We may not change culture overnight, but we certainly CAN begin changing the way that we live and participate in it.
Continuing from:
Seeing it from this perspective to me is quite supportive to ponder ‘twice’ any time I go to watch a film or see any works of art and remind myself that what I see is not special, not unique, it won’t give me a ‘breakthrough’ in itself and so stop for once and for all that ‘seeking’ mentality which is more like a habit from the past as I am certainly not looking for any ‘truths’ in it any longer once I have realized I created my own mythology with my art as well, without realizing that there’s nothing new under the sun and that we all use the same symbols and images so it’s just arranging it in a different way to create some meaning and give continuation to the stories – lies – we have been telling to ourselves as human beings to make us more godly or divine, at least that’s what the ‘art role’ was meant to be according to what is taught in academy. Yes, though once you start finding out the nature of such ‘god’ and such elites, well, let’s just say that art can be reduced as well to the most refined form of propaganda of course and now I understand why I had such a hard time realizing that all art had been previously entirely devoted to promote religion or immortalize monarchs or peasants to remind ourselves ‘this is how it’s always been like’ in the absence of the eye that can lie as well as the photographic camera, but hey every age requires its own cementation in our minds through pictures and words, so art served that function.
If anything, art has been used to impose symbols, to enslave – hence the ‘mythical’ start of it for magic-religious purposes. Gee, only now I kind of realize the pieces of my puzzle and the absolute diversion I delved myself into, no wonder I was seeking gods in pictures, symbols or philosophies – all part of the ‘inherent’ (read: preprogrammed) need to have someone/something greater than us to make responsible for this entire creation – so, religion is one of the primary mind constructs we all exist as, whether you are atheist or not, it’s part of the unconscious the same way that we believe that fighting for our lives is something that makes sense, or how the rich and the poor is how things have always been and always will be. Art then became the necessary imposition of images to perpetuate religious mentality for the purpose of pacifying/stupefying and sedating individuals while threatening with the ‘wrath of god’ if anyone dared to step outside of the line – well, it was religion back in the day but now it’s just alcohol, drugs, sports, entertainment and big pharma too, but that’s our contemporary story.
So, it’s taken me some time to find ‘more reasons’ to write about this art subject and it’s interesting how I had to use other pieces of information to break my own spell, meaning, having to let go of the idea of art as something ‘really human’ or else, as if it was more ‘true’ than anything else we do or say, which can’t be so, because everything we have ever thought, done, spoken comes from who we are as the mind and so we have only learned how to regurgitate the same ‘system’ into pictures, ideas, stories and so reinforce our own cages, which is why understanding one’s enslavement makes it easier to let go of anything one is holding onto from ‘the past’ which is the current automated reality we are living in – it is once again to remind myself that no matter how ‘majestic’ something might look like, it was never meant to glorify or represent life or principles of equality at all, but rather the opposite.
An example: writers were contracted to be informed about which topics to write upon, such as space travel, futuristic technocracies, alien invasions and so with doing this, begin an entire new ‘wave of thought’ in the society through these inoffensive tools called books that then eventually turned into movies. The same with films which are formulas to instigate a particular line of thinking and making of the main topics in them something acceptable as part of culture/what goes on in our minds as well – just as it’s happened with porn appearing on ‘mainstream movies’ nowadays as well as sadomasochism made ‘cool’ and we’re on our way to make of pedophilia and all kinds of paraphilias something ‘acceptable’ so that younger generations get the idea that ‘it is okay to have sex with older people.’ This is the current nature of our culture and where we are heading to.
Once again, are we only revealing and making acceptable what always has existed within us as human beings, or are we instilling new behaviors through our culture? I’d say both since we create such fixations in our minds and we simply evolve the experiences to have new contexts, new ‘ideas’ to fantasize upon and so ‘upgrade’ the experience. In the mind we function as addicts that get our ‘fix’ from having something to think about or fantasize about and the initial experiences can get us to quite a ‘high’ but then, we continue ‘pushing the envelope’ because once the energetic reaction becomes normalized (you build resistance) one seeks a greater dose. This is what I see is what we’ve all been following in the media until it becomes absolutely unsustainable or else, what is left there to continue ‘pushing the envelope’ when it comes to our celebritism? To our ‘art’? to our films other than rehashing the same stories over and over again?
Why do I see this as a very relevant topic? Because I can see myself as a product of the ‘culture’ I decided to immerse myself in, and I mean this as an actual decision I made in my teenage years to soak up the most information about music, books, arts so that I could work on that – why did this happen? It clearly happened after 2001 and the almost paranoid reaction I had toward keeping myself high on CNN watching every detail and every move after 9-11– lol just like those elections where Bush wasn’t able to be clearly defined as the next president and you’d ponder WHY was I watching that? Well, it was my idea then of becoming politically involved. But after realizing the scam it was, I then veered toward that which I thought was more liberating: arts. My very relationships and career decisions were entirely shaped by every single book I read within the starting point of finding some kind of ‘truths’ in them, seeking to identify ‘me’ through the writer’s characters without realizing I was in fact absorbing it all to then rehash it in the form of ‘my own personality.’
The same with the music that I developed an affinity for, the stereotypes of individuals praised as ‘artists’ and how I also even trained myself to praise crap art (not literal though) because, well everyone else seems to also like it isn’t it? Lol like my ‘favorite movement’ Abstract Expressionism and Pollock – just praised alcoholics or junkies made stars on the cover of Life Magazine, upgraded to such stardom for a very necessary political move of that time when it comes to consolidating America’s position after WW2, and this would imply that we only get to know of the artists that somehow have also ‘agreed’ to be part of the establishment – which from my personal aspirations of ever getting to that position means that everything has always been fixed and that no one becomes that famous without hidden agendas. Who knows? Maybe Van Gogh was made such a legend because of his erratic behavior and affinity for absinthe and so, he was made famous to begin instigating more people to get into drugs to paint in such ways too… because let’s face it: we copy and integrate everything we see around us and if we see something that works to ‘get some success’ going, then we will try and emulate it because it is part of our preprogramming to seek such specialness and ‘uniqueness’ too, and some people like myself would seek it through artistic stardom, others through becoming a stock broker which means: yes, art is not ‘outside of the system’ at all, and the star-system is the learned protocol if one wants to ‘make it’ within the system.
Artwork by JL Kenney
I actually decided in my early teens to watch all ‘cult movies’ because I was getting myself prepared to be ‘well acculturated’ and went from Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Trainspotting, Reservoir Dogs and others.. you can see the constant topics there: drugs, criminality and ultraviolence and this is what is a ‘must’ in every movie along with sex if it is to ensure its success, a perfect carrier for imprinting new behaviors which are then copied by ourselves as if it was a mint reflection of our society. When it comes to books, reading Burroughs, lots of Kerouac, Palahniuk, Coupland while listening to depressive music saying ‘It’s too late now, It’s the devil’s way now’ and watching people like Thom Yorke get ‘depressed’ in his ultra-famous lifestyle pointing out to us that even if you have it all there’s still that depressed state residing within due to being too aware of how things really work, or be told that Kurt Cobain committed suicide for hating this world and wanting to die – which I still consider he was suicided in fact, but that’s another story – Well no ponder I painted what I painted, I just rehashed what I would read/hear/see around me: Culture! And nowadays it’s stronger than ever to promote being dumb and stupid as ‘cool’ and having mentality such as ‘You Only Live Once’ and justifying any form of teenage stupidity because Hey, YOLO! Or seeing the ultra mind controlled Miley Cyrus or some ten years ago Britney Spears breaking the norm of what a ‘lady’ should act/be like and continuing to push the boundaries when it comes to ‘gender roles.’
Entertainment was the key influence in my life throughout the time when I was developing my own emotions and feelings which is what I eventually enjoyed ‘losing’ myself into: as a child watching too much TV, as a teenager reading many books, listening too much music from which I learned more about the human mind while developing some rather unusual fascinations with everything that pointed out toward death and destruction, which I later on transposed onto my own paintings wherein I tried to also become part of the ‘shock world’ just because I was so much against what seemed normal and acceptable, so I found my ‘niche’ in society by everything that seemed to go against the tide. An example is the time when I placed myself to watch some ‘cult movies’ like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, I considered them far too violent and could not comprehend how people could revere it, however I then wanted to be part of that world, of the ‘alternative’ or the not so widely acceptable, just anything that could question or challenge what I deemed to be the ‘status quo’ or ‘what is normal’ but, I wasn’t at all aware how it is that these movies were made popular for the very purpose of making sex, drugs, ultra violence part of the mainstream and ‘normalcy’ in our consciousness.
The same went on with A clockwork orange, I watched it a couple of times and walked through my own early digestion of the idea of violence being enjoyable for these guys and pondering if others were able to discern that such violence was not in fact something funny or enjoyable and that these guys were sick in the gulliver. However a deliberate problem here is that Kubrick didn’t include chapter 21 on Burgess’ original story, which would have given another twist to the whole plot and shown a real grown up Alex that had transcended his ultra-violent teenage years as that would have ‘broken the spell’ for a film maker that was also meant to create a ‘mark’ in an entire generation and generations to come with the portrayal of violence as something fun to do, aside from the mind control remarks in an attempt to ‘cure’ Alex’s problem, which also gives a hint of what Big Pharma means today in a ‘mentally ill’ person’s life: cure without ever pondering WHY is it that our so called ‘mental illnesses’ exist today more so than ever before, and how we could even legitimize it without any real means to test someone for it?
I guess I could write many things about all of this since it’s part of my so-called ‘visual’ education, but the point here is to realize that nothing is what it seems, there has been no real virtues in this world, we have never been actually alive so anything I ever had respect for of course was just a lie that I wanted to hold on to for some reason, which in this case it came through what I would read in magazines that was considered ‘cool’ and ‘cult movies’ and ‘movie classics’ which actually were on purpose made part of such categories so that any person would then have to watch those movies and get acquainted with the basics that make of Hollywood something profitable till this day.
Will I be able to see things with the same eyes again? No, once the lid is blown off, you can’t. It is no longer a nice story where Jane the girl in American Beauty that would kind of see through the ‘fakeness’ in reality, ‘falling in love’ and running away with a drug dealer to ‘escape their reality’ I mean, it stops having such romantic twist to it – as I had defined it anyways, lol – and it becomes just another plot where those that could not ‘fit in the box’ become ‘outsiders’ and living in the fringe side of reality. However I do like to keep watching/reading to continue seeing where and how we have created this mass hypnosis where we have essentially become the personas that we are sold in the media: this is the not so innocent and most pervasive brainwashing and as such, I see it is very important to become more aware of how we ‘entertain’/entrain ourselves, and not end up in denial of that which we wasted our life time on, as I did at some point in my life too when being in a constant hypnosis of watching music videos for example.
The point here is demonstrating how we have never genuinely created something that demonstrated an actual point of self-creation in our culture, and of course we haven’t done so because We as individuals have Never in fact considered such starting point possible within ourselves in the first place, to recognize the power and ability to create ourselves, to become better human beings. All we have ever been and done is to exist as the ‘created’ at the mercy of some invisible creator, repeating, revamping, rehashing what has been used since the beginning of time to revere its ‘unfathomable’ existence and creation. It was in the repetition of symbols, myths & archetypes, ideologies and holy books, behaviors and morals that we have shaped ourselves around the same acceptance of oneself as the mind only and from there, confirm our ‘human nature’ and why we seem to always be so unfulfilled, so miserable, suffering all the time, the ‘pains of living’ and the ‘struggle’ to make a decent living… is this what LIFE is really about or is this what we’ve seen/read/watched it is Meant to be? We have only perverted, tainted and twisted it all further, enhancing our own separation, ignorance, apathy and overall self-destruction through the ‘creations’ we’ve pulled out as arts/media/culture – please see specifically now contemporary art/ post modernism – of which I became just a part of by reproducing the same ideas around everything that I would imprint within myself on a daily basis for years on from the TV: death, destruction, decay, suffering, abuse, sexual deviance and learning how to praise this as some kind of ‘truth’ of an individual, almost learning to accept this bs as the ‘dark side’ that we had to come to embrace and make it more evident to ‘wake up’ but, of course we’ve kind of remained in the phase of becoming enamored with our distractions, our diseases, our paraphilias and haven’t yet given the next step to outgrow it and realize it for the teenage years this implies when it comes to our stages of development as species. Sure, you can be mesmerized by how well done/crafted some works are, but again: is the starting point of it, the essence and intent of it something that I can consider valuable or respectable and supportive for our real development as living human beings, to consider what is best for all within the context of self-honesty? No.
In a way it does mirror our reality. Contemporary art became garbage, literal garbage sold as millions, or canned poo which is the most common example of how this ‘devaluation’ or should I say the entire extrapolation of value became yet another cognitive dissonance and part of the plan when art came to form part of ‘desirable collectibles’ by the elite and making some pieces of plastic worth millions of dollars – I correct myself, billions of dollars such as Sotheby’s record sales of 5.8 billion dollars in 2011 – making it nothing more than just any other asset for people at Wall Street to feel empowered with. It is also very cool for me to see and realize this, and come to see how all those books I read trying to make sense of ‘the movements’ or phases of human expression were nothing else but planned justifications to make it seem as some kind of ‘natural evolution’ of sorts, when in fact it has always been planned specifically to follow through within the context of how the world works at an economic and political level. Let’s not forget it is the current roles of curators and ‘art authorities’ that decide what gets ‘consecrated’ and what doesn’t – just as in regular HIStory told by the winners, the side of the story that we are meant to adopt and accept as ‘how the story went!’ so that we keep feeding each other lies and keep revering our own masters.
The current success of our drugged/medicated, dumbed down, fame seeking population suffering from cognitive dissonance, while being dumbfounded at celebritism confirms the effectiveness of our own mind control, accepted, allowed and even praised. When we look at our culture, we can see nothing else but the fulfillment of our own prophecy for absolutely consensual enslavement, one that we buy and choose as part of our personalities and preferences, believing that we can somehow still manage to ‘feel special’ in a standardized society where even ‘subcultures’ or anti-cultures are part of the system, lol. From my own experience, it will take quite some time to wake up from it, as it just took me some 7 years to come to realize this because I had wanted to keep the little idea or dream that these artists were ‘special people’ that had have some genuine ‘revelations’ in their work and what they do, which is what I tried to be a part of, to be the one that could ‘see’ behind the scenes or have some special connections with god – I am not joking here, when I started painting I also wanted to be the hand of god to reveal something special, lol. But, how could that be without even pondering first if the thoughts, the images, the concepts we had in our minds were in fact our own, including the idea/notion/speculation of GOD itself?
The same with architecture and every ‘majestic’ construction, of course it was built by slaves but I still wanted to overlook the obvious inherent purposes of such constructions as the physical consolidation of what ‘control’ and ‘power’ looked like, of accepting the existence of massive amounts of wealth to build for the elites, repeating symbols for thousands of years and as such learn it in our history books as if it represented some ‘great work’ or revelation of our ‘who we are’ as species – dismissing the fact that if anything, we could confirm that we have never in fact ceased to exist as slaves, but instead we were taught how to revere our enslavement. We are all in fact experiencing Stockholm Syndrome and it is rather urgent that we wake up to see how through the seemingly ‘innocent’ we are driving each other to the precipice, starting with child consumerism and the archetypes fed by Disney movies, it’s definitely something to focus on if we can’t at the moment entirely straighten the rest ‘crooked trees’ right away, but children are of primary importance here.
I still find it very interesting when I hear someone say ‘to have thoughts of their own’ as if we had our very own copyright to everything we think or say, as if we could create words from scratch. We weren’t even aware how our tastes and preferences were being shaped by ‘the environment’/culture and our lineage/parents which means you would get into it no matter if you went to private schools or else, because having a TV, reading books, watching films, or simply being with your peers would invariably taint you with it. Drugs were never meant to be ‘liberating’ but the other way around, they were just promoted by these people that told us to ‘tune in and drop out’ while hanging out with artists/rockstars and make everyone drool to such ‘lifestyles,’ never even pondering who was financing some of the greatest ‘rock bands’ in history and virtually any ‘star’ that we have gotten to know of. It’s very simple: if you become famous, if you ‘make it’ it mostly usually means you had to continue playing the role and tell the stories that give continuation to the agenda for further indoctrination and control. This is how we became the useful idiots as human beings that in seeking for a piece of heaven as fame and fortune, one comes to accept certain ideologies and behaviors, sometimes it’s not even by explicit consent because we then believe that we can innovate by ‘pushing the envelope further’ and ‘be controversial’ or transgressive as if this meant going against ‘the core of control’ as ‘the system’ or religions, but in fact it is another contained form of ‘rebellion’ to continue misleading ourselves from the actual sources of change, which doesn’t mean dropping the white dove to embrace the raven within, but the consideration of the starting point of why I do this, what motivates me, what do I get from it? Am I supporting myself within this that I am doing/creating? Is my intention to support others and myself through it?
Nothing of what we see currently as ‘mainstream’ In our CULTure is spontaneous either, it is manufactured, it is deliberately fixed to promote certain ‘artists’ or ‘artworks’ or ideas through TV shows, so it doesn’t genuinely reflect an ‘evolution’ because there’s NEVER been such self-directive change in our consciousness: we’ve always been herded/guided. And this is yet another aspect to de-mystify about expression and what has been promoted as some kind of ‘spiritual revelation’ in art itself or in Satanism as pop-culture is presenting now: it was never in fact meant to ever represent genuine self-expression, it’s only a chewable way to integrate mind-control and mind possession as ‘normal’ and ‘cool’ while sending any living principles out of the scene and made uncool or ‘old-fashioned.’
If I hadn’t stopped myself from falling down that precipice of the new age/sacred art culture that I was delving myself into some 7 years ago, I would have probably be enamored with things that Alex Grey’s paintings or aiming to at least be someone like Banksy to be an incorporated and revered form of ‘resistance’ to the system. Everything is literally ‘on our noses’ as the culture we breathe in and out every single day – and there was still a part of me that refused to entirely SEE this or more like placing it into words, as I was still holding on to keeping just this ‘little pieces of heaven’ as the ideas of who these ‘great artists’ had been, and ‘what great inspirations’ they have represented for me and yes I repeat, their work probably is/was or their ideas, but of course it never meant a life-changing example but more of a conducted and deliberate plan to continue misleading from promoting or making actual solutions part of our ‘pop culture’ or art movements. This is why everything is so contained as if it was prescribed, it’s a preprogrammed plan as well and as such there was no real ‘innovation’ or real creativity involved but prepaid craftsmanship to advance and give specific morals, ideas, en vogue topics as the ‘new directions’ to our human culture and this is what I’m most intensely interested on these days: debunking our culture.
Maybe I can learn something from that Chuck Klosterman’s book I read many years ago Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs to analyze popular culture and see how it is that our fitter-happier mentality in this capitalist ‘mediafied’ system is the ‘filter’ through which we create our relationships, how we interact with one another is entirely manufactured for a specific purpose: to become willfully ignorant and prisoners of our own diversion and distraction as we become addicted to what’s in the ‘psychosphere’/collective unconscious and be a part of our globalized mentality, which I don’t necessarily judge as ‘bad’ but only see all the points that would require to be aligned to be a supportive popular culture, and we are heading in the opposite direction at the moment.
So, one point to consider here is that this is in no way to blame those that apparently ‘set the agenda’ as ‘they’ were just part of the game anyways, but rather looking at how I/we accepted and allowed ourselves to become prisoners of our own diversions, of our own emotions and feelings, of our own minds while neglecting to really look at what is it that we are making of ourselves, what have we turned ourselves into and use common sense as a point of reference to see ‘where we are’ in our day to day participation: is what I like, do, follow, commit to what is best for all? Why is it that something as vital as politics and understanding of how the system really works never been part of our inherent ‘culture’? Why have we reduced politics to a mockery? Nowadays politicians seem to be more of a subject for reality shows with the same contest-like popularity mentality structure where one can ‘vote’ for the lesser of two evils and call that a civil duty – so why are no real definitions of politics as in realizing our power to direct our lives and so make effective decisions to benefit ourselves as society? Oh no! That’s where the real threat exists! That’s why we are constantly taught to hate ‘the elite’ and ‘hate politicians’ and see them as ‘the problem’ while excluding ourselves as co-creators of the problem – that’s the Real problem in fact. And so the importance of always considering SELF-Responsibility in everything we might think or believe that only ‘a few’ are imposing ‘upon us.’ It is as simple as realizing that there would be ‘no culture’ if we – one by one – didn’t actively participated in it.
I remember this text of about 50 pages on what ‘Culture’ is when I was in junior high school and now I would reduce the definition of culture to the industry of making behavioral imprints part of a person’s individual and collective identity for the purpose of maintaining old-age status quo with the appearance of evolution or progress while creating a paradigm of ideologies that perpetuate the divide and conquer mentality through the mechanisms of entertainment and arts, which are intended to standardize thinking, behavioral, emotional and feeling patterns in the masses. There has never really been an evolution, but only a change of scenario with words that would indicate ‘progress’ while missing out on the actual newspeak this ‘progress’ entails. How can there be any progress when we still leave out billions of individuals from having access to the most essential needs to live in dignity, such as water, food, shelter, healthcare? This is also to place into perspective in which kind of segmented bubbled mentality we exist in when praising the lavish lifestyles of our rich and famous while disregarding and deliberately ignoring the real problems we have come to accept as ‘normal’ in our world.
Common Sense and Principled Living to consider Life in Equality and What’s Best for All in everything we do/act/speak is what we don’t yet learn in school and this is why it is so important to start debunking everything we had used as an excuse to justify ‘who we are’ and our ‘human nature’ within ‘culture,’ because culture is still man-made, it is NOT something inherent to our physical bodies, it is not in the air we breathe, it is not in the food we eat – no matter how contaminated or GMO’d it can be – it is all about who we are in the mind and what we decide to participate in. Human Nature and ‘Culture’ have become the greatest excuses as to why it is apparently ‘impossible to change’ now, it is a comfortable lie we like to tell ourselves, so we have to being there before attempting to call others ‘liars’ isn’t it? That’s where self-integrity and self-honesty begins.
It’s time to debunk my own perceptions of what art was supposed to be and to understand that even if I had the intention to ‘see beyond the veil’ the very fact that I wanted to hold on to some apparent ‘good’ things I had believed were a virtue in some individuals and human creations like in art made me want to hold on to certain aspects of my own cultural conditioning from which I developed my personality, my taste in men, the lifestyle I wanted, the kind of music, TV, books and everything that I previously regarded as , ‘the who I am’ within the social-soup of reality which is the way I shaped myself to be as who I am as my mind. I bet that everyone can relate to identifying oneself to one character in a movie, in a book, or with some artist and even emulate the way they lived their lives or trying to mimic ‘how they got to make it’ in the world. Another example of this manufacturing of culture is how suddenly certain things would become available and so ‘openly’ talked about in the mainstream like with the hippie movement and psychotropic drugs, sexual openness, the apparent female empowerment and the tune in-drop out ‘living’ mode which gave another step toward the new age movement. Little did I know there was nothing really ‘special’ about that in the sense of human consciousness suddenly ‘evolving’ or us finding some kind of ‘gate’ to the heavens lol, but instead it is about seeing how these were specific experiments conducted by the CIA to precisely get an entire generation interested on drugs, spirituality and the ‘unseen’ as well as feeding addictions rather than ever getting closer to finding out real ways to make of our lives in this world-system better, such as politics or becoming familiarized with the ways the money system operates, who decides how we conduct our social-programs, why do we we even limit ourselves in our economic systems and so forth.
There have been many, many things that have suddenly become a point of focus and attention in our lives, because it is constantly talked about of and/or advertised and so we diminish ourselves to be receptors and regurgitate what we watch on mainstream media, and then ponder why ‘everyone’s talking about…..’ similar topics. Well, there’s no magic in that. I made the experiment myself some years ago when I deliberately would not watch anything about pop culture, I didn’t even know who Lady Gaga was until late 2010 and dared to listen to the music, but before that I only got to know of the name and person through the covers of magazines that I would see while making a line in the supermarkets in South Africa. So, it is possible to be ‘out of the loop’ of course if you step outside of mainstream TV, radio and not visit such pop culture websites. However because right now we are so plugged into everything that is constant ‘news’ and celebritism, you get to know of these individuals whether you like it or not, it’s just all over and one can ignore it, but you can’t avoid seeing the pictures everywhere. So this is how we move ourselves en masse to keep enticing ourselves to upscale our own obsessions and diversions from ever considering what it is that our lives would be without such entertainment? Maybe we would start actually focusing on why we have to constantly suffer, strive and really exist as slaves that only worry about money and fearing to lose our jobs.
It is essential to get ourselves out of this survival mode if we want to ever get to a point of providing to each other a dignified living, and most of the time we rather have a joystick between our hands or hypnotize ourselves with Netflix marathons rather than taking some of the multiple sources in the internet and start scratching the surface to understand why do we live in such a dog-eat-dog world? How have we created this nature of the system? What can we do about it? Which would in fact then be us realizing that politics IS what should have always been part of our culture, it IS what should have always formed part of our essential education: to realize each one of us has the power to create oneself and as such direct our reality in a way that is beneficial for all.
So, by saying this we can already see that we have been ‘living’ in a deliberately concealed or fabricated version of our reality to precisely Not dig into these topics, to Not see behind the glitter and glam that we are constantly fed with by the surreal lives portrayed on television. So, this all indicates to myself that as I now see, realize and understand with more clarity than ever before, it is my responsibility as a human being, as part of this creation and part of the problem to support myself and be a point of support for others that also want to start taking the veil off of their eyes. This is the real apocalypse time, the time of revealing to ourselves all the lies we have bought and sold as ‘our culture’ for example, and how it is this very ‘culture’ that has become the very virus we all get infected with by getting high on the experiences we choose to get from it, getting lost in the fantasy realm of the fictions that serve for multiple purposes leading to a greater distraction and diversion from ever considering doing something more substantial to really change the world.
It is so true to say that the real revolution won’t be televised, and everything that once was ‘revolutionary’ or ‘alternative’ becomes mainstream and so gets sucked into the system again, nor do I mean the type of revolution with guns, protests and machetes – but the revolution of who we are as our minds. So, I do not actually oppose getting mainstream if these ideas proposed here start becoming the usual awareness of how this world really operates; in fact, the more and more we start collectively seeing this, the more and more difficult it will be to buy just any lie, to fall for the same Hollywood crap we are sold in order to upgrade and instill ‘new ideas’ of what we are meant to be thinking about now. There’s nothing new really, we have reached the end of ‘creativity’ and it is now the time to start creating a New Living Culture of Life, one where we make of self-responsibility a necessity to coexist in dignity, a culture of principles where we can support each other to live and stop losing ourselves in emotional mindfucks and enhancing our obsessions.
Our human nature has never certainly been benevolent, but praising its malevolence will only get us further down the hole. So if I see this, if you see this: it is us that have to change how culture is created nowadays. And how to do this? You may ask, well, it’s not to merely ‘change’ what is created, but changing ourselves, changing who we are as the creators and participants in this reality which will determine the nature of our creations, that’s the real birthing as life creative process we’re talking about here, and I want YOU to join us in it.
I forgive myself that I hadn’t accepted and allowed myself to realize that all aspects of what I had called ‘culture’ as a way to ennoble ourselves as human beings was in fact nothing else but the show off of our very core programming, all based on personalities that were in fact also used to give continuation to certain ‘phases’ in our own mind control or self-awareness diversions such as books, music, films that I once believed were a ‘reflection’ of ourselves – and they are – however they also were in fact great instruments of conditioning and imprinting of certain behaviors and ways of looking at the world to the point where every person that has had contact with this ‘culture’ of watching movies or reading books or ‘admiring’ artists has had that point of self-identification toward them as if they represented something noble in fact to copy or integrate as a role model or something to aspire to – which might be in certain cases – but in my own experience this is how I learned to be comfortable with violence, decay and pushing the boundaries of what I would deem as ‘acceptable’ based on the idea that the more the envelope was being pushed within me, the more ‘in’ or ‘Avant-garde’ I could become myself, which is nothing else but just having pushed myself to make even the most hideous things ‘acceptable’ and part of subcultures which I did had a reticence to accept as ‘normal’ yet, because of seeing the amount of people that would like certain kind of images or personalities or so called paraphilias, then I believed that we had to embrace our ‘evil’ or our ‘dark side,’ and all of this knowing within myself that it wasn’t really ‘okay’ but because it is part of our society then, I made it ok on purpose so as to not seem ‘out of the loop’ with what my ‘culture’ seemed to be moving on to.
Something that I begun noticing from the time that I began watching cable TV which is 20 years ago, is that at least in something like MTV everything started becoming more and more outrageous to the point of scandalous and plain degenerated, however it was made ‘cool’ because of the idea of ‘art’ and ‘avant-garde’ and post-modernism and all of these tags that I actually believed were pretty much ‘in tune’ with what we are witnessing in our societies, not realizing that within looking at what was first the chicken or the egg, they simply represented more ways to continue ‘shocking’ ourselves and accepting violence, depravation, sexual morbidity, the lack of any values as something that was part of ‘my generation’ and so actually beginning to also see myself as part of that ‘lostness’ that was portrayed everywhere and the lostness that sought to get high, to have sex, to ‘live life’ through alcohol and feeling like there is no way out in this life other than becoming a junky or ultimately commit suicide as it was staged to be seen from some of our generation’s pop-culture heroes like Kurt Cobain – I mean all of these personality traits somehow I felt Identified with it to the point wherein you can look at my book collection, and a great amount of them will have the topic of drugs, dharma bums, of spiritual outcasts, off-griders, shockers like Miller, Burroughs, Ellis, Bukowski and the usual Sartre just to make myself push my own boundaries. No matter how much they seemed to ‘tell the truth’ it could also be them supporting these personalities and making them ‘known’ to everyone else as ‘how the youth is’ which is a double way to portray reality and reinforce the same patterns/behaviors/traits which are not necessarily self-supportive. I didn’t find any ‘truth’ or practical self-supportive views on life in them – the same as with Coupland or Palahniuk’s book through which I would rather confirm my supposed state of ‘outcastism’ I caged myself in, no matter how much I enjoyed them, it was all just programming reinforcement – all of it just served as sugar for my personalities, to upgrade them and upgrade the addiction.
“Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
There you go, our ‘truths’ made quotes.
Here’s to my process of self-debrainwashing:
I forgive myself that I accepted and allowed myself to ever define myself according to the characters I enjoyed in books, the artists and their attitudes such as standing ‘against the system’ while actually denigrating themselves to a low-lifestyle just to ‘not depend on a government’ for example, which is just the same mentality of ‘the dreamers’ and the people that so-called could stand ‘free’ or ‘be the resistance’ and ‘never fit in’ through creating art, without realizing that this mentality of ‘the outcasts’ – of which I read several books on – the ‘rebels,’ the ‘anti-system’ musicians, the depressive mentalities that I became so engulfed in to the point where I missed my own life while just becoming addicted to feeling ‘down’ wherein I have found it difficult to allow myself to enjoy myself, just because of how much I reinforced my pessimism, my gloomy view on life based on the types of preferences that I developed as a child from age 7 and on, within the idea that this was the ‘cool stuff’ that I had to make myself like that ‘fringe’ side of reality just because I initially would be shocked by it to the point wherein I would go from the fear/shock to the attraction and then integration of it as part of ‘who I am.’ In this I was aware how I went ‘pushing my own envelope’ for the purpose of being special, being unique since people my age as my peers weren’t ‘into the stuff’ that I was into back then, which made me feel that I could see beyond the happy-go-lucky mentality and that somehow the dark and mysterious was ‘more real,’ which in a way it is just defining myself according to the good/bad essential separation mentality in which we have caged ourselves throughout ages, to always be in conflict with one another and within ourselves.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that I was being ‘true to myself’ by being a rather pessimist person and with an obscure view on life based on what I saw was also ‘con-firmed’ by others like writers, musicians, filmmakers that I believed could ‘understand me’ but in fact we were all just acting out on our emotions and feelings and not really doing anything else other than what we were meant to do, such as feeling helpless to do anything for our lives and world, following our preprogrammed personalities while using ‘culture’ as a way to justify our copy-paste of ‘trends,’ personalities, ideas, beliefs, preferences and then! Even dare to create relationships based on these preferences, which is something I did and that I consider many people do, which is once again only creating relationships and ideas of ourselves based on what has kept the entire ‘show’ running as is without opening up real possibilities for change, because in holding on to this so-called ‘art’ and ‘culture’ I was in fact limiting myself from seeing the actual potential we have as real self-creation, which is then stopping following ‘the leaders’ and ‘trends’ that are manufactured or trying to ‘fit into’ certain personalities, but instead focus on changing the starting point of everything we do/act/speak on, changing our lives from copycats to self-creative individuals without any need for ‘external reinforcement’ to do so.
I forgive myself that I had accepted and allowed myself to focus on all ‘the bad’ and that which I believed we refused looking at or realizing as a way to ‘wake us up’ but now, that’s also become part of ‘the norm’ and so developing a kind of ‘resistance’ or immunity to any form of shock, which is why I realize that utilizing images to shock even more is just not doing the work any longer. This is then about developing new ways that involve thinking out of the box as in thinking outside of the morality of the good vs. the bad and start focusing on living principles within our self-creative abilities.
I realize that in order to create any life-supportive art, the creator itself must walk through this deconstruction process him/herself so that one is deliberately then willing to contribute with one’s words, action to the creation of a world that is best for everyone as our common aim at this moment in our world. And this will imply also the exposure of the fallacies that we have revered as our history, and so forgiving that past fuckup and see it for the propaganda that it was as a creation of ‘the winners’ in the world, and so build a new culture of life that involves self-education, self-improvement through learning more about what it means to live within Self-Honesty and learn how to honor each other as life. This is not ‘uncool’ this is what we have pushed ourselves to see as ‘uncool’ or ‘outdated’ but that’s the key to a genuine change in our mentality and so in our reality. We need books, we need films, we need music, we need plays, we need visual works that can be tools of support for this process of self-revelation or ‘the revelation’ process which can also expose the art of the past for what it was, what was its purpose, its consequences and so make each other aware that we have collectively used something as culture to continue ‘pushing the envelope’ and not questioning further the type of fascinations or addictions that we simply came to ‘embrace’ as part of our lives as that would make us ‘avant-garde’ or ‘keeping up with our times’ in the illusion of progress, which were in fact fabricated for the purpose of preventing us from actually focusing on that which matters, which is getting to know ourselves, developing self awareness and becoming individuals that can genuinely break the patterns from the past in all aspects of ourselves as there is nothing I can hold any form of respect, devotion or admiration from ‘our culture’ in the past, because we didn’t use it to share with each other how to actually live and become our fullest potential as species.
I now understand this ‘letting go’ of something that I had wanted to hold on to as part of my self-definition. And I can see that this is part of the ‘programming’ that I had to shed over time which in itself is part of my process in order to not only see it as ‘preprogramming’ but understanding how this culture that I had become fond of was never meant to support ourselves and each other to realize ourselves as life. This is what we have conditioned each other to by our own acceptance and allowance and such, it is now when I decide to understand more about the world-system picture so that I stop revering that which was never meant to be supportive for life.
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