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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to rant a bit about culture ever since I was a kid I've been suspicious of culture somehow it rubbed me the wrong way and I mean every type of culture not just a specific culture I've always really disliked culture and for the longest time I didn't know why so this would include gamer culture biker culture pickup culture hippie culture goth culture tattoo culture American culture academic or scientific culture corporate culture black culture drug culture Christian culture Islamic culture Hindu culture Russian culture and by the way I'm Russian originally a geek or nerd culture and sports culture so that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the cultures that are there a lot of these are sort of subcultures some of them are larger some of them are smaller but like I said they've always rubbed me the wrong way and I never felt like I fit in into any culture maybe you can resonate with that and like I said for the longest time I didn't know why this was I thought it was just like I'm kind of weird I don't know why I don't fit into any culture but the more I started doing consciousness work and personal development work I realized why this is and it's because all culture is fundamentally artificial and limited and it stifles consciousness that's the problem and I'm not picking on any particular culture here I mean all cultures I'm painting deliberately with a broad brush here all cultures are inherently limited they're inherently artificial they're inherently arbitrary there are constructs of the human mind they are biased inherently so they're moralizing they're bigoted they're egoic they're inauthentic to individuals they force people into pigeon holes and straitjackets very often they're neurotic they're escaping just they're very clannish and they get aggressive whenever they're threatened really what we're dealing with here when we're talking about culture is we're dealing with the collective ego so if ego is what you got going on personally and we've already talked in the past about how many problems the ego creates for us okay so when we're self actualizing we're dealing with this ego and how to overcome its limitations but it's not merely that we have our own privately goes it's also that our private little ego is very intimately wedded to the collective ego of our society of our nation of our continent of our religion of our scientific paradigm of our local community of our city of our state you know it like you've got all these layers to it and this ego just like the individual ego which is a construct of all these things that we cling to about ourselves well the collective ego is just like that it's also a construct it doesn't really exist in the sense that you can point your finger at it and say there it is there's culture it doesn't look like that right culture is this kind of ethereal abstract thing you can't quite pin it down and yet it's such a pivotal player in your life and it influences you so much and the problem here though is that it's kind of like you're the fish and water the culture is the water and the fish has spent his whole life living in the water doesn't even recognize that there is influences from culture what's easy recognizes influences from other cultures and a lot of people have they're disliked culture like I don't like that culture there I don't like this culture there I don't like this country I don't like that nation I don't like that football team I don't like those Republicans or those Democrats or I don't like those philosophers or those scientists or those religious people but then when it comes to your culture that's you generally have a blind spot and that creates many many problems now it's very easy to denounce other cultures because we can see the inherent limitations of other cultures but it's very difficult to see your own culture and the influence it has on you and the limitations that it places on you now you might say well Leo what's wrong with culture I mean aren't there good cultures out there isn't it a matter of like avoiding the bad ones and finding the good ones and what I would say is no it's not that small of a problem it's a lot deeper of a problem because all culture fundamentally is mechanical its mechanical and everything that's mechanical prevents consciousness from growing and given that your prime directive in life is to be growing and developing your consciousness culture presents a huge huge huge unseen obstacle for you you don't even know that it's there it's like a glass ceiling that you keep hitting your head against as you're trying to grow and self actualize and you wonder like why am i hitting this glass ceiling well it's because your culture is there in the background now some cultures are a lot more toxic than others so I'm not saying they're all equally bad and I'm not saying that there's not some good elements to culture but even if you take the most spiritual cultures of all time like what would that be maybe that would be you might say that that's like something like Buddhism you might say well Lia what's wrong with Buddhism that seems like a perfectly good spiritual culture well if you start to do a little bit of research you start to see a lot of dysfunctions a lot of limitations a lot of problems with Buddhist culture you start to see it really quickly if you do just some objective research and the same will go for any culture no matter how good you think it is how spotless and how spiritual it always devolves because fundamentally we're trying to do is you're trying to take consciousness and then you're trying to distribute it to the masses to a cultural mechanism and that always makes it mechanical and then that always fails but before I talk more about that let's really get specific here because I want you to start to feel and to get a sense of the magnitude of what I'm talking about here so try to imagine with me right now just how much your culture has affected you and when I talk about culture by the way I don't just mean like the very traditional types of culture like you might think of Islamic culture it's pretty easy to see the culture in Islamic culture or like maybe the culture and Buddhism you can see it in that right these are very deep old traditions or something like you know Judaism you can see the culture in it or like Roman Catholicism in the Vatican they have thousands of years of history so I mean obviously that's culture but I don't want you to make the mistake of saying like well because I live in America or I live somewhere in Europe you know uh and I'm not really a church-going type and I'm not a really traditional type of person that just because that you're like that that that means you're not affected by culture no in many ways if you are like that if you're living in a modern Western democracy like America or in Europe or maybe Australia or someplace you actually have it in a sense the worst because your culture is transparent to you and yet at the same time it has a lot of influences on you that you probably haven't really thought of before so let's articulate a few of these imagine with me how much your culture has influenced the following things in you how you dress how you wear your hairstyle the entertainment and media that you like and dislike and that you consume the food that you like or dislike and consume your attitude towards drugs and alcohol your attitude towards prescription medicine your attitude towards work business and career and how you think business ought to be run the technology that you use and also the technology that you don't use and that you think of as hokey or as pseudoscience how is culture influenced your education and what you even understand education to be to think of education as going from first grade to twelfth grade and then going to four years of college if that's what you think education is just think about how much that whole scheme has been influenced by modern culture think about your ideas about how kids should be raised and remember that you were one of those kids who was raised according to the rules of your culture of how kids should be raised also your ideas and norms about family what a family is what a family includes or excludes and how families should function what a healthy family looks like think about your views about sex and intimate relationships and romantic love and marriage and how you view that huge chunk of your life what you think is right there what you think is wrong there and the way that you go about having sex and the way you go about having intimate relationships and what you believe love is and how it actually works the mechanics of those things think about how much your culture has shaped that try to also imagine how much your culture has shaped your paradigms of what you believe reality is people often think like all reality reality is just reality we know what it is it's just the facts no no no no no no no no reality is not just the facts the facts are held in the context of your culture and what's really crazy and we start to realize just how much the change the perspective on the facts can change so much the significance you attach to the facts and what you believe realities can change so much depending on your culture because it's all about the context you see and culture is the context for almost everything you do especially everything you do socially with other people think about also try to imagine this how culture has influenced your ideas of science and what is valid science and valid knowledge versus invalid science and invalid knowledge maybe you might call that folk knowledge or pseudoscience this stuff is not carved in stone this is part of your culture you see think about history oh this is a big one imagine just try to imagine this is so significant how much your culture has impacted your knowledge of human history it's so easy to overlook this because in school we'll just taught history and we just think that all yeah history is just history no history completely depends on the culture and the country that you learned it from completely almost completely if you grew up in Africa you would have very different history lessons than if you grow up in America versus whether you grew up in Australia versus whether you grew up in Singapore or in China somewhere right these would all be very very different histories they would stress very different things and they'd have very different perspectives on the evolution of humanity and civilization and if you were a Native American you would have a very different sense of history than Americans do also try to imagine just how much culture has shaped your morality and your ethics what you believe is right and wrong that's huge that's huge also think about now getting a little bit more personal how much your culture has shaped your values and ideals about your own life what you want for yourself your deepest desires and your goals can you see how culture is a huge component of that it's not that you were just born you just have some desires to become successful or to to become a scientist or you have a desire to become a a professional athlete you know football play or something like that no can you see that that's all part of culture also your ideals about how you're supposed to look how tall you're supposed to be what color hair you're supposed to have uh what kind of clothes you should wearing all these ideals you have how popular you should be how much money you should have what kind of girlfriend or husband you should have can you see that that's all culturally influenced can you start to grasp the significance of this also fears imagine how much culture shapes what you fear the most in life what do you fear do you fear not being liked do you feel being ridiculed do you fear becoming homeless do you fear being excommunicated from your church or from your community do you fear being called a pervert or a charlatan what do you fear and how is call or played into that what do you believe what are your beliefs all the beliefs you have how many of those are actually derived from culture how many of those wouldn't even exist in you if not for your culture how about gender roles you think a man is just a man and a woman is just a woman how much do you think culture played into that what you think a man is and what you think a woman is and what the ideals are for both of them and how they should interact that's very much culturally derived think about death what are your thoughts and beliefs about death that's very much dependent on your culture not every culture of use death as a bad thing not every culture denies it and ignores it and tries to run away from it the way that modern Western cultures do think about language try to imagine how much language which comes completely from your culture how much that has shaped your perspective on all of reality including science religion and all your reactions with all your friends and all your beliefs those are all shaped by language that's such a fundamental layer that we rarely think about language is not just a difference in the words that we use language actually affects the concepts you can hold in your mind and how you actually think about reality the very grammar of language structures how you think about the world sports do you like sports think about how much sports are a byproduct of culture spirituality are you into spirituality have spiritual practices or religious beliefs I mean that is hugely influenced by your culture health how do you view health what do you think is healthy or unhealthy this is all coming from culture and also your hobbies whatever hobbies you have are you collecting stamps are you collecting butterflies or whatever hobbies you might have that you like to do I think about how much those are probably shaped by culture as well a shocking revelation is to realize that you are in a cult and you don't even know it that's what culture is culture is just a big cult and you know it's very interesting because a lot of times people who are very sucked into mainstream culture they will point to what look like bubbles or subcultures within the mainstream culture and say all look that's a cult like those Mormons are a cult and and those Scientologists are a cult and those people over there are like a cult and this is a cult and maybe Leo like actualize that org is starting to turn into a cult but the people that I see that always point the finger and say oh look at that cult what they're not aware of is that the biggest cult you got to be afraid of is not those little cults it's the gigantic over cult the super set of all cults which is the national cult that you grew up in which is almost completely transparent to you and it feels just like reality to you it feels like it couldn't be any other way and then yet you know you go travel to a totally different country which has a totally different culture and you get this culture shock and all of a sudden you see just how arbitrary all that stuff that your culture has been doing really is but even if you do go travel around that still won't be enough to see the the tentacles of this thing you know your culture the tentacles of your culture are buried so deep in every orifice of your body um that I like that image because it's a disturbing image you imagine giant octopus with tentacles in every orifice of your body that's what's happening to you right and the biggest thing is that nobody told you this because of course part of every culture is to deny that it's a culture to deny its arbitrariness to deny the fact that it's a construction so what is a culture really what is the function of culture why does culture even exist well this is a deep deep philosophical topic that you could ponder for hours and hours and I encourage you to do that but just to gloss over it really quickly what's going on with culture I think is that you have a collective identity a collective ego being created by individuals that are coming together for purposes of survival and reproduction basically and the culture facilitates that the culture is like a higher order organization amongst social creatures humans in this case primates monkeys whatever that then allows them to bond better so there's a sharing of common values and beliefs and ideas and so forth and this of course creates a sort of paradigm or a lens through which all of reality is viewed and it's not the cultures prime objective to increase the consciousness of the collective or of itself culture is mostly concerned with just a survival and reproduction and out competing other neighboring cultures see and really the really kind of deep almost cynical definition of culture is it's a collective bubble of delusion that's what it is think about this for a second if you had a bunch of individuals as an individual you basically just have kind of reality whatever reality is that's before culture right imagine there's no culture at all it hasn't been invented yet so you just have an individual in the middle of the jungle and he's there within reality now what's beneficial perhaps an individual is to come up with visual ideas and constructs about reality but what's the problem there well the problem there is that if you come up with some fantasy about reality and it's only you in the jungle well the jungle will easily kick your ass won't it and your ideas about how the jungle works won't matter very much they're not going to help you that much because you're gonna have you know your feet are going to be burned by the the brutal nature of reality itself and so if you start to have all sorts of fanciful beliefs about how reality works within the jungle the jungle is basically going to kill you okay so that doesn't work but let's say we get together a hundred people now those hundred people if they come up with some ideas and constructs about how the jungle works well they've got more slack so to speak because together what they can do is they can actually take their ideas and because you're building this house of cards each card reinforces and leans on the other so these hundred individuals like nodes in a network can come together come up with a construction and that construction all the sudden takes on a very real significant meaning that otherwise it couldn't have because each other node in the network reinforces the validity of that belief or that worldview and so in this way we can have a construction such as money a totally arbitrary invention but also very useful and also potentially very dangerous as we find out with you know economic global collapses which we're starting to face all around the world nowadays because of all the shenanigans that go on the financial markets right but you can start to see how money even though it's a construction because we all believe in it it takes on a reality of its own and that really if you think about it from the standpoint of the evolution of reality right it's like first there was the planet Earth then there was bacteria then those bacteria evolved into creatures and lizards and dinosaurs and then those died and then we have mammals than we had humans and like all of this was like nature was inventing all this cool stuff and now with humans a really interesting invention comes online which didn't really exist with the with other creatures not on this scale is that we can just manufacture our own fantasies and just by the fact that we can take this fantasy and spread it around amongst a billion people that fantasy takes on a life of its own and it actually becomes sort of a pseudo reality that's the power of belief that's the power of collective fantasy and so a modern man lives in these bubbles right these bubbles of constructed fantasies and these apply to what clothing you should wear think about like nature doesn't care what clothing you wear and yet it makes a huge important difference when you're going to high school what clothing you wear if you go to high school with the wrong clothing you're not going to have sex people are going to laugh at you they're going to ridicule you your reputation will be ruined or if you're trying to um feed your family by starting a business or having a career uh it's going to matter what clothing you wear and it's going to matter how much money you have in your bank account and it's going to matter you know all all this socially constructive stuff is going to matter otherwise you will not get hired for the job if you come into a job interview and you tell them that you believe in Satan they probably won't hire you even though Nature doesn't care if you believe in Satan or not but other human beings do and because you've now grown up in a society which is completely dominated by the culture that we've created in a sense like Nature has become a distant second far down on the list of priorities your first priorities are now to fit into the social matrix to impress people to get people to like you to play politics games to you know to earn money to to have sex with the right people to get approval from the right people and you know to play sports and to to be in team and to to go to the gym and to look healthy and to look ripped and to have the right hobbies and all this sort of stuff and to do spirituality in the right way and what the culture does is the culture guilts you and pressures you into subscribing to the culture and this happened to you if you can remember when you were a small kid that started to happen to you you as a kid had your own natural inclinations to do this or to dress this way or to to say this thing here but then what happened your parents or your friends or your teachers which were all enforcers of the culture they basically beat that out of you by telling you no no no no no no no and also giving you rewards for obeying the culture and that way they basically peer pressured and suckered you into believing and playing this game and so it's a game and like I said it's bad enough to only be dealing with your own private ego but now you also have to contend with the cultural ego and that's a that's a much bigger challenge in a sense because your private ego you kind of have you know you can you can go to work on that but what's really difficult to do is to change the cultural ego that's what politics is all about and you know how nasty and difficult that can be and all of this of course relates back to you into the development of your consciousness and what you have to realize is that the raising of your consciousness which is your prime imperative in life is a solo activity consciousness cannot be raised as a group project consciousness is purely a solo activity now you might say well Leo there's a lot of spiritual traditions and it seems like I have more success working on my spiritual habits like if I'm meditating in a group or you know what about Buddhism or Hinduism or some of these other traditions like Zen for example which is a culture which have produced many enlightened people and they seem to be able to successfully raise consciousness no that's an illusion yes some cultures are more conducive to the raising of consciousness but consciousness itself is only raised on an individual level this is very important to understand it's only raised on an individual level you might even look at actualize that org you might say well actualize that org that's like a little culture little subculture that helps me to find a sense of community and a sense of support for self actualized yes it seems like it does that but in the end your ability to self actualize will really only come down to your your own inner work that you do or fail to do and any attempt that you make to self actualize as part of a group it's not going to work too well in fact what's going to produce is going to produce all the mechanical nasai described and it could produce all the classic symptoms of a cult and this is inevitable because this is how a collective ego works you see so you have to realize this and this is why religion will always fail at producing enlightened people as will any other organizational community not in the sense that they can't but in the sense that they will always encounter the same kind of mechanical corruptions that happened with every mechanical system and only to the extent that you're focusing inward on yourself and taking sole responsibility for your spiritual and conscious development only to that extent can you actually become enlightened or can experience riot raising of consciousness within your your group of your community see and to the extent that you forget about that and you get lost in the externals and in all the social relationships to that extent you're not raising your consciousness and you're actually lowering it your goal as part of the self actualization journey is to become independent of all culture not to denounce it be very careful here not to interpret what I'm saying as culture is evil and bad and now we have to judge everyone who's part of any culture and then we have to denounce all culture no that would be equally bad you want to transcend culture you don't want to be reactive against culture you want to be able to transcend it which means that when you do interact with people who are deeply soaked in some kind of culture that doesn't trigger you and you don't need to tell them to stop you don't need to convert them or proselytize them or to judge them or to wag your finger at them no you're cool with it but you yourself have transcended culture which means you operate outside of culture which if you remember my video about self-actualization where I talk about I give you a whole list of all the features of a self actualized human being according to Abraham Maslow's definition um there one of the points one of the hallmark features of a self actualized person is that they have transcended culture and I see very few people who have really truly transcended culture this is not an easy thing to do because we're so blind to it so how do you do this how do you actually go about seeing the cultural blind spots well firstly simply by awareness just start to notice all the elements of culture that are like these tentacles that are crawling into every orifice in your body and how they're influencing you start to see that just by awareness of that alone you'll start to gain distance and transcendence and that can go a long way you can really ramp up that awareness but also by studying and experiencing other cultures this is important people who have only experienced one or two cultures tend to be very closed-minded and very stuck in their culture and very defensive about it whereas people who have experienced 3 5 10 different cultures and have actually lived in those cultures they gain a very different perspective on life they're much more open-minded they're much more multicultural and they're generally just much more chill human beings also cut any cultural feeds that are feeding you with cultural information so stuff like all the comedy videos that you watch on YouTube all the movies you watch at the movie theater or on Netflix all the magazines you read the tabloids that you read you know the websites that you visit for your popular news and stuff like that um the books that you read so all the media basically is the most direct line that feeds you culture and I know how much you love your media your video games and your Netflix and so forth so you know what the bad news is that you might have to cut some of that stuff even though it's fun and you love it at some point you have to realize also how much it's reinforcing all these beliefs and all these values and all these ideals that probably aren't what you really want in your life but they're being fed all those funny videos you watch that you love so much they're all feeding you the same cultural norms and ideas see and it's because you love them so much they just enter your brain and they just stick there and then you never even question them so start cutting those cut those feeds also be less social because all the socialization you do with your friends guess what that's also feeding you feeding you with gossip feeding you with the latest news feeding you with the latest memes and the latest norms and latest fads the newest movie they came out and this thing happened to that person and oh what about this politician look at what he did the sex scandal see all that stuff feeds in in a subtle way it feeds in and it's dangerous because it feels pleasant to gossip about this stuff but then of course what happens that you don't really have any solitude time so as you become less social you're going to become more of a loner and you're gonna have a lot more time to reflect and to contemplate and to just be in solitude and that's exactly what you need to start to undo and extricate yourself from the culture also you should start to question everything question everything that your culture has ever taught you question every single belief that your culture takes for granted and holds is sacred and unquestionable become a true skeptic also embark on your own journey if you want to extricate yourself from culture have something of your own that you're trying to create you're trying to do have a life purpose because when you're focused on your life purpose you're trying to accomplish something big you're not going to have time to engage in all the cultural nonsense that goes around you and also you're probably have to break some cultural conventions to accomplish that big objective another huge win of psychedelics go try some psychedelics and see how much that shatters uh your notions of what your culture has taught you it will really break down a lot of the beliefs and ideas and stories that you have that you really feel are part of reality but psychedelics will quickly tell you that now now they're really just arbitrary constructions meditation is a huge pick up a meditation habits are doing it every single day the more you meditate the longer you meditate for years and years and years as you keep doing that you will slowly extricate yourself more and more from culture until eventually you can completely break out of it or you know I would say completely because culture is so deep that even people who get enlightened are still largely run by cultural norms I think of a Zen master a deeply lighten Zen master well he might be extremely enlightened but he's still very much at the at the affect of his culture and a lot of times in nasty and negative ways and be more with nature because nature doesn't come with a culture when you're out in the woods winter in a mountain top when you're in the middle of the ocean when you're on a tropical island all by yourself in the midst of nature and it's beautiful and it's amazing that somehow shifts something in you where you start to see reality stripped of all its cultural constructs all the human that we constructed this entire matrix you're sort of ripped out of it and you see the majesty of reality bear without any adornments and that can be a beautiful thing and that's ultimately what you're shooting for is to live in reality free of all the adornments because yes the adornments they seem kind of Pleasant and sexy at first but then later you realize that really they're just very gaudy these gaudy human adornments that you don't need and it can be much more satisfied and fulfilled when you just drop those so that's it that's my rant about culture remember that when I rant you got to understand that I'm kind of doing a rant tongue-in-cheek I'm not really here bitter about culture pissed off and sago culture we got to destroy all culture no I'm just kind of doing it for entertainment you know at this point I it's hard for me to even muster a serious rant these days cuz it's just like I don't really I'm not really attached I'm not really attached to my beliefs or some ideas that much so I just kind of rant when it's fun to you know vent a little bit and because I think that right now you know it's really lopsided 99% of people are so immersed in culture that I feel like if I rant about culture a lot that will just be a nudge in the opposite direction right I could shoot a hundred hours of ramp on culture and that would still probably not be enough for you to get to the point where you are actually on the upper other end of the spectrum where you're actually denouncing all culture and that's becoming neurotic I mean ultimately gonna have to find a balance right it's all about balance but right now I think you're you're safely on the end of the spectrum where you can really cut a lot of culture out of your life with no problems only benefits alright so like I said that's it but I do have a worksheet for you so go do the worksheet fill it out to take all this abstract stuff and to make it concrete it's got questions on there that will really make you question how much culture is influenced your life so that free worksheet is down below just click the link sit I'm signing off post me your comments down below click the like button for me please right now and share this episode with friend and then lastly come to actualize on a rug this is my website come check it out it's an easier way to browse all my videos I have some exclusive content on there subscribe to my newsletter stay tuned every single week for more content that I'm gonna be releasing because to self-actualize one of the things you're going to have to do is you're going to have to dismantle many of the constructions that you created or your culture has created over your entire lifetime and that process can be a tricky process it's difficult to navigate that whole thing right there's a lot of sneaky little counterintuitive games that your mind will play on you that will sabotage you in that quest so my objective is to provide you with the knowledge the big picture understanding so that you can go on this journey and ultimately purify yourself of all this artificial nough sand get to the bare truth of what you are what reality is and then to live from place of freedom in your life so that you're not limited or controlled or bullied by all this baggage that you picked up from your social matrix that's sort of what we're doing so there's a lot more to share sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you