Culture = A Big Cult You have different cultures: gamer culture, biker culture, pickup culture, hippie culture, tattoo culture, American culture, scientific culture, corporate culture, drug culture, Christian culture, geek culture and sports culture (and there a much more of them). All cultures are fundamentally artificial, limited, arbitrary, biased, moralizing, egoic, inauthentic to individuals, neurotic and stifles consciousness. Culture is the collective ego and our individual ego is full of it. Culture is a construct and doesn’t really exist but influences you big time. The problem with culture is that it is the water and you are the fish, you cannot recognize that you are influenced by culture. You usually have a blindspot for your culture: you cannot recognize how it influences you and the limitations that it has on you. What is wrong with culture? All cultures al mechanical and everything that is mechanical prevents consciousness from growing. Culture is the context for everything you do How much your culture had influenced the following things in you: -          How you dress -          Your hair style -          The entertainment and media you like -          The food -          Your attitude towards drugs, alcohol and prescription medicine -          Your attitude towards work, business and career and how you think businesses have to be run -          The technology you use or don’t use -          Education -          Your ideas about how kids should be raised -          Ideas about family -          Your views about sex, relationships and marriage -          How reality is -          Your ideas of science and what is valid or not -          History (it completely depends on the country you learned it from) -          Morality and ethics -          Your values and ideals. What do you want for yourself. Your deepest desires and goals -          How you should be supposed to look, the money you should have, the girlfriend you should have -          Fears -          Beliefs -          Gender roles, ideals and how they should interact -          Death -          Language -          Sports -          Spirituality -          Health -          Hobbies You are in a cult and you don’t even know it. You feel that reality could not be any other way. What is the function of culture? You have a collective identity for purposes of survival and reproduction and culture helps achieve these goals.  Culture is mostly concerned with survival and reproduction, outcompeting other rivaling cultures. Culture, even though it is a construction, if many people believe in it, it can gain a reality on its own. Modern man lives in a collective fantasy but nature doesn’t care about any of these things. Your first priorities are to fit into the social matrix: -          To impress people -          To earn money -          To have sex with the right people -          To play sports -          To go to the gym and have the right hobbies -          Etc. Culture pressures you to fit into the culture but you as a child had natural inclinations to dress how you wanted, or to speak how you wanted and so on. You need to realize that your raising of your consciousness is a solo activity. Consciousness cannot be raised as a group project. Your ability to self-actualize comes from the inner work that you do alone. If you try to rise consciousness as a group thing you will create a culture and the mechanics of it. Your goal as a part of your self-actualization journey is to become independent from all culture, not to denounce it. Culture is not evil and bad; you don’t want to react to it, just transcend it. What does this mean? When you are with people that are deeply engrained with cultural norms and beliefs, it doesn’t trigger you and you don’t need to tell them to stop or judge them, you are cool with it but you operate outside of culture. How do you do it? -           Firstly, by awareness. Start noticing all the elements of culture that are ingrained in yourself. -          Also, experience other cultures. -          Cut any cultural feeds like comedy videos, movies, magazines, news, books. Basically, all the media. The media reinforces you values that you actually don’t really care -          Be less social and be in solitude -          Start to question everything -          Embark on your own journey. Have a life purpose and something you want to create. When you are focus on creating something big you will not have time to engage in all the cultural nonsense. -          Try psychedelics -          Meditation -          Be more with nature You should live free in reality without all the constrains that culture puts in you. You will have to find a balance but you need to cut a lot of culture out of your life.