Who do you think you are?

• 12 February, 2022
• culture
• society
• trauma

Intelligence is special when compared to stupidity or ignorance, but nobody holds the patent on it. I don't believe that intelligence is innate or something you are born with. I'm not a midwife nor do I work in a hospital but I don't believe that any newborn baby is any more intelligent, or any more stupid than the next newborn baby. Intelligence is something that you learn from transforming insight into knowledge. It's not something you're born with, but something which comes from your environment. As I write these words I can feel a few raised eyebrows but I refuse to accept that anyone is more intelligent than anyone else, or conversely, that anyone is more stupid than anyone else.

Everybody starts out the same way. We all start out ignorant, unaware, but curious. This is not necessarily human behaviour. If you let a cat or a dog into a new space, such as a new room, both the cat and dog will check out the space and investigate the environment before deciding whether or not it's comfortable being in that environment. Human beings are no different. Small children get everywhere and get their hands into everything because they're naturally curious about what is going on around them. In fact I'd even go as far to say that small children are far more environmentally aware than most adults simply because they don't have a well developed Ego, they have hardly any life experience, and they're not constantly filtering out stuff through thinking.

I've also never heard a three year old child say, "When I grow up I'm going to work 40 hours a week, pay all my bills on time, and vote for the blue party."

Ego is our response to an environment

This is something I suggest you spend some time thinking about. Ego is what happens when your natural curiosity is shut down and you are assigned a role to which you become attached. This for most people normally happens within the first couple of years at school fairly early in childhood. This is something I've observed on and off for many years. My becoming a mystic and shaman was never intentional for me nor was it ever planned or thought out. I have wandered and drifted throughout my entire life never really becoming too attached to any roles in life. I think I started out in my teens wanting to get into psychiatric nursing, then there was the Theravada Buddhism, astrology, the Tarot, magic, theatre, the performing arts, poetry, music, I could have gone in so many different directions.

I just took a decision early in my life and made a commitment to retain my natural curiosity and treat my life as some kind of voyage or journey of exploration, experimentation and learning, about the world, about life, about other people, about myself. My curiosity was somewhat inculcated by my late mother.

If you look back on my life from an outside perspective what you will see is a disjointed mess. I've changed radically over the years but see, everything I've ever done or believed is somehow connected not only with what was previously but what came next. Rather than see ourselves as a character made up from different arbitrary character traits and events which we somehow believe is our personality, what I suggest is you see your life as a narrative, a story, and who you were and what you did was always somehow relative to your circumstances, whatever role or function you had at the time, and your relationship to other people.

What makes you the individual who you are today isn't a personality. It's your environment, your circumstances, the relationships you've had with different people, and the narrative and story you can tell me or anyone else about your life.

The way of the ancestors

Shamen talk about 'the way of the ancestors'. The phrase sounds vaguely New Age, and it has a kind of warm, fuzzy sound to it. But what is the way of the ancestors? Fundamentally it is human evolution. The way to see yourself is the front end of a set of experiences of life which are not just relative to you, but which can be relative to many other different people. Let's take a simple gesture, say you scratch your nose. Well maybe you scratch your nose in the same way as your grandfather, your grandmother, your great grandfather, and so on, further back in time.

Everything about you is inherited from someone else. Nothing about you - your body, your mind, the way you think, the different emotions and feelings you go through, is uniquely your's. That is unless you're some weird mutation of a human being, an evolutionary offshoot. Everything that is serviceable about you is inherited from the past and comes out of memory.

Therefore not only are we not that much different from each other, but we're also not that different from people in the past. Even if we go back say 3,000 or 5,000 years, the differences between we, the people, now from who people were back then are pretty much insignificant.

What I'm saying is that we become who we are primarily down to environmental factors - both natural and social. This is why when developing Qultura I did not make any effort to develop a method to follow. The key difference between Qultura and the pattern or model I was working from - Theravada Buddhism, is that Theravada Buddhism is largely gnostic in nature, and I sought to emphasize the agnosis or the agnostic nature of Qultura. This is also why Qultura is all about the narrative and the community at the expense of any sense of self. This is a tricky message to put out there, given the fact that most people strongly identify with a sense of selfhood or Ego.

Some people will ask me, as they have in the past, if I'm advocating some kind of hive mind, a kind of crypto-fascist ideology. No. I don't think so.

Ideas are what matter when it comes to evolution

It's not true that the crowning achievement of Western civilization is the democratically empowered individual and Ego. This is not the shining achievement of our civilization. For me personally one of the biggest 20th century achievements in the West was the Beveridge Report of 1942 which led to the concept of social security, and the creation of the welfare state and National Health Service in Britain. This created a social safety net and fostered the values of community, social responsibility and individual human dignity.

This was an idea, from one man, that carried enormous social consequences and provided significant benefits to millions of people which simply did not happen or which was very limited in other societies. Even today, can the average American citizen arrange a free health check or go to see a doctor without even thinking about the cost? I don't think so.

Human evolution is progressed through ideas and cultural change at a community level. I don't like ascribing what I do to any doctrine or dogma, because some of the beliefs I've held in the past have fallen apart at the seams. But this is a fairly central premise of my work. Who you are isn't as important as what you can think up in a given set of circumstances and tell to another person. Civilization, or a lack of civilization, is built upon ideas. This is also relative to another of my mystical principles - the environment creates the individual, not the other way round.

You're perfectly free to examine these premises against the course of human history, but all social change takes place in the environment of culture and cultural awareness. Many people have ideas, and most of the ideas people have don't go anywhere, but those that do are seeds which are planted into a social environment and from that point take root.

Culture is developed through ideas - urbanism, monotheism, the sum of the square of the hypothenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides, the railway, the steam engine, the television, the piano, post-modernism, the ratchet, the pulley, it's ideas which develop culture and promote social progress. It's not the people who change through the ages, it's their environments, the culture and the technology.

So what role then has the Ego?

So what has happened to new ideas and the development of culture since the end of the 20th century? Where are the new ideas and advances from the first two decades of the 21st century? What is happening?

Language is the central human reference point to life and existence. You can only be as consciously aware as you are able to think, transform insight into knowledge and awareness, and put into words. The collapse of Marxism at the end of the 20th century in the West has resulted in a period of cultural decline and social fragmentation so that now there is no critique of the dominant culture of the planet, which is fast becoming neoliberal free market ideology. This has come at a time with advances in digital technology and the spread of the internet and out of this a stronger emphasis on the Ego and a cult of personality.

Free market ideology, capitalism, Trickledown, there is no counter-balance or critique of the system or ideas being brought about by anyone. There is plenty of opposition to such ideology but it is fragmented and not in any way cohesive or unified. You have feminism, there's black civil rights movements, there's disability rights movements, there's the LGBT community, the trans community, environmentalists, socialism, other various ethnic groups and movements, and there is very little in the way of intersectionality or intersectional awareness or the type of thinking along the lines "Their rights are being attacked or taken away, so this must mean that everyone's rights are threatened."

One of the greatest failures of all such movements is that, consistently, they have failed to work towards or develop common cause.

What is keeping these movements separate, divided and woefully fragmented? The answer is very simple - Ego.

In my years of activism what I've learned is that the so-called Left is just as fractious and contentious as the LGBT community. There's a very clear division between such movements and the black civil rights movement, and nobody seems to want to go anywhere near anything to do with disability rights. Within this with all the politicking, identity politics, Ego trips and in fighting it makes it very easy for the free market capitalists, who have all the money, the resources, not to mention the media, to play off different groups against one another and exacerbate the internal divisions.

When you take a step back and take a good look at what's really going on you begin to realize that what most people really mean by equality and human rights is their human rights and them personally or in their clique becoming more equal to the Establishment. Sod everyone else.

Reinforcement of separateness

Then you have the rapidly developing and expanding social issue of social stigma and social exclusion which nobody is talking about, and what most people don't seem to want to even think about. Social stigma is a by product of Ego because it's the struggle for social, economic and political power defined by various social markers, all of which is based on a belief in Ego, selfhood and My Unique Personality. This is all based on desirable traits or aspects of one's being, appearance-wise, behaviour-wise, or ideology and less desirable traits, labelling, stigma, and the end result is social fragmentation, division, and for many people social exclusion.

It's important that Ego was developed after the Fall of Man and the development of separateness with a focus on conscious attention some 5,000 years ago. It's been carried through by gnosticism in religion and for centuries was a very powerful tool for the suppression of women's rights, suppression of sexuality, and was a major plank of colonialism. In the 19th century the Ego was revised by Freud and for decades it formed the basis of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

The Ego is sold to you through various illusions, not just separateness, but also such illusions as continuity, permanence, emotional and psychological security, cause and effect, self-improvement and the law of attraction.

But this is where I will leave this for now. If you want to go deeper into this I have two e-books, 'The Invisible Prison' (about external authority) and 'The Tears of a Clown' (about the Ego) which you can download and read for free. You can find them in the section 'My e-books'.