Chapter One
Chapter One
THE FOOL’S JOURNEY
“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.” ― Terence McKenna
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” ― Terence McKenna
“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation” ― Terence McKenna
"You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” ― Terence McKenna
The first step of the journey to enlightenment does seem foolish to those still embedded or entrapped by their materialistic culture and traditions. Why in the world would anybody but a fool want to leave a good life, breaking with friends, family, job and church, to strike out on a nebulous journey of self-discovery alone and into the wilderness? Surely this person is not acting in a sane manner, claiming to be motivated only by some vague feelings and thoughts that something very serious is missing in life and that somehow what one now has is not enough!
It may never happen or maybe later in life after tremendous suffering and dead end chases after the illusionary pots of gold at the ends of the materialistic rainbows, that this “fool’s journey” may begin to make sense. Maybe the people embarking in their late teens and early twenties on this nebulous journey of self-discovery were really on to something only to be swept back into the accepted norms of culture and suffering by the all-powerful collective demands of culture and tradition. Maybe even I was at one time one of these idealistic youths who just did not make the grade and fell back as family, work and other responsibilities began to pile up, leaving my idealistic dreams in shambles.
Maybe in old age after the kids are grown and there is time in retirement to sit and think that some will look back on their lives and wonder is there more to life than this. Among the feelings of depression, anger, anxiety and even hate, thoughts and questions might arise here and there. Did I miss something important in life amongst all the demands of society and family that has been responsible for why I now suffer so much? Has a damaged mental and emotional life led to or accelerated the physical diseases that now incapacitate and hinder my quality of life?
Of course it is never too late to take stock of one’s life and begin the long hard journey to enlightenment. It’s a journey we all will take sooner or later and even a late start in this life can lead to earlier starts in lives yet to be. It’s important to begin the journey from the grandest, most comprehensive perspective possible even if at the time one has doubts about consciousness surviving the death. When I began my journey I thought long and hard about this and decided that if I did not survive the death of the body then there was nothing to worry about.
However, if I did survive then karma was not just a force in this life to be reckoned with but for eternity and many lives to come. So I thought it wise and prudent to live my life as if this were true so that all my bases were covered. As it turns out every day I see more and more evidence of the beneficial effects of this policy and the increased possibility reincarnation and OBE and NDE experiences are real and that I am acting on reality and not just theory alone. So no matter what your age it’s never too late to begin this journey when you think and act from the really big picture, even if to begin with it is only a theory to you.
Once a person is willing to accept the possibility that the material world is basically a school for individual and collective conscious expression, we can begin to really accelerate our learning. In the process our individual suffering begins to diminish because we are using right thought and right action to navigate, and so don’t unknowingly stumble into one consciousness pitfall or trap after another by thinking and acting from a state of ignorance.
Little children are constantly hurting themselves physically by running and tripping over things because of ignorance and not paying attention to their surroundings. The same thing happens on a mental and emotional level throughout our lives; but we fail to recognize that it is our ignorance that is really hurting us and instead blame others and the environment. To make things even worse, we try to hurt back in reaction to this suffering and in our culture we have created hell on earth in some places.
The cultural historic wave we have collectively created has built into it horrific subcultures of death and destruction of both man and nature that from time to time condemns millions of people to suffering and death. People embedded in their cultures march off to war with hardly a second thought to murder others and to be murdered themselves or to slaughter each other based on cultural, racial, economic or religious differences.
This is why it is so important to create a subculture lifestyle of our own separated to some degree from the overall culture. We just are not able to pick and choose the conditioning we need if we are too obsessed, involved or embedded, so we end up being driven to experience both the benefits and liabilities of the overall culture. This is the reason we need to break with our culture in order to later reenter it as being in the world but not of it. Not only can we then pick and choose the elements of culture that benefit us, we also can add to the beneficial aspects of the culture for ourselves and future generations.
This article Culture Is Not Your Friend correctly points out this problem with sorting out the wheat from the chaff in culture but fails to understand that the way the sorting takes place is to maintain an individual objective perspective. [7]
“The first one is the question of whether it is desirable or even possible to abolish culture. Culture after all has given us law, science, ethics, philosophy and made possible all the achievements of talent and of sanctity as Huxley felt necessary to note[xiii]. Even McKenna felt compelled to agree that we do not wish to abolish culture altogether, since some of it is valuable, such as for example “the Sistine chapel”. Both have made preliminary attempts at distinguishing those parts of culture which are positive and inspiring from those which are misguided and cancerous. A convincing and final answer about how to distinguish between those parts of culture which are worth preserving and those which should be forsaken, is however nowhere to be found.”
In order to move from our seriously dysfunctional culture that overall suppresses and submerges the enlightenment process to an overall culture supporting enlightenment, we need to drop out, gain perspective and then reenter in order to transform culture. The way to do this to transform our own personal lifestyles to ones that support enlightenment and this may not only involve bringing such things as meditation into our lives but actually moving to a simple lifestyle in natural surroundings. Once we have removed ourselves from culture to some extent through a change in lifestyle we can begin to see what it is in culture that is victimizing us and what is supporting us.
“According to McKenna, the victims of culture include all those who are subjected to its dogmas, values and ideologies: From the young man going to kill and die in a war against people he never met in the name of culture, to those who limit and suppress their sexual identity and preferences in order to conform to culture’s moral dictates, as well as to those whose aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities are shaped by culture’s limiting constructs of expression and thought – in short, everybody. By embracing cultural forms such as ideologies, trends or brands, we are giving up on the precious opportunity for individual expression inherent in human existence. By defining ourselves through a predetermined concept or structure, saying for example:” I am a Marxist” or “I am an Apple fan” – one gives up his chance for self-definition. Culture, as McKenna puts it, is an intelligence test – and those who choose to embrace it fail the test.”
In gaining “self-definition” and perspective once to some degree outside of culture we can begin to understand how culture binds us and it is interesting how close this statement comes to the shaman’s wheel of time as outlined by Don Juan.
“Robert Anton Wilson, who elaborated many of the ideas proposed by Leary’s in the 1960s, during the 1970s and onwards elaborated on the idea of Kulturbrille in his concept of “Reality Tunnel”. According to Wilson ideology and models of the world in general is a “reality tunnel” which shapes the way we view the world. A reality tunnel is a kind of “brainwash” and Wilson maintained that “the easiest way to be brainwashed is to be born” .
Culture, in his eyes, was a tool for programming the minds of human beings. Such programming is done by all cultures, and predisposes the individual to view the world through a particular reality tunnel which will shape his view of reality whether it be that of ‘Eskimo totemists, Moslem fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, Marxist Leninists, Nazis, Methodist Republicans, Oxford agnostics, Snake worshipers, Ku Kluxers, Mafiosos, Unitarians, IRA-ists, PLO-ists, orthodox Jews, hard-shell Baptists etc. etc.’
The thing which unites the people who hold all these extremely different views of the world is their commitment to a certain ideology or worldview through which they see all things. Thus, they tend to gather any piece of evidence which will support their particular worldview and dismiss any piece of evidence which will go counter to it –creating a customized, highly particularized view of the world to suit their own predispositions.”
I find this last paragraph especially important because in reality we are top predators that use and have used throughout our history the tactics characteristic of other predators in nature. For instance a lion sneaks up using stealth and deception in the high grass until it is close enough to the unwary distracted prey to mount a direct attack. As in the rest of nature, we as predators have used and still use secrecy, stealth, lies, subterfuges, distraction etc. to capture prey. Unfortunately our relations among ourselves are dominated by these same predator-prey relationships where we use these same predator tactics against each other individually and in groups. We even go so far as to lie to ourselves in the name of politics and religion that the harm we do to others is for their own good.
What we really need is less inter-species predation and competition and more cooperation to develop win-win relationships rather than win-lose relationships. But before we can do that we have to understand that we are constantly creating and maintaining, “a customized, highly particularized view (model) of the world to suit our own predispositions.” If we observe ourselves, others and our and their internal and external dialogue, we can see that through selective use of both truth and lies we model our world in a very defective way.
So the first step is to stop lying to ourselves and others so as to develop a better more realistic model on both a personal and collective level. Then we can begin to improve our predatory relationships and even turn them into cooperative relationships where everybody wins and nobody loses. If we don’t do this then our personal model degraded by lies and deceptions, not only destroys our lives individually but also compounds into extremely damaging politics and religious extremism leading to war, poverty, disease, mass murder and the death of millions of people.
For example because of our own individual flawed models of reality we resonate and go off to war to die and bleed for those top predators among us fighting for control over land, resources and people. We buy into the propaganda of nations that we are heroes not fools to give up our lives and cripple our bodies to fight in regional and global wars centered on competition between the psychopathic leaders. We are vulnerable because our own internal and external propaganda resonates to the greater culture because our individualized propaganda is in itself riddled with flawed thinking, emotion, and action based on using others to our own advantage with little regard to the well-being of the others.
We can develop a personal discipline where we transform our personal space and that of others around us through disciplines like yoga and meditation. This may mean we might have to drop out of the overall culture for a while to get our bearings and find a physical and spiritual center. Then once we have our center we can begin to integrate back into society in a careful limited way avoiding the destructive aspects of culture and supporting the constructive aspects of culture.
We need a simple lifestyle that gives us time and space for this “self-definition” that does not require us to give too much time to gathering, protecting and maintaining resources allowing us to divert our attention to the enlightenment process. We retreat into our inner sanctum to sort out our thinking and our emotions, so retreat can be a beneficial process toward later moving back into culture and society in a mutually beneficial manner.
Lifestyle
Altering and transforming our lifestyle is one important way to begin the enlightenment process because we use it to escape the detrimental, obsessive, destructive demands of a unenlightened cultural matrix. This cultural unenlightened matrix drags us down where we end up as swimmers drowning in a turbulent ocean. It’s everything we can do just to keep our heads above water as we suffer immensely having no time or strength to escape to higher ground.
One way to think about this is that few people live their lives in the calm peaceful center of the hurricane that surround them but rather in the turbulent eye-wall being blown here and there by the force of cultural impacts and their own turbulent internal state. If we live out our lives in the peaceful center of the cultural hurricane then we are unmoved and unshaken by events as they transpire all around us.
The way to begin to actualize this state of being centered and at peace even while surrounded by suffering and conflict is to create a physical space, a retreat often away from cities and in nature. In addition this retreat should be simple and take little time for maintenance and if our needs are few it will take little in the way of money to subsist. It’s important to understand that what we own also owns us in that we have to maintain what we own. A large house is expensive to not only own, but to maintain while a small cabin takes little maintenance.
Many people who dropped out of mainstream culture by moving to Alaska bought a piece of land in the spring, pitched a tent or brought in a small RV to live in while they built their cabin during the summer. By winter time the cabin was finished at least on the outside and well insulted for the winter. In winter folks would finish up on the interior of the cabin. It really does not take that long to build a 15 by 15 foot structure especially if you are young and healthy with a strong back. Such a structure can be built between two weeks and a month depending just how hard one is working.
This leaves plenty of time if one gets started early in the spring for a garden and landscaping around a birdfeeder outside of a plate glass window. This window rather than a TV can focus ones attention on nature helping to free the mind rather than a TV that just maintains destructive cultural ties. It’s nice to have water close to the cabin as well as this will bring in more diverse types of wildlife like herons, turtles, fishes, otter, ducks and dragonflies. I learned that this can be as simple as digging out a small pond in a wet spot the size of three swimming pools with an excavator at little cost. So one can bring the water to the cabin rather than have to buy an expensive piece of land on water.
For myself I have a cabin that is 14 by 30 feet with a loft for sleeping. I have a 6 by 6 foot glass window looking out on a bird and butterfly garden on one end and a small screened porch looking down a few feet away to the pond. So depending on the weather I move back and forth from sitting in front of the bird window or the porch. I have also planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden and cleaned up the rest of the large lot that has a pine overstory so that I can maintain the land with a rake, machete, fire and a push mower.
A person working hard can clean out the brush under trees and open up land first by chopping down the brush low to the ground then going over it all with a small cheap push-mower. This way one can easily keep the land open once it has been cleared and no longer is a fire hazard as well. It’s easy to walk around and enjoy the property when understory is cleaned out, free of ticks and chiggers.
As far as building the cabin if one has not learned basic carpenter skills as a child like I have, one can get a book and start building more simple structures on the land first like a pole shed for storing lumber for the future cabin and general storage after the cabin is built. Some people even close in part of the pole shed creating a barn in which they live while they build their cabin or home.
It’s often best to just buy land and move to it right away using what one had been spending on rent to pay for the land and structures being built on the land. Paying rent is throwing money down a rat-hole mortgaging one’s future. I have seen so many people that after 10 years of paying rent would have owned their own land and home mortgage free if they had been willing to sacrifice and put their money into property rather than rent and utilities. Also folks can waste a lot of money day to day of frivolous stuff when they don’t have something important to be putting the money into.
Okay so now we have our retreat to serve as our physical center and can now develop the disciplines necessary to create a personal and sub-cultural environment insulating us from the larger general dysfunctional culture and supporting better ways of feeling and thinking. In time we can take this understanding and travel to and from the greater culture involving ourselves in political action, religious activities, healing and other pursuits that benefit the greater over-culture.
Mobility
Mobility should be part of our lifestyle. As global culture continues to degrade with more suffering being necessary, we want to avoid this cultural tsunami of the collective that is failing to learn its collective lessons. What I see is a collective failure to address issues of overpopulation, overconsumption, unequal distribution of resources and excessive global competition and predation within humanity’s social structure.
There seems to be little value to be found in love, truth and wisdom when the prominent value of most people seems to be doing whatever it takes to gain advantage over others including deceptive predatory tactics. Personal lies and deceptions build individual and collective delusionary thinking, feeling and actions that are pushing society over the brink.
Those that value enlightenment over everything else don’t want to follow their leaders over the precipice to collective and personal destruction, so along with sanctuary, mobility is important. If a war or ethnic cleansing threatens to break out where we are, we have to be able to move to a more peaceful area before getting caught up in the disaster. We can see in the international news where millions of people are relocating with little more than the clothes that they are wearing. Those of us that value peace and enlightenment have to take responsibility for moving ahead of the curve of suffering and violence and that takes not only awareness to recognize the threat, but careful planning so we don’t either get trapped in place or leave with nothing but the shirt on our back.
In nature the species that prosper and broaden their ranges in times of great change are ones that are best able to adapt to changing circumstances. The endangered Red Cockaded Woodpecker and Spotted Owl once were very successful and widespread in the old growth forests before European colonization. However, because they were so specialized to old growth forests that when these were logged and light fire excluded, the nature of the forests changed and they are now almost extinct. In contrast the crow and blackbird have been able to adapt to man’s activities and have expanded their range and numbers.
In nature we have this dynamic where creatures have to find a balance between adapting and prospering in a specialized environment that may at any time suddenly change. It’s the same thing with human society. We have to be adaptive to our current environment, but still retain the ability to be flexible when our current environment changes or is no longer supportive. As students of enlightenment, we have to position ourselves in physical, mental and emotional space that is most appropriate for us at any given time. In order to do this we have to be adaptive and flexible in our thinking, feeling and actions.
If our situation or our environment changes, what might have been useful thinking and action at one time may no longer be useful and may even be destructive. We have to have a flexible model of reality that is true, modeling the contours of the reality and lessons being presented to us in the present. I see so many people still trying over and over, stuck in a quagmire of suffering, thinking that just because a tactic has worked before in the past it should continue to work for them now. It’s important to realize when our world changes we have to change in unison.
If we get angry, hateful or depressed blaming others for our demise, then we are not learning this lesson of mobility. If one is in front of the gun one always has the choice to blame the one holding the gun and get shot, or take responsibility for getting into that compromised position and figure a way out. If one gets good at the enlightenment process because of the heightened awareness, one gets out of the way before the gun gets pointed in their direction and they find themselves in a crisis situation.
Trouble in the material world can even be avoided if one is aware enough to catch trouble in the mental and emotional realm and dissipate it before it has a chance to manifest in the physical. People that are constantly in crisis under continuous stress, need to learn to slow down and gain the awareness necessary to deal with situations before they reach the point of crisis. If the zebra are paying attention and avoiding the deceptions of the lion, then they will keep a safe distance. If the zebra are not paying attention, distracted or in denial, then the lion can get close enough to put them in crisis and their lives at risk.
Enlightenment Disciplines
Once we realize that we really do want freedom from suffering and have begun extricating ourselves from the destructive dominant culture, the next step is to develop constructive disciplines of behavior that become constructive habits for the rest of our lives. This involves taking steps toward creating and maintaining an enlightened lifestyle but within that context we must discipline our mind, emotions and actions so that we control our emotions, thoughts and body and not the other way around. We can’t have culture determining what we think, how we feel and how we act but instead take charge of ourselves.
It takes little disciple to take a psychoactive drug to get a glimpse where we want to go but it takes a powerful warrior’s discipline day by day year by year, for the rest of our lives to take and maintain control over our emotions, thoughts and actions for enlightenment’s sake. Yoga, meditation, prayer and other religious practices are not easy, especially to begin when we have the inertia of destructive cultural habits and conditioning to overcome.
One of the most difficult things is using meditation techniques to gain control over our thinking and feeling. In India they have a saying when an elephant is roaming wild in the forest he does not struggle but when he is caught and tied to a stump he struggles to regain his freedom. It’s the same with habitual thought and emotional processes they have taken on a life of their own, an independent existence outside the control of the individual to which they belong. So it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. What good are our thoughts, emotions and body if it won’t do what we want it to do but insists going its own way to our detriment?
To see what I mean just sit in a quiet place and try concentrating on repeating a word over and over in your mind for half an hour. See just how long you can concentrate on repeating the word before you find yourself thinking about something else or even quitting because thoughts arise that this is a waste of time. I doubt that most people won’t be able to concentrate on repeating this word longer that 15 -20 seconds before they find themselves on another train of thought.
What happens is that if you persist for a while coming back to repeating the word over and over, you can find that you can catch your mind wandering in ever earlier stages of activity. At this point your mind will really begin to struggle to get you to stop. You will think this meditation is really silly, or I got to go pee, or the cell phone rings and you rush to answer it. It feels like there is some kind of conspiracy against being able to concentrate on just this one thing.
It seems like ones inner life and outer life conspire to keep one from doing this and in a way it’s true. The inertia of old inner and outer habits actually seems to conspire to hold and condition you, freezing you in habitual thought and emotional processes. So not only does it take a powerful will and intent to break out, it takes the discipline of a day to day approach to gain back control over your thoughts and emotions and your life. In a way culture or society owns you as a cultural slave and the means for doing this is though thought and emotional responses and connections. Why do you think that nations and corporations invest so much in propaganda operations?
What actually happens if one persists in meditation day after day is that slowly by concentrating on only one thing a state of detachment begins to develop where the thought process begins to slow down. Thoughts begin to be observed as packets of images one after the other with spaces in between. Once one gets over the fascination with the images and continues, the space between the images broadens and the images are fewer and more intense.
Eventually the thoughts and images stop and one enters into a state of no thought: a vastness of quiet and peace from which the thoughts and images seem to arise like bubbles. If we observe bubbles that start small down deep in the ocean we see they get bigger as they come to the surface. At this point, it is as if we are all connected like islands surrounded by ocean. Beneath the ocean that separates the islands is land that connects all the islands together. So everybody everywhere and all of nature as well, are connected on this deep subconscious quantum level. One begins to feel this wholeness, connectivity and peace and when one comes out of meditation it persists on into everyday life.
We begin to live our lives from this internal state of peace, connectedness and tranquility rather from the state of inner and outer chaos. We are in the world but not of it. We have control over our lives and begin to move in a disciplined deliberate manner, moment to moment into enlightenment and love and out of chaos and fear. We are aware of ourselves and how we interact with our environment and chisel away where we are wasting ourselves and our energy.
THE FOOL’S JOURNEY
“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.” ― Terence McKenna
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” ― Terence McKenna
“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation” ― Terence McKenna
"You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” ― Terence McKenna
The first step of the journey to enlightenment does seem foolish to those still embedded or entrapped by their materialistic culture and traditions. Why in the world would anybody but a fool want to leave a good life, breaking with friends, family, job and church, to strike out on a nebulous journey of self-discovery alone and into the wilderness? Surely this person is not acting in a sane manner, claiming to be motivated only by some vague feelings and thoughts that something very serious is missing in life and that somehow what one now has is not enough!
It may never happen or maybe later in life after tremendous suffering and dead end chases after the illusionary pots of gold at the ends of the materialistic rainbows, that this “fool’s journey” may begin to make sense. Maybe the people embarking in their late teens and early twenties on this nebulous journey of self-discovery were really on to something only to be swept back into the accepted norms of culture and suffering by the all-powerful collective demands of culture and tradition. Maybe even I was at one time one of these idealistic youths who just did not make the grade and fell back as family, work and other responsibilities began to pile up, leaving my idealistic dreams in shambles.
Maybe in old age after the kids are grown and there is time in retirement to sit and think that some will look back on their lives and wonder is there more to life than this. Among the feelings of depression, anger, anxiety and even hate, thoughts and questions might arise here and there. Did I miss something important in life amongst all the demands of society and family that has been responsible for why I now suffer so much? Has a damaged mental and emotional life led to or accelerated the physical diseases that now incapacitate and hinder my quality of life?
Of course it is never too late to take stock of one’s life and begin the long hard journey to enlightenment. It’s a journey we all will take sooner or later and even a late start in this life can lead to earlier starts in lives yet to be. It’s important to begin the journey from the grandest, most comprehensive perspective possible even if at the time one has doubts about consciousness surviving the death. When I began my journey I thought long and hard about this and decided that if I did not survive the death of the body then there was nothing to worry about.
However, if I did survive then karma was not just a force in this life to be reckoned with but for eternity and many lives to come. So I thought it wise and prudent to live my life as if this were true so that all my bases were covered. As it turns out every day I see more and more evidence of the beneficial effects of this policy and the increased possibility reincarnation and OBE and NDE experiences are real and that I am acting on reality and not just theory alone. So no matter what your age it’s never too late to begin this journey when you think and act from the really big picture, even if to begin with it is only a theory to you.
Once a person is willing to accept the possibility that the material world is basically a school for individual and collective conscious expression, we can begin to really accelerate our learning. In the process our individual suffering begins to diminish because we are using right thought and right action to navigate, and so don’t unknowingly stumble into one consciousness pitfall or trap after another by thinking and acting from a state of ignorance.
Little children are constantly hurting themselves physically by running and tripping over things because of ignorance and not paying attention to their surroundings. The same thing happens on a mental and emotional level throughout our lives; but we fail to recognize that it is our ignorance that is really hurting us and instead blame others and the environment. To make things even worse, we try to hurt back in reaction to this suffering and in our culture we have created hell on earth in some places.
The cultural historic wave we have collectively created has built into it horrific subcultures of death and destruction of both man and nature that from time to time condemns millions of people to suffering and death. People embedded in their cultures march off to war with hardly a second thought to murder others and to be murdered themselves or to slaughter each other based on cultural, racial, economic or religious differences.
This is why it is so important to create a subculture lifestyle of our own separated to some degree from the overall culture. We just are not able to pick and choose the conditioning we need if we are too obsessed, involved or embedded, so we end up being driven to experience both the benefits and liabilities of the overall culture. This is the reason we need to break with our culture in order to later reenter it as being in the world but not of it. Not only can we then pick and choose the elements of culture that benefit us, we also can add to the beneficial aspects of the culture for ourselves and future generations.
This article Culture Is Not Your Friend correctly points out this problem with sorting out the wheat from the chaff in culture but fails to understand that the way the sorting takes place is to maintain an individual objective perspective. [7]
“The first one is the question of whether it is desirable or even possible to abolish culture. Culture after all has given us law, science, ethics, philosophy and made possible all the achievements of talent and of sanctity as Huxley felt necessary to note[xiii]. Even McKenna felt compelled to agree that we do not wish to abolish culture altogether, since some of it is valuable, such as for example “the Sistine chapel”. Both have made preliminary attempts at distinguishing those parts of culture which are positive and inspiring from those which are misguided and cancerous. A convincing and final answer about how to distinguish between those parts of culture which are worth preserving and those which should be forsaken, is however nowhere to be found.”
In order to move from our seriously dysfunctional culture that overall suppresses and submerges the enlightenment process to an overall culture supporting enlightenment, we need to drop out, gain perspective and then reenter in order to transform culture. The way to do this to transform our own personal lifestyles to ones that support enlightenment and this may not only involve bringing such things as meditation into our lives but actually moving to a simple lifestyle in natural surroundings. Once we have removed ourselves from culture to some extent through a change in lifestyle we can begin to see what it is in culture that is victimizing us and what is supporting us.
“According to McKenna, the victims of culture include all those who are subjected to its dogmas, values and ideologies: From the young man going to kill and die in a war against people he never met in the name of culture, to those who limit and suppress their sexual identity and preferences in order to conform to culture’s moral dictates, as well as to those whose aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities are shaped by culture’s limiting constructs of expression and thought – in short, everybody. By embracing cultural forms such as ideologies, trends or brands, we are giving up on the precious opportunity for individual expression inherent in human existence. By defining ourselves through a predetermined concept or structure, saying for example:” I am a Marxist” or “I am an Apple fan” – one gives up his chance for self-definition. Culture, as McKenna puts it, is an intelligence test – and those who choose to embrace it fail the test.”
In gaining “self-definition” and perspective once to some degree outside of culture we can begin to understand how culture binds us and it is interesting how close this statement comes to the shaman’s wheel of time as outlined by Don Juan.
“Robert Anton Wilson, who elaborated many of the ideas proposed by Leary’s in the 1960s, during the 1970s and onwards elaborated on the idea of Kulturbrille in his concept of “Reality Tunnel”. According to Wilson ideology and models of the world in general is a “reality tunnel” which shapes the way we view the world. A reality tunnel is a kind of “brainwash” and Wilson maintained that “the easiest way to be brainwashed is to be born” .
Culture, in his eyes, was a tool for programming the minds of human beings. Such programming is done by all cultures, and predisposes the individual to view the world through a particular reality tunnel which will shape his view of reality whether it be that of ‘Eskimo totemists, Moslem fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, Marxist Leninists, Nazis, Methodist Republicans, Oxford agnostics, Snake worshipers, Ku Kluxers, Mafiosos, Unitarians, IRA-ists, PLO-ists, orthodox Jews, hard-shell Baptists etc. etc.’
The thing which unites the people who hold all these extremely different views of the world is their commitment to a certain ideology or worldview through which they see all things. Thus, they tend to gather any piece of evidence which will support their particular worldview and dismiss any piece of evidence which will go counter to it –creating a customized, highly particularized view of the world to suit their own predispositions.”
I find this last paragraph especially important because in reality we are top predators that use and have used throughout our history the tactics characteristic of other predators in nature. For instance a lion sneaks up using stealth and deception in the high grass until it is close enough to the unwary distracted prey to mount a direct attack. As in the rest of nature, we as predators have used and still use secrecy, stealth, lies, subterfuges, distraction etc. to capture prey. Unfortunately our relations among ourselves are dominated by these same predator-prey relationships where we use these same predator tactics against each other individually and in groups. We even go so far as to lie to ourselves in the name of politics and religion that the harm we do to others is for their own good.
What we really need is less inter-species predation and competition and more cooperation to develop win-win relationships rather than win-lose relationships. But before we can do that we have to understand that we are constantly creating and maintaining, “a customized, highly particularized view (model) of the world to suit our own predispositions.” If we observe ourselves, others and our and their internal and external dialogue, we can see that through selective use of both truth and lies we model our world in a very defective way.
So the first step is to stop lying to ourselves and others so as to develop a better more realistic model on both a personal and collective level. Then we can begin to improve our predatory relationships and even turn them into cooperative relationships where everybody wins and nobody loses. If we don’t do this then our personal model degraded by lies and deceptions, not only destroys our lives individually but also compounds into extremely damaging politics and religious extremism leading to war, poverty, disease, mass murder and the death of millions of people.
For example because of our own individual flawed models of reality we resonate and go off to war to die and bleed for those top predators among us fighting for control over land, resources and people. We buy into the propaganda of nations that we are heroes not fools to give up our lives and cripple our bodies to fight in regional and global wars centered on competition between the psychopathic leaders. We are vulnerable because our own internal and external propaganda resonates to the greater culture because our individualized propaganda is in itself riddled with flawed thinking, emotion, and action based on using others to our own advantage with little regard to the well-being of the others.
We can develop a personal discipline where we transform our personal space and that of others around us through disciplines like yoga and meditation. This may mean we might have to drop out of the overall culture for a while to get our bearings and find a physical and spiritual center. Then once we have our center we can begin to integrate back into society in a careful limited way avoiding the destructive aspects of culture and supporting the constructive aspects of culture.
We need a simple lifestyle that gives us time and space for this “self-definition” that does not require us to give too much time to gathering, protecting and maintaining resources allowing us to divert our attention to the enlightenment process. We retreat into our inner sanctum to sort out our thinking and our emotions, so retreat can be a beneficial process toward later moving back into culture and society in a mutually beneficial manner.
Lifestyle
Altering and transforming our lifestyle is one important way to begin the enlightenment process because we use it to escape the detrimental, obsessive, destructive demands of a unenlightened cultural matrix. This cultural unenlightened matrix drags us down where we end up as swimmers drowning in a turbulent ocean. It’s everything we can do just to keep our heads above water as we suffer immensely having no time or strength to escape to higher ground.
One way to think about this is that few people live their lives in the calm peaceful center of the hurricane that surround them but rather in the turbulent eye-wall being blown here and there by the force of cultural impacts and their own turbulent internal state. If we live out our lives in the peaceful center of the cultural hurricane then we are unmoved and unshaken by events as they transpire all around us.
The way to begin to actualize this state of being centered and at peace even while surrounded by suffering and conflict is to create a physical space, a retreat often away from cities and in nature. In addition this retreat should be simple and take little time for maintenance and if our needs are few it will take little in the way of money to subsist. It’s important to understand that what we own also owns us in that we have to maintain what we own. A large house is expensive to not only own, but to maintain while a small cabin takes little maintenance.
Many people who dropped out of mainstream culture by moving to Alaska bought a piece of land in the spring, pitched a tent or brought in a small RV to live in while they built their cabin during the summer. By winter time the cabin was finished at least on the outside and well insulted for the winter. In winter folks would finish up on the interior of the cabin. It really does not take that long to build a 15 by 15 foot structure especially if you are young and healthy with a strong back. Such a structure can be built between two weeks and a month depending just how hard one is working.
This leaves plenty of time if one gets started early in the spring for a garden and landscaping around a birdfeeder outside of a plate glass window. This window rather than a TV can focus ones attention on nature helping to free the mind rather than a TV that just maintains destructive cultural ties. It’s nice to have water close to the cabin as well as this will bring in more diverse types of wildlife like herons, turtles, fishes, otter, ducks and dragonflies. I learned that this can be as simple as digging out a small pond in a wet spot the size of three swimming pools with an excavator at little cost. So one can bring the water to the cabin rather than have to buy an expensive piece of land on water.
For myself I have a cabin that is 14 by 30 feet with a loft for sleeping. I have a 6 by 6 foot glass window looking out on a bird and butterfly garden on one end and a small screened porch looking down a few feet away to the pond. So depending on the weather I move back and forth from sitting in front of the bird window or the porch. I have also planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden and cleaned up the rest of the large lot that has a pine overstory so that I can maintain the land with a rake, machete, fire and a push mower.
A person working hard can clean out the brush under trees and open up land first by chopping down the brush low to the ground then going over it all with a small cheap push-mower. This way one can easily keep the land open once it has been cleared and no longer is a fire hazard as well. It’s easy to walk around and enjoy the property when understory is cleaned out, free of ticks and chiggers.
As far as building the cabin if one has not learned basic carpenter skills as a child like I have, one can get a book and start building more simple structures on the land first like a pole shed for storing lumber for the future cabin and general storage after the cabin is built. Some people even close in part of the pole shed creating a barn in which they live while they build their cabin or home.
It’s often best to just buy land and move to it right away using what one had been spending on rent to pay for the land and structures being built on the land. Paying rent is throwing money down a rat-hole mortgaging one’s future. I have seen so many people that after 10 years of paying rent would have owned their own land and home mortgage free if they had been willing to sacrifice and put their money into property rather than rent and utilities. Also folks can waste a lot of money day to day of frivolous stuff when they don’t have something important to be putting the money into.
Okay so now we have our retreat to serve as our physical center and can now develop the disciplines necessary to create a personal and sub-cultural environment insulating us from the larger general dysfunctional culture and supporting better ways of feeling and thinking. In time we can take this understanding and travel to and from the greater culture involving ourselves in political action, religious activities, healing and other pursuits that benefit the greater over-culture.
Mobility
Mobility should be part of our lifestyle. As global culture continues to degrade with more suffering being necessary, we want to avoid this cultural tsunami of the collective that is failing to learn its collective lessons. What I see is a collective failure to address issues of overpopulation, overconsumption, unequal distribution of resources and excessive global competition and predation within humanity’s social structure.
There seems to be little value to be found in love, truth and wisdom when the prominent value of most people seems to be doing whatever it takes to gain advantage over others including deceptive predatory tactics. Personal lies and deceptions build individual and collective delusionary thinking, feeling and actions that are pushing society over the brink.
Those that value enlightenment over everything else don’t want to follow their leaders over the precipice to collective and personal destruction, so along with sanctuary, mobility is important. If a war or ethnic cleansing threatens to break out where we are, we have to be able to move to a more peaceful area before getting caught up in the disaster. We can see in the international news where millions of people are relocating with little more than the clothes that they are wearing. Those of us that value peace and enlightenment have to take responsibility for moving ahead of the curve of suffering and violence and that takes not only awareness to recognize the threat, but careful planning so we don’t either get trapped in place or leave with nothing but the shirt on our back.
In nature the species that prosper and broaden their ranges in times of great change are ones that are best able to adapt to changing circumstances. The endangered Red Cockaded Woodpecker and Spotted Owl once were very successful and widespread in the old growth forests before European colonization. However, because they were so specialized to old growth forests that when these were logged and light fire excluded, the nature of the forests changed and they are now almost extinct. In contrast the crow and blackbird have been able to adapt to man’s activities and have expanded their range and numbers.
In nature we have this dynamic where creatures have to find a balance between adapting and prospering in a specialized environment that may at any time suddenly change. It’s the same thing with human society. We have to be adaptive to our current environment, but still retain the ability to be flexible when our current environment changes or is no longer supportive. As students of enlightenment, we have to position ourselves in physical, mental and emotional space that is most appropriate for us at any given time. In order to do this we have to be adaptive and flexible in our thinking, feeling and actions.
If our situation or our environment changes, what might have been useful thinking and action at one time may no longer be useful and may even be destructive. We have to have a flexible model of reality that is true, modeling the contours of the reality and lessons being presented to us in the present. I see so many people still trying over and over, stuck in a quagmire of suffering, thinking that just because a tactic has worked before in the past it should continue to work for them now. It’s important to realize when our world changes we have to change in unison.
If we get angry, hateful or depressed blaming others for our demise, then we are not learning this lesson of mobility. If one is in front of the gun one always has the choice to blame the one holding the gun and get shot, or take responsibility for getting into that compromised position and figure a way out. If one gets good at the enlightenment process because of the heightened awareness, one gets out of the way before the gun gets pointed in their direction and they find themselves in a crisis situation.
Trouble in the material world can even be avoided if one is aware enough to catch trouble in the mental and emotional realm and dissipate it before it has a chance to manifest in the physical. People that are constantly in crisis under continuous stress, need to learn to slow down and gain the awareness necessary to deal with situations before they reach the point of crisis. If the zebra are paying attention and avoiding the deceptions of the lion, then they will keep a safe distance. If the zebra are not paying attention, distracted or in denial, then the lion can get close enough to put them in crisis and their lives at risk.
Enlightenment Disciplines
Once we realize that we really do want freedom from suffering and have begun extricating ourselves from the destructive dominant culture, the next step is to develop constructive disciplines of behavior that become constructive habits for the rest of our lives. This involves taking steps toward creating and maintaining an enlightened lifestyle but within that context we must discipline our mind, emotions and actions so that we control our emotions, thoughts and body and not the other way around. We can’t have culture determining what we think, how we feel and how we act but instead take charge of ourselves.
It takes little disciple to take a psychoactive drug to get a glimpse where we want to go but it takes a powerful warrior’s discipline day by day year by year, for the rest of our lives to take and maintain control over our emotions, thoughts and actions for enlightenment’s sake. Yoga, meditation, prayer and other religious practices are not easy, especially to begin when we have the inertia of destructive cultural habits and conditioning to overcome.
One of the most difficult things is using meditation techniques to gain control over our thinking and feeling. In India they have a saying when an elephant is roaming wild in the forest he does not struggle but when he is caught and tied to a stump he struggles to regain his freedom. It’s the same with habitual thought and emotional processes they have taken on a life of their own, an independent existence outside the control of the individual to which they belong. So it’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. What good are our thoughts, emotions and body if it won’t do what we want it to do but insists going its own way to our detriment?
To see what I mean just sit in a quiet place and try concentrating on repeating a word over and over in your mind for half an hour. See just how long you can concentrate on repeating the word before you find yourself thinking about something else or even quitting because thoughts arise that this is a waste of time. I doubt that most people won’t be able to concentrate on repeating this word longer that 15 -20 seconds before they find themselves on another train of thought.
What happens is that if you persist for a while coming back to repeating the word over and over, you can find that you can catch your mind wandering in ever earlier stages of activity. At this point your mind will really begin to struggle to get you to stop. You will think this meditation is really silly, or I got to go pee, or the cell phone rings and you rush to answer it. It feels like there is some kind of conspiracy against being able to concentrate on just this one thing.
It seems like ones inner life and outer life conspire to keep one from doing this and in a way it’s true. The inertia of old inner and outer habits actually seems to conspire to hold and condition you, freezing you in habitual thought and emotional processes. So not only does it take a powerful will and intent to break out, it takes the discipline of a day to day approach to gain back control over your thoughts and emotions and your life. In a way culture or society owns you as a cultural slave and the means for doing this is though thought and emotional responses and connections. Why do you think that nations and corporations invest so much in propaganda operations?
What actually happens if one persists in meditation day after day is that slowly by concentrating on only one thing a state of detachment begins to develop where the thought process begins to slow down. Thoughts begin to be observed as packets of images one after the other with spaces in between. Once one gets over the fascination with the images and continues, the space between the images broadens and the images are fewer and more intense.
Eventually the thoughts and images stop and one enters into a state of no thought: a vastness of quiet and peace from which the thoughts and images seem to arise like bubbles. If we observe bubbles that start small down deep in the ocean we see they get bigger as they come to the surface. At this point, it is as if we are all connected like islands surrounded by ocean. Beneath the ocean that separates the islands is land that connects all the islands together. So everybody everywhere and all of nature as well, are connected on this deep subconscious quantum level. One begins to feel this wholeness, connectivity and peace and when one comes out of meditation it persists on into everyday life.
We begin to live our lives from this internal state of peace, connectedness and tranquility rather from the state of inner and outer chaos. We are in the world but not of it. We have control over our lives and begin to move in a disciplined deliberate manner, moment to moment into enlightenment and love and out of chaos and fear. We are aware of ourselves and how we interact with our environment and chisel away where we are wasting ourselves and our energy.