’re poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe: this is not intelligent behavior, this is a culture with a bug in its operating system that’s making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. Time to call a tech. And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.