In the past hundred years as the 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 and symbioses.
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 some thing older — even for these people — something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it. Replaces the cultural operating system some thing not determined by history and geography, but some thing writ in the language of the flesh it’s self. This is who you are, this is truly nakedness, you are not naked when you take of your clothes.
You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.
When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of you 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 a swage the pain and extenuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth channel and the dawning
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 only 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, let's say, leaving London on a foggy evening and arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later to sweltering day in a city of 14 million on the brink anarchy. I get to change my OS frequently. and so I notice the relativity of these systems. and some work for some things and some for others.
For instance, if you are a positivist, if you are running 'positivism 4.0' you can't support UFO's. Positivism 4.0 does not support UFO's. If on the other hand you're running 'your ancient book 5.1' as your OS, UFO's and a number of other things can get in through the door. That is what we would technically say is a more tolerant OS.
Or its plug-in supports special effects denied to the positivists.
Well it's fun to think this way because it shows you that you don't have to be the victim of your culture. Its not like your eye color, or your height, or your gender. Its 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... err you think of some while I have a drink of water.
Psilocybin is an excellent disc 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 disc are Ayahuasca, and of course, these are gentle clearings of the disc which take 5, 6, 7 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 eraser will immediately be downloading, un-stuffed, implemented, installed, run and you will find yourself with a entirely different head.
Now, Shamans have always know this, but they may not of 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, essentially, what's going on among Shamans and those who resort to them for curing and counseling and so forth, some one is running a slightly more advanced operating system than the customer. The Shaman is in possession of certain facts about plants about, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about local geography, about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of, the client is running culture light the shaman pays 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 some bodies going to get a leg up on you. Well, what's wrong with the operating system we have consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is... well... its dumb, its retro, its very non competitive, its messy, it waste the environment, it waste human resources, its 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 the glory is in every ones 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 own feet, we're poisonings the atmosphere we breath. 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!
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I dig this.
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