7/28/2019 Mckenna - Culture is Your Os
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In the past hundred years as the super-technologies have been
developed in the west, the smashing ofatoms, the invention of
radio, television, computers, immunology, so-forth and so-on, data
has beenarriving 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 thatperturb 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 animals
soul replaces it. Replaces the cultural operating system.something
not determined by history and geography. but something write in the
language of the flesh
its self. 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 delusions.when you shed your cultural operating system, then
essentially you stand naked before the inspectionof your own
psyche. Desmond Morris called it, the naked ape. and its from that
position, a positionoutside the cultural operating system, that we
can begin to ask real question about "what does it meanto be
human?" what kind of circumstance are we caught in?" and "what kind
of structures, if any, canwe put in place to assuage the pain, and
accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks waiting for usin
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 been thinking about this a lot and at first to me
it seemed only a metaphor, this phrase "culture is your
operating system". But because i travel arounda lot, and get that
jolting experience frequently, of lets say: leaving London on a
foggy evening andarrive in Johannesburg 14 hours later to a
sweltering day in a city of 14 million on the brink ofanarchy, I
get to change my operating system, frequently. and so i notice the
relativity of these systemsand some work for somethings and some
for others. for instance, if you a positivist, if your
runningpositivism 4.0, you cant support UFO's. positivism 4.0 does
not support UFO's. if on the other handyour running Urancha book
5.1 as your operating system, UFO's and a number of other things
can getin through the door. that is what we would say is a more
tolerant operating system. or its plug inssupport special effects
be nine that of the positivist.Its fun to think this way because it
shows you, you don't have to be the victim of your culture. Its
notlike 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 fist you have toclear some space on your disc. the best way to
do this is probably with a pharmacological agent. (youthink of some
while i have a drink of water). psilocybin is excellent disc
cleaner. you can put a lot of
things in the trash and have them just disappear with a
psilocybin upgrade. other pharmacologicalagents that can clear your
disk are ayahuasca. and of course these are gentle clearings of the
disc,which take 5-6-7 hours. if your in a hurry to dump that old
data and leap right into the new operatingsystem, click on the
button marked Dimethyltryptamine. a compressed disc eraser will
immediately be
downloaded, un-stuffed, bin-hexed, implemented, installed, run
and you will find yourself with anentirely different head.
now shamans have always known, though they may not have used the
kind of language i am usinghere. shamans have always known this
trick. what trick? it has two assets. first of all, that culture is
anoperating system, that's all it is. and that the operating system
can be wiped out and replaced by
something else. so essentially whats going on among shamans, and
those who resort to them, forcuring and counseling and so forth, is
that somebody is running a 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's of many different sorts thatthe client is not aware
of. the client if running culture light. the shaman paid for the
registered andlicensed 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. its very important that you
have all the bells and
whistles on your operating system, otherwise somebody is going
to able to get a leg-up on you. well,whats wrong with the operating
system that we have, consumer-capitalism 5.0 or what ever it is.
well,
its dumb, its retro, its very non-competitive, its messy, it
waste human resources, its inefficient, it runson stereo-types, it
runs on a low sampling rate which is what create stereo-types, low
sample ratesmake everyone appear alike when in fact the glory is in
ever ones differences, and the currentoperating system is flawed.
it actually has bugs in it, that generates contradictions.
contradictions suchas were cutting the earth from beneath our feet,
were poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. this isnot
intelligent behavior. this is a culture with a bug in its operating
system, that's making it produce
erratic, dis-functional, malfunctional behavior. time to call a
tech. and who are the tech's? the shamansare the tech's.
