What Qultura means
Asking the question 'why' is usually the wrong question, because it invites an explanation, and with every single explanation there has ever been in the world generated by human beings comes the illusion of knowing. What? How? These are the only two questions that need to be asked in any given situation. This is what leads you to a story, a narrative, and the truth. If you are a human being you can only ever be a story in the great drama of this planet, and your story, just like everyone else's story, makes up what we understand to be human evolution.
The central issue to the Human Question is control and domination. This is the central issue when it comes to the environment and climate change, and this is also the central issue when it comes to the complexities and contradictions of life. This planet cannot be controlled by anyone or anything. Your life cannot be controlled by you or anyone else. This is how people almost invariably - if I may be so crude and direct here - end up fucking up their lives. They seek to control something that is far bigger than them.
Climate change is reality, and goes hand in hand with biological evolution. Change is the only constant in existence, and so as the universe changes, the solar system changes, this planet changes, and Nature, which is the primary characteristic or feature of this planet, must also change. Human beings, who are collectively a part of Nature, also must change and this is reflected through our social and cultural awareness.
Learn to connect, experience, and let go
When I first started out training in Therevada Buddhism and Vipassana meditation Babu my mentor and spiritual teacher would have me adopt the lotus position in a room focussing on a lighted candle and my breathing - breathe in, breathe out. Babu would shuffle around me saying "The void within the void within the void within the void.." over and over again. After some months of doing this regularly I finally admitted that I struggled to maintain my focus and actually stop my flow of thoughts. Babu was pleased. "Now you finally get the point," he said. "When you meditate you will meditate naturally without being conscious of doing so. You cannot sit down to meditate because that is a desire to meditate. If you are meditating on the basis of desire you are not meditating. You are just pretending to meditate."
My point here is that you are breathing all the time, without being conscious of the fact. Your heart is beating all the time, and you are not conscious of the fact. Your body is functioning all the time without you being conscious of the fact. You're probably not consciously aware of the fact that once every several weeks your body replaces itself which means that the physical body you had three months ago no longer exists and the body you have now will not exist in three months time. You only become consciously aware of your physical body if it's not working, if there's a dysfunction, or pain, or difficulty. When you are healthy you're not consciously aware of your physical body at all.
The same principle applies when it comes to life. Life is what happens when you are totally connected to what's going on around you, connected to other people, and where everything simply comes together and just flows so that you are not really aware of yourself, or your Ego, and not really thinking about life but just going with the flow and you're totally immersed by the experience. This is what life is really all about. It's about being connected to everything that's going on around you, about just letting things happen and letting your life unfold, and creating the memories that go together to make up the story or narrative.
This is your life, your narratives, your story, and please keep in mind that this is a story without end, so you never ever really need to worry about the ending. The ending comes when you're dead, and if you're reading these words then you're not dead, so why worry about it?
You need to be prepared to go it alone
Qultura has been developed as a system designed to give you the assurance through mystical principles and an awareness of Natural Law to let go of control and surrender to the natural order of things. The central issue here is the issue of control and the need for security and stability, human socialized emotional and psychological needs that cannot ever be fulfilled to a degree to ensure a stable and meaningful life. At some point in your life you're going to have to breathe in and take a deep breath, count to three, and jump.
You cannot walk into an ashram and sit down to meditate if you are anxious, or nervous, or somehow conflicted within yourself. You can do all the meditation and yoga you like, but if you are not walking the path through life that you were born to walk then you are achieving not much more than deceiving or cheating yourself. There is no point in doing meditation or yoga a couple of hours a week if for the remaining time you're out there in the rat race battling it out with everyone else for the scraps and shreds of self-esteem.
No society at any point in human history has ever had it under such control that sex was just for procreation. Going all out for sexual gratification, porn, going out and getting smashed on a Friday night, taking recreational drugs, making money, these are all relatively immature attempts at healing from the years of trauma, insecurity and stigma brought about by our social and mental conditioning. Just like the salamander human beings have the option of not maturing in life and such is the nature of the human tragedy that defines so many lives.
I know from my own experience of life how very close the relationship is between abuse and addiction. It's a very fine line. Maturing into our fully evolved human form is fundamental to our primeval birth right. It's what we were evolved to be on this planet and to share a kind of symbiosis and kinship with trees. This is something I feel very strongly and some would say passionate about. Our abusive relationship with the planet and with Nature mirrors quite often our abusive relationships with ourselves and each other. The common issue is our lack of, or deficit of consciousness and conscious awareness, our widespread unwillingness to mature and evolve, and our almost infantile addiction and need for external control and to be babied by various authority figures, hierarchies and institutions.
Please don't get me wrong. We don't like being treated like children, but modern culture and epi-cultural influences such as politics and organized religion has led to a culture of infantilism among people which makes it possible to get through life without ever needing to mature psychologically or emotionally beyond the 5th form of comprehensive school.
This is something I didn't manage to figure out completely until some years ago when I became street homeless. What holds most people back in life is an unwillingness to go it alone on a fundamental level. What I'm referring to are people - and I'm referring to the vast majority of people here - who are clinging on to their Egos for dear life because they genuinely believe that the Ego is all there is to who they are. I feel many of us have deep within us this infantile and neurotic fear of being alone with the elements and with Nature. Walking into the abyss terrifies us. Many of us are serving indefinite prison sentences in invisible prisons, identified only as our Egos, held their by our conditioned beliefs in external authority, unaware that out in the abyss we mature into our real selves and recover our humanity.
Following Eve's example, 1 + 1 = 3
The Eve I'm referring to here is the Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first woman in the Book of Genesis. The specific example I'm referring to here is the act of faith that caused Eve to follow the counsel of the serpent and take the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Now please keep in mind I'm not trying to sell you Christianity here but I'm giving you some mystical insight. This was the act which caused Adam and Eve to be tossed out of the Garden of Eden because it was Eve who committed the 'original sin'. For in the wisdom of God 'they will become as we are', the 'we' being the paternal voice of authority.
Please also pay attention to the numbers here. One and one is always three. This is also a mystical reference. What you need to do is to add one and one together to make three.
So how can one and one make three? This I'm more than willing to explain because this more than anything is what my whole life has been all about and my life is both my story and my message which I fully intend to leave behind for others.
One in mysticism, numerology and magic always signifies and symbolizes consciousness, something which unifies all existence. Consciousness is existence. One plus one mathematically, or arithmetically, equals two, which is a duality, polarity, energy and physicality. This gives you the conundrum of life, as I've explained in The ground of Being. Now you can follow any religion you like, any philosophy, any ideology, any belief system, you can meditate as much as you like, practise as much yoga, but you are always, always going to fall short.
You can even dabble in psychedelics and experiment with mushrooms and LSD, though personally I wouldn't recommend it. Seeking a mystical experience through dabbling in hallucinogenics usually ends up in blowing your mind - like hooking your brain up to a million volt electrical circuit. There's quite a few 'heads' out there who blew their minds and who decades later are still trying to process the experience. You don't actually need to do this.
The missing one here symbolizes the primacy of direct individual human experience of life. As a real human being the real universe is not a concept in your mind. The real universe is out there within your reach, totally and completely accessible to you, always, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Anything which is not accessible to you or within your reach is essentially unsubstantiated rumour.
But just like bees and ants we continually insert ourselves and organize ourselves into cliques and hierarchies of knowledge. We say to ourselves "What's going on in the world?" Well tune into the BBC, or Sky, or Twitter, or Facebook, and we find out that it's sunny, twenty five degrees, the Government has made an announcement, a celebrity is appearing in a new TV series, and so on. We somehow feel better, because we've got some information and feel a part of something bigger, but we've sold out more of our direct experience and thrown away another chunk of life.
This is something that all institutions and organizations require and demand of us - that we redefine and shape our human identities for the comfort and convenience of the institution and organization. So what happens? You end up being enslaved and chained to your Ego. No humanity is possible if you are enslaved and chained to your Ego. Today you are forced by the Government to define yourself as a taxpayer. Anything less is at best tolerated and at worst unacceptable. Enslavement to Ego comes with stigma. If you have a disability and you inconvenience the organization you carry the penalty of stigma. Likewise if you are homosexual you carry stigma. Not having the right skin colour or ethnicity carries another type of stigma. If you are transgendered this carries another type of stigma. The stigma you carry is always relative to the inconvenience to the organization and how far you take the organization out of its comfort zone. The most common and widespread example of such stigma is that which comes with being a woman. Do you see how this works?
This cultural redefinition through Ego will always invariably reinforce separateness between you and your natural humanity and also between you and your natural state of mindfulness.
Embracing Qultura and reclaiming Akashic power
So to wrap up by defining what Qultura is let me start by presenting you with an image from the Major Arcana from the Tarot to explain the symbolism. Qultura is a deliberate misspelling of 'culture', starting with the letter 'Q', the 17th letter of the alphabet and ending with an 'a', the first letter of the alphabet. This is symbolized by The Star, the 17th numbered card of the Major Arcana of the Tarot.
Using the Rider-Waite deck for its simplicity, you see a naked woman by a pool with one foot in the water and the other foot on the land. Above her head you see one large star, symbolizing her core essence and seven smaller stars. While these seven smaller stars can represent the seven chakras, what I suggest you instead intepret all eight stars together as Akashic power and the unity of the universe as self, this planet as self and you the individual as self. Notice how she pours water from two jugs, one into the pool of water, and the other onto the land. Let the water from the jugs symbolize truth.
Note that The Star is associated with the astrological sign of Aquarius, its associated planet of Uranus, and therefore is symbolic of community.
Qultura implies 'way' or 'method', specifically your way and your method. Embracing Qultura is an act of truth to power. Qultura is 100% subversive and subversion is 100% all about the outward creative self-expression of individual truth into an environment. However for truth to be expressed outwards into an environment there has to be a commitment to both empathy and trust towards both your natural and social environment (read community).
Talk your talk, walk your walk, and live your truth
Qultura means a commitment to being real, to talking your talk, walking your walk, and living your truth. This is not an act of rebellion, as many people believe, but is an act of integrity, because truth to power in our society is always a position of complete and total equanimity. You have walked the Yellow Brick Road, you have stepped forward and pulled back the curtain, you know that the speaker of the booming voice of the Wizard is just another human being like you.
Just like The Hermit in the Tarot, the ninth numbered card, symbolizing individual truth, you have gone it alone, made that act of faith, and are an active, participating member of your community. You have created a Qultura method, and through creating a Qultura method, you have created your narrative, your story and your individual truth.
