Culture. What is it? It must have begun with a mere chronicling of something observed about some people occupying a common area of the world. A comment, nothing more; seemingly innocent and not very interesting. For example, the people here only eat one meal a day, morning, and not three as do we. But it caught on. Perhaps bored, curious people saw in it a way to occupy themselves studying somebody else to avoid looking at themselves. I am guessing. Whatever its reasons, the outcropping is a dangerous place to play. It means I risk falling into a tar pit from which nobody escapes. Here is the ugliest part: the culture once it has us in its grip tells us we only exist for the glorification of its never ending story. It claims even to hold the Supreme Being captive for us. It's a bastard!

And, by now, every nation has its layers upon layers of cultural overseers. They are all about convention. That spells death. In every one of them there is a firm belief that the culture of the nation is the important thing. More so than the life of any baby. After all, the babies belong now to the culture. In every culture on Earth a trained horde of professional workers guard it day and night as the national treasure. There is the question of food and dress and language and emergency response and education and ethics and art and literature and music and religion and architecture and laws and law enforcement and commerce and national defense and health practices and recreation and all the countless labels. It is so complex by now it cannot possibly be grasped nor comprehended to any remotely complete extent by anybody. For the purposes of this writing the foregoing is deemed a sufficient description to communicate what is known by everybody to exist. Most consider it an absolute necessity. The other thing to know is that it dominates and shapes the lives of its members from cradle to grave. Finally, it it is important to realize the damned things that dominate you do not exist! More important, it does not even think for itself. It's like a puppet people operate for show. The hands inside the puppets' handmade bodies that give to them all of their power on Earth are the marvelously adept hands of human beings like you. Gods unaware! We could do so much better if only we believed in ourselves.

How often is anyone asking why do we not? How did this happen? Is it good? It is so absurd that even the methods of rebellion against the society are created as part of the culture by the culture and carried on inside it as determined by it. In other words, absolutely nobody is fucking real anymore. I had to face the truth that my own spiritual guru is a fake. And this is important.  He is a fake, not by the force of his ego, my own. I made him up to make the transition from caged tiger to free, wild reality. 

The inquiry open here is to study how a symbol for a thing becomes the thing. It goes like this-a bunch of people settle on an island. They symbolically name the place New York City. After awhile, New York is the happening thing and the people who named it are its servants voluntarily. The symbol now taxes them, arrests them, fines them, jails them, educates them, and separates them into classifications or castes difficult or impossible to escape in a lifetime. Imagine if you brought a puppy home and named it and fed it and it grew up to tax, arrest, punish, and classify you for the rest of your life! This is worse than that! At least a puppy is alive.

Situation. People today live to serve inside a culture and the culture has no existence except in the minds of people who are thought of by the population at large as its people. In other words people belong to a culture. Everybody in the population. Reading a novel about someone hiking the Pacific Crest Trail reveals that the trail was created by long and difficult attempts for a hundred years to get the proper federal authorities to initially officially designate it as such and then build it. I bet fifty people could have done a better trail in less than three years and would have maintained it through loving care in ways unimaginable at the beginning. Think of all the famous art that was created under the official direction and control of the Catholic Church as another example of this monstrosity. All those faked religious paintings! And, all the fake memorials to famous cultural heroes, my God! Do not you know the greatest hero is one nobody remembers for being that? The ones who kept the flame of truth burning in the attics and basements and unlit alleys of the culture's over looming artificial history? Those heroes? Famous for their anonymity? Where is the statue to them to be found?  The ones who died friendless in drunken, addictive, swollen, heartbreaking misery unable to speak their desperate need to be free of convention's locked  heavy door? Where?

That is backward. Cultures should belong to people. People should define culture rather than the other way around. The children's story of the emperor's new clothes comes to mind. The purpose here is merely to point out that the emperor is naked. Culture is dull, cunning, ravenous, boring, and blind. What you serve is so naked it has no beingness no life and no heart. All the ridiculous mascots and uniforms and flags and store bought pre-assembled teams you serve, My God! They buy that colored crepe paper at the dime store for a quarter. Do you not realize you are alive?

People, on the other hand, are bright, interesting, kind, generous,  courageous, and talented. It ought to work where we simply do what we truly want to do all of our lives and a clerk, if someone is moved to be one, merely reports on that as evidence of what we have done together as people to inspire us to greater heights of glory. Come to think of it, a clerk position is totally obsolete. And that is culture enough. The culture that had none. The culture that must always be coming. Every day a new wrinkle that comes out of the places least expected of having that one.

After all, a pack of wolves runs free so why can't we?

Let us truly live.