One minus one is always zero
External authority shares a certain amount of common ground and this is true far more when it comes to psychiatry, psychotherapy, other forms of therapy and eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism than it is true for religion (in general) and politics. The common ground is of course the transformation of consciousness in a way as to get at nirvana, moksha, or enlightenment. While it is true that religion is a tool for broadening your understanding of mysticism and the mystical experience, much in the same way as psychedelic drugs and substances can be used to expand your mind, religion has become far more focussed, like politics, on laying down the law and maintaining social order.
This is where, if you are seeking guidance from external authority, because of your mental confusion and inability to move forward and recover the flow of your life, you can easily become trapped by right and wrong and moral reasoning. This is a common issue when you have a traumatic mindset, and the complexity of your circumstances and your life - which can happen to anyone given the complicated nature of modern life and human relationships - because you can be drawn into second hand beliefs from external authority and cheat yourself out of some valuable life experience and insight.
This is why no central method is offered by Qultura methodology. Profoundly anti-authoritarian in nature by design, discussions of right and wrong are discouraged within the Qultura community simply because human experience of life is human experience of life.
For over five thousand years the path of human consciousness towards mystical insight has been distracted in various ways by moral reasoning and arguments as to what is right and what is wrong, and not much in the way of evolution of human consciousness has been achieved as a result. The technology has changed, as has culture, as has language, but the ideological and societal divisions are today in the 21st century pretty much the same as they were in the 19th century or at least the early 20th century. You could even speculate that such divisions and issues go back much, much further. But how far back do you need to go to understand that such divisions exist today?
The differences between reality and truth
These differences between reality and truth lie in the arbitrary nature of environment and individual. To simplify the nature of this relationship environment is ‘many’ and individual is not. To think of yourself, your whole being or concept of self as individual is to deny the existence of the environment and relationship which leads to what individual actually is.
We tend to think of environment as something which is not us, such as this planet and our natural environment, or society and our social environment. But environment is also our physical bodies, our hearts, our brains, our internal body organs, our sensory and motor nervous systems, our circulation, our digestive system, our experiences of life, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, the language we use. Our minds are also environment, for the mind is simply the environment through which we think and feel, and through which we both perceive and conceive our reality. All this is environment.
Part of the reality which we all experience in life is the fact that we experience environment, both within us and all around us, and we are equipped with a brain which can handle the many different variables of environment, the felt sense of immediate experience, the continuous multidimensional continuum of sensation and experience, but the focus of our conscious attention, the Ego as it were, can only handle one, two or perhaps three different variables without needing to sit down and make a list.
Truth is consciousness, but it is only the reality we are conscious of through our perception and direct personal experience of reality, and only in the present moment. Many people confuse truth with principle or law, and while principle and law may have some basis on truth, quite often the truth we are able to perceive does not take in the variables or conditions that we cannot perceive.
Consider that even as recently as 300 years ago most people believed that the world was only 4,000 years old and had been created by God. A little more than a century ago, around the time of Freud, we believed that we were exceptional intelligent beings living on a planet in a universe of unintelligent, random forces of Nature. People were covering the legs of tables and chairs to prevent ‘sinful’ and ‘immoral’ thoughts. We believed that we would suffocate if we travelled at speeds of more than 30mph. We believed that machines heavier than air could not fly. We believed that people with wide foreheads were born criminals.
So what, in the space of a century we have reality all figured out? Is this what you really think? Then why is everything such a mess?
The new threshold for Mankind and human consciousness is the fact that we are in fact relative to everything else in existence, and that we understand reality a lot less than we assume that we do. In the past 50 years there is a growing awareness that consciousness is the basis of all existence, and that reality - the reality that matters - is predominantly subjective.
The dangerous assumptions of a human centric universe and planet
The danger lies in the assumption that we are separate from our environment and that we are separate from everything else in the universe and also everything else on this planet. This notion that we are God, the divine Creator of our environment, is what is known in mystical terms as inflation. Inflation is the assumption that we are in control, we understand our environmental reality, and we are best placed to make changes in our environment believing that this can serve our purpose and enhance or somehow improve the nature of our existence.
But our environment contains many different variables that we do not understand and often cannot even perceive. Such is the nature of our direct life experience. Outside the conscious, the habitual, the regular, the lawful, life comes at us constantly and randomly, in a sequence of unconnected events, happenings, conflicts, contradictions, and it does so simply because the basis of all existence is consciousness, and consciousness is not lawful, it’s spontaneous, random, unpredictable.
The danger comes from regarding psychiatry, psychology and even science in the same way as religion, which is becoming more and more the norm in the West, and the assumption that science, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy as the penultimate arbiter of what constitutes legitimate human experience and behaviour and what isn’t. This creates a certain stigma around mental health issues and mental illness and people who are labelled as mentally ill are often stigmatized to the degree that their experiences of life are invalidated because they ‘have issues’.
Some degree of reliance on external authority is necessary in life particularly in our earliest years but care needs to be taken that the path taken under guidance from external authority does not corrupt us internally, stifle our perception of possibilities, or render us blind and ignorant of our own inner truth and karma. There are inherent dangers in external authority, in particular when the external authority is religious or political in nature, because we can lose sight of our Principle, lose perspective, and become disconnected and divorced from our reality and authentic Process or experience of life.
Self realization and truth cannot come from someone else’s truth
The key to finding your truth is to find your perspective or Principle. The starting point for Qultura methodology is the exact same starting point in life which we all go through at the very start of life. “This is me.” “This is not me.” If you can identify something as being you, and something else as not being you, then you’ve figured out relationship, a mystical transaction, and you can then begin to explore the connection and start the yoga.
But then is that what you identify as you really you, or is it what other people have told you is you and you’ve just somehow accepted it, gone along with it, and now believe it?
There is no need to wade through an entire philosophy or methodology of some ancient guru in Northern India from a couple of thousand years ago. You are not a one year old infant just starting out in life. The Principle and Process of existence isn’t complicated, it’s just a foundation, a basis, a starting point. The environment you have to work with, the reality, the here and now is very small, and this is the only reality that matters.
Out of this reality - your reality - in the here and now you can figure out your process and from that figure out your Principle and your methodology. What is your experience of life? What do you think? How do you feel? Do you really need some guru or dead person to translate to you how you feel or what you think? Do you really need that authority?
The answers you see lie deep within you, nowhere else. You just need to find the inspiration and go through the experiences to bring the answers into your field of immediate consciousness because it’s in that field of immediate consciousness is where you create your truth.