"Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934)
Remember the old saying, the map is not the territory? The map is especially not the territory when its directions and locations are symbols that refer to false paths.
In that case, using the map takes you to the wrong place. It keeps you moving toward an imitation of the destination. And when you arrive, you may think you've found the treasure, but you've actually discovered a trap.
And you're in it. You can believe, even while in the trap, that you've found the gold. Because you did the right thing. You followed the symbols. You agreed to their meanings. But you ended up with an illusion of wealth.
Worse, you buy the illusion and now believe that what you originally sought was just a fantasy.
In this democracy, freedom is a symbol that refers to a specific set of permissions the government grants to individuals.
And even then, the actual list of permissions is shrinking—which means the government is arbitrarily redefining what was originally granted.
Freedom is situated in the hands of those who rule from Washington.
Arguing about how much freedom the government should allow is like arguing about the degree to which you are a property owned by government. 43%? 78%?
It's also like calling you a time-share. Should government decide it can spend two weeks a year in your mind and body? A month? Eleven months?
The symbol of freedom, for those who love big government, is malleable, depending on the latest official (vague) description of "greatest good for the greatest number," which automatically trumps all individual rights.
"Hi. I'm a time-share named Joe. Today, I found out that the federal government can move in to my body & mind 24 days a month. That's a new decision. I fully support it, because government is calculating greatest good for the greatest number."
Accepting the symbol of freedom is tantamount to excluding all other formulations of freedom. That's how a symbol co-opted by psyop agents works. It supplants older definitions. It replaces reality.
What is the reality? Freedom is a natural state of being. Every individual has it. Governments and pacts and laws don't alter that one iota.
And when we look at it in this way, without blinders, several questions arise.
The major question is: what is freedom for?
Is it just a vine we watch wither away and dry up and blow into dust?
Is it only and forever something we fight to preserve?
Is that the full and complete story?
What do we DO with freedom when we HAVE it?
In any civilization, freedom has to be a platform, from which a certain number of individuals imagine and create at the height of their power.
Without interfering with anyone's freedom.
They imagine and create new realities that never existed before.
They are the ones who unlock the gates to an open future.
The actual content of their creations is never known before it appears. They don't repeat what's already been done. They embark on new roads. They never give up. They never fold. They never stop.
They don't settle for half. They don't reduce their dreams and visions to fit the group. They don't try to blend in. They don't care about their critics. They invent new worlds that supersede this one.
They breathe freedom and taste it and do something with it. They make freedom into a prelude for action, for creation on the largest possible canvas.
Normal and Average and Fitting In and Compromise and Collective are words for decay and death.
We are in unusual times, because every word and phrase that suggest greater creative power have been twisted and co-opted by marketers, PR men, advertisers, educators, media anchors, psychologists, propagandists, psyops specialists, and political leaders. This is, of course, no accident.
It's a sustained program for reducing meaning to pedestrian terms, for reducing culture to cartoon caricatures.
This is what mass mind control is all about.
But the free, independent, and creative individual doesn't submit to that programming.
Archetypes of heroes, artists, and true revolutionaries are still alive in consciousness. They are touchstones, not for mimicry, but as reminders of achievements that are possible.
These archetypes survive the death of cultures and nations. They endure.
The open sky of possibility is born out of consciousness and reflects back to it.
We fight to gain freedom, to preserve it, and to ascend from it.
The spirit of our government has become a foul, stench-ridden mass of corruption, even as it cynically promotes ideals of freedom, for a little more leverage. Fools believe in it.
The government is now in the business of making robots and androids. That is its mission. That is democracy.
Those who compromise and give in every day of their lives seek cover and protection in The Group. They think hiding is their best option.
But dreams appear. Dreams that momentarily take slaves out of their chains.
These are the real nightmares for those who, at every level, seek to maintain their passive acceptance of What Is.
There are two basic worlds: what already exists; and possibility.
The second world is infinite.
The over-trained mind believes possibility is just another system.
But imagination, when unleashed, has no boundaries.
Trying to understand imagination by referring to society is futile. There is nothing in how society is managed that clarifies imagination or explains it.
Our current society is a living example of what happens when individual imagination is downplayed.
Modern society, intentionally and falsely, portrays the free and independent individual as a moral criminal.
So here we are. Freedom exists in a pure state. It's real. It's a choice that exists inside every person. Whether or not the State grants it has nothing to do with that fact. Freedom Is. Knowing that, the slate is clean. We can choose. We can start a new life at the drop of a hat.
The more we see of freedom, the bigger the space of it, the more likely it is that we'll choose to create rather than fit in. The more we see the space of freedom as possibility without limit, the more likely we'll dig deeper for inner resources—as fuel for our fire.
Some take that road. Most do not.
Most are content to accept the shadow symbol of freedom as the real thing, even when they know it isn't.
› Silvia Postill 8 Oct 2013 | 1:26 pm
..great article Jon